THE RESPONSE OF AMERICAN POETS TO 9/11: A PROVISIONAL REPORT

In Falling Man, Don DeLillo’s novel about the aftermath of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, one of the characters muses on the therapeutic options available to her fellow survivors: “People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language . . . to bring comfort or composure.” In fact, there was a surge of poetry reading in the weeks and months following the attacks, and of poetry writing as well, both to witness the condition of anguish people were undergoing and, yes, to provide hope that those events would not constitute some indelible reality that would darken the post-9/11 climate for decades, or forever. The circulation of 
W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” on the Internet, for example, satisfied both needs. It presented to readers the complex, unhappy response of a sensitive man, sitting in a Manhattan bar, upon hearing the news of the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland; and precisely because the poem had been written on the first day of a war that the Allies had subsequently emerged from victorious—a war that was now, in 2001, a closed historical period—it brought some emotional relief and a defiant mood of resistance. This too will pass, for all its immediate pain—that is the message, in retrospect, of occasional poems like Auden’s, and another Internet favorite, W. B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” about the Easter Rising of Irish nationalists against the British government. Time’s passage eases shock and pain; it is the consoling reminder that extremities of sacrifice and suffering are fated to be outlived, if not forgotten.

But an elegiac poem’s first audience is the walking wounded, and though the poet’s eye is also on posterity, he or she must address the contemporary reader if the poem is to have the visceral authenticity that will carry it credibly to succeeding generations. The poem’s mixed identity as a bulletin to the poet’s co-sufferers and as an aesthetic document available to future readers in very changed circumstances—a carrier of perennial and universal wisdom—makes it a very hard piece of writing to get right. Very few poems on immediate historical events make it into the canon. Now that we are at some small distance from 9/11, but still feel the searing emotions of that day, it may be useful to consider some exemplary poems of the last few years that seem viable, seem necessary, for our well-being in the manner DeLillo describes. We will find that “consolation” is an insufficient term for the function of such poems, however. Thomas R. Edwards provides a better rationale: “It is the nature of the imagination to preserve images, to keep significant moments of human history symbolically present and available for the operations of ­justice.”

It is worth noting at the outset that not all poets intend to comfort their readers. Some want to distress them, to burn the imagery of catastrophe into their brains. Never forget is the credo of poems that break the silence by concentrating on an immediate horror. In the manner of Heathcliff pleading with the dead Catherine Earnshaw to haunt him with the excruciating fact of her eternal absence, poets and their readers may crave to renew the intense experience of 9/11 in order to sustain their grief and their anger, for personal or political reasons. What do we require of poems that revisit Ground Zero at the bone? What rhetorical structures, what language, can satisfy our desire not only for the tangible bite of the immediate but for a narrative about the indomitable strength of mind we assert against the narrative of violent assault? How have poets, so far, chosen to think their way through a moment of history in which 3,046 lives were snuffed out in a few hours by “an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal,” in the words of the 9/11 Commission Report?

Three anthologies of 2002

Such questions seem more pertinent to the bolt-from-the-blue event than the protracted decades-long maladies of, say, combat in war or AIDS or global warming. The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, for example, by all accounts wrenched the psyche of Americans, dominating conversation and reverie like no other military incident since the Civil War. No doubt an abundance of patriotic poems were set down within weeks of the bombing. Yet we have almost none from a significant poet. Articles of War: A Collection of Poetry about World War II, edited by Leon Stokesbury, includes only one example, Robinson Jeffers’s “Pearl Harbor.” Indeed, we would find it surprising if Jeffers, perched on Hawk Tower, gazing west from Carmel, did not feel moved to register his defensive response:

I say “defensive” because Jeffers has armed himself in advance for some catastrophe like Pearl Harbor. The fundamental dynamic of his “imagination of disaster” (to borrow Henry James’s ever-useful term) is suspicion, and sometimes paranoia. He is writing his poem to proclaim his resigned foreknowledge that the attack would take place as the result of an American strategy during the 1930s to provoke it into being. The poem takes satisfaction in the inevitability of the coming war, which is why the tone is so even-tempered and the poem concludes so calmly by dwelling on the brightness of the stars in the enforced blackout along the California coast. Jeffers had an imperative for writing this poem; he had ready-made content and an attitude he had honed during decades of polemical cut and thrust. There is no shock in the poem, no outrage; it is a document of a sophisticated political temperament and deserves its rank as the preeminent record of an event that must have seemed to most of the leading poets in 1941 astonishing yet too unspeakable to render into lyric ­expression.

Sixty years later, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by airplanes piloted by Al Qaeda terrorists, Pearl Harbor offered the most obvious and visceral analogy. Much nonsense was written on how the attacks of 9/11 signaled an “end of innocence” predicated on the sense of safety America enjoyed because of her geographical distance from enemies. But that innocence, already violated in 1941, had withered completely during the postwar period, when the possibility, and at times the likelihood, of nuclear missile attacks imposed a sense of daily dread on every citizen. (On the worst day of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, I walked across the commons of my undergraduate institution, UCLA, noting the anguish of passersby. One stranger stopped me and said, “Is this it? What do you think?” “Is it what?” I asked stupidly. “The end of the world,” he replied and hurried on.) On one level Pearl Harbor was aptly summoned in 2001 because of the bolt-from-the-blue nature of the attack. On another level some measure of self-blame and complicity stirred in the response of intellectuals. “The war that we have carefully for years provoked / Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant,” Jeffers wrote. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti, writing from San Francisco in 2002, adapted the theme of retribution for the new atrocity. He provides in prosaic format a thumbnail history of the airplane, and then presents his analysis in a fevered closure:

“Struck back” is the key phrase in that passage. America had inflicted suffering on so many places in the world, the argument runs, and now, in the figures of its imperial towers of finance and its military fortress, its power was being challenged by its former victims. “What did we in all honesty expect?” asks Diane di Prima, Ferlinghetti’s fellow member of the Beat Generation:

These and many other poems brimming with the sentiment that the chickens have come home to roost can be found in the first collection of poems rushed into print after the events of September 2001, An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11, edited by Allen Cohen and Clive Matson. Published in Oakland, the anthology draws on a considerable number of Bay Area poets, whose attitudes are vehemently ideological. The book’s title seems to admonish the perpetrators of the attacks for their rough justice, and there are poems that do just that, but the majority hew to the line that the U.S. had provoked the Third World into striking back at Babylon America (as Daniel Berrigan described the prophetic mindset of the pilots). Many poems nourished an apocalyptic view of the event: the Twin Towers are imagined as Mammon, Goliath, Lucifer, Polyphemus, the Mayan pyramids of Chichen Itza, the Tower of Babel, but here and there by opposing iconography: as Guernica, Warsaw, London under the blitz, the twin statues of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most of the poets foresee a long war proceeding from the date of 9/11, if not a War on Terror then a war against nations, regions, cultures, in a succession of tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye maneuvers with no likely ending. In this fatalistic scenario, the new century is imagined as more harrowing than the previous one, in which, for example, Robinson Jeffers calmly imagines not only a terminus for the war signified by Pearl Harbor, but inevitable victory for the nation whose flag he flies from his tower: “Oh, we’ll not lose our war: my money on / amazed Gulliver / And his horse-pistols.” The poets of 2002 are not so sanguine. What would constitute victory in the cycle of violence inaugurated, or reinvigorated, by the destruction of the World Trade Center? And what consolation could the post-9/11 poet provide?

In speaking of poems with such an overt political agenda, one question that clings to 9/11 poetry must be addressed before we proceed further. Do some or all poems about 9/11 “exploit” the event? That is, do some poets see the disaster as an opportunity that they can turn selfishly to their own personal or political program by manipulating the high emotions of their readers to make a name for themselves as a sensitive soul or a charismatic prophet? To be honest, I have read poems on 9/11 that arouse my suspicions. But I suspect even more the desire to demean imaginative texts on any subject as exploitative. Norman Mailer confessed that his first thought upon hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor was to wonder if the great American novel about the coming war would be set in the Pacific or European theater of conflict. Does that low musing affect our judgment of The Naked and the Dead? The artwork itself provides the only genuine evidence as to whether it is worthy or unworthy, a cynical grab for public attention or a hard-won effort to reveal the urgent significance of its topic. I give every poem in this essay the benefit of the doubt. Their sincerity, I believe, is guaranteed by their achieved craft.

 
A second anthology of writings in 2002 tested the pulse of the nation’s authors: September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, edited by William Heyen. Incorporating essays, poems, and memoirs, this assemblage is the most important literary document of the event so far. (Disclosure: I have an essay in the collection.) Solicited authors were given a very brief lead time for composition, causing one invitee to tell me, “No matter what we say, we’ll sound like idiots ten years from now.” But writing under the pressure of the immediate trauma has its obvious value as well. I have used some of the poems from this anthology in my undergraduate classes and I can testify that students appreciate the timeliness, the air of high-emotion reportage, even if they disdain some of the attitudes. For example, Elizabeth Spires’s poem, “The Beautiful Day,” begins:

The poem concludes with the image of milkweed seeds blowing in the wind.

This disconsolate poem is a classic expression of melancholia and mourning; it transcribes the emotional devastation of the day itself, when the entire nation watched on television a continuous loop of the disappearance of two giant towers, the damage and casualties at the Pentagon, and the wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, with plentiful alarms of more destruction to come. The vacancy without becomes by the end of the poem a vacancy within, as even the power of language is extinguished. It is a quintessential poem of September 11, 2001.

But students tend to scorn the poem. They resist its sentiment, or more precisely they question its ethical purpose. In its defeatism they sense a victory for the terrorists. It’s a demoralized poem, they complain, with the danger of demoralizing readers by means of its histrionic affect, its strained self-pity, the way its speaker inflates her “I” to a “we” as if there were universal agreement that the possibility of joy has disappeared forever along with the towers. The poem stirs deep feelings and extended discussion in class, and I welcome the controversy because it involves basic questions about whether poetry can matter in the lives of its readers. The poem is a cry of pain, and its rhetoric is suited to its emotion, hyperbolical in the manner of a love poem that makes claims about the beloved that may in some objective sense be noncredible, even ludicrous, but are relished for their truth to feeling. One does not tell a person wailing at a funeral or a person in the rapture of first love that their feelings are inauthentic or excessive. Indeed, lyric poetry exists to give a voice to the indecorous, the extravagant. And also the banal. “And nothing will ever be the same”—the flat final line defies logic and common sense, but in its simplicity it speaks the truth the heart knows, and even students who scorn it acknowledge that they might have need of it someday, or some kindred expression of absolute grief.

After our unit on 9/11 poetry, in which we read perhaps a dozen works, I ask the class to cite their favorite poem and defend their choice. Almost universally, the students choose the following brief poem by Christine Hartzler, not from the ­anthology:

In any poem of two stanzas, the second strophe must depart in a significant way from the first, but it would be hard to find a better example of how a second thought can radically subvert the first. (The poem is an unrhymed Petrarchan sonnet with octave and sestet inverted.) The innocuous title and the steady attention to Greg Louganis’s diving makes the reader think that the poem is going to be a straightforward tribute to the Olympic gold medalist. But the volta beginning with line seven is shocking, not least for its cool tone: the humorous aside of lines ten and eleven, the offhand diction of “Maybe you’ve seen the / photograph.” And most arresting of all, the appreciative lyric elevation of the final image, in which the falling man’s shirt is compared to a beautiful flower, “blowsy” in its photogenic blossoming.

Students are attracted to the defiant attitude of the poem, its refusal to mourn, its eschewal of “absence” and “vacancy” in favor of the close-up framing of an anonymous human figure who is not treated as a pathetic victim. “He made a choice of how he wanted to die,” is a popular response. He doesn’t come up from the depths in “unbounded joy” like Louganis, but neither does he die in the poem; his life is arrested by the photograph at a moment when he can be admired, performing his futile and certainly “breathtaking” pike, rather like Donald Armstrong in James Dickey’s war poem “The Performance,” who tries out his fancy somersaults before being beheaded by his Japanese captors. Students write that they are consoled by the self-willed transformation of the man, mid­leap, into a flower and an athlete, and by the way first the photographer and then the poet pay tribute to him, presumably according to his wishes.

The poem, one of many on the subject of bodies falling from the Twin Towers, is a memorial elegy of sorts, not for generations who will live ever after in the shadow of the event as in Spires’s poem, but for those who died “on that singular day.” A poem in the Heyen anthology favored by students is Fred Moramarco’s “Messages from the Sky: September 11, 2001,” a species of Concrete Poetry in which the shape of the linguistic text follows the content. In this case we find two vertical columns of words, and all the constituent phrases are from actual cell phone messages left on answering machines by people trapped in the towers or on Flight 93. Artfully displayed, the language is anything but artificial:

One student wrote in her journal, “I hate being manipulated like this, but I finished the poem with tears in my eyes.” This is the “real language of men” Wordsworth praised as superior to the skill of the poet. Compare, for example, the plaintive spontaneous speech transcribed by Moramarco to the phony monologues put into victims’ mouths by Albert T. Viola and William S. Kilborne in a Spoon River Anthology–like volume titled Twin Towers Anthology: The Pentagon and Flight 93 (2005). Well-intended, no doubt, but any effort to render the dead as martyrs full of high sentiment is going to infuriate, not inspire, readers who seek the felt meaning of historical events.

Of special interest in these anthology poems is the representation of the terrorists. Poets offer a range of attitudes, of course; they have a diversity of perspectives just like the population at large. They wrestle with an intractable dilemma: they wish to condemn the attacks while avoiding the kind of Orientalism that gathers all Muslims, or Arabs, into a monolithic category: The Enemy. Even poets who assert that the U.S. and the European colonial powers terrorized the Third World into a violent payback on 9/11 stigmatize the hijackers as evil figures. For Antler they are “deranged fanatics”; for Sam Hamod they are “fools who / Misread, misunderstood, and / Defiled the Qur’an.” An especially interesting formulation from the Heyen anthology is what seems to be a performance poem by Tamman Adi, a Muslim, who insists that “nothing America did justifies September 11” and adds:

Inevitably, the meditations on the terrorists have recourse to the Bible as a means of conceptualizing the standoff of West and East. Just as the Book of Lamentations underlies many lyric elegies, so the Book of Jeremiah or the Book of Revelation inform meditations on these acts of violence. Diane Glancy is hawkish in the way she imagines the enemy in a passage of poetic prose:

Sharon Doubiago, in “Jesus Was a Terrorist,” tries to move the debate beyond the rancorous tensions and verbal abuse between the antagonists, each condemning the other as hypocritical, impious, and racist. Jesus, “an assassinated Palestinian,” offers to cleanse the public imagination in both communities of its intolerance and temptation to violence. Doubiago’s suggestions are elaborated in an essay, one of the anthology’s finest, by Naomi Shihab Nye, who, writing to Islamist militants as “your distant Arab cousin,” recommends, among other remedies, the study of poetry, especially Rumi, as an antidote to the blandishments of Al Qaeda.

 
Another widely read anthology from 2002 is Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. Comprising sixty-two poems by authors living in and near New York City, this collection features lyrics specifically about the fall of the towers, and also after the event in the sense of containing narrative elements that seem to derive from that dark day, reminding us how so many poems we have read in the last seven years, on diverse topics, have a different look to them when we connect their tone or imagery or thematic reach with 9/11. A successful comic poem—a rarity in the canon of 9/11 literature—by Paul Violi would not have suggested 9/11 at all if it were not in this collection. Another high-spirited poem, by Nikki Moustaki, gives the readers instructions on how not to speak about the calamity, since so many metaphors and phrases within the year became hollowed out by overuse and rendered trite. In her poem we feel the exhaustion of poets with the very ­subject:

Reading poem after poem one sympathizes with the efforts of poets to condense, to synthesize, to streamline, so as to avoid rehashing the same old tired tropes. When Hugh Seidman offers an arresting couplet that seems to summarize the whole story of 9/11—“terrible hubris / terrible debris”—one is tempted to close the book, satisfied with the four words as a quick and dirty aphorism.

There is one type of poem in Poetry after 9/11 that covers some too-often neglected territory. This poem swings the camera away from the spectacular imagery of the towers, and the welter of crowds rushing through the streets of lower Manhattan, to query the absence of familiar figures from quiet locations inside and outside the city where the victims, or possible victims, resided and where their absence is now intensely felt. This kind of poem has a genealogy as well, going back at least to Wilfred Owen’s great sonnet on the “sad shires” that sent boys to the Western Front, “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” During World War II, Phyllis McGinley wrote some remarkable lyrics with the same subject; Leon Stokesbury offers several in his anthology, including “Landscape Without Figures”:

The best poem of this kind in Poetry after 9/11 is Andrea Carter Brown’s “The Old Neighborhood,” which also deploys the Latin motif of ubi sunt (“where are”) to stirring effect:

and so on, a long enumeration of vanished persons, down to the poem’s conclusion:

To the extent that the focus of 9/11 is on the sublimity of falling towers, on fire, smoke, ash, and noise, there is an unwholesome glamour to the occasion. It is helpful to get a fresh geographical perspective like the one Kimiko Hahn provides in one of her tankas set in Brooklyn:

The dislocation in point of view breaks the Medusa gaze of Ground Zero, the memory of the towers’ fallen glory. By paying a ceremonial visit to outlying regions that are home to the majority of people who died in the rubble, poets display a civility and compassion that constitute the American narrative, a modest and humane response to terrorist ideology.

 
Another region alluded to and explored at length in these anthologies, and poems published elsewhere, is airspace. The fact that the targets of the hijacked airplanes were the tallest towers in the city, thrusting more than thirteen hundred feet into the New York skyline, caused everyone, even TV viewers, to lift their gaze into the celestial realm, the conventional site of the transcendent. Some poets gingerly summoned the painterly appeal of the heavenly setting, such as Stephen Dunn in “The Insistence of Beauty,” which begins “The day before those silver planes / came out of the perfect blue . . .” and ends by acknowledging how artists seem hard-wired to celebrate the “edgy space” into which the imagination extends in spite of lingering affection for the dismembered community below. Poems like Dunn’s regard the sky and praise what they see, but reference to God in this secular scripture is extremely rare, virtually nonexistent. The impact zone down below, a place of tribulation, embodies the subterranean, the underworld, the inferno of everlasting torment. Likewise, the symbolic status of the flying machine took another hit in the “super emergency” that the wayward planes inflicted on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. (King Kong shows up in poems about 9/11, as does the notorious scene in the film Independence Day in which alien spacecraft incinerate the White House.) That our generation has introjected these fantasies of aerial collision and are fated to repeat them compulsively in the coming years is suggested by Christine Rhein in “In Code,” where she notices her “four-year-old son / building towers of LEGO, / knocking them over / with his Fisher-Price plane.” When the moon and stars come into 9/11 poems, as they often do, it is to lend the upper air a happier gloss than modern technology can offer. Because of these high places resonant with order and beauty, the poems imply, future claims of justice might take their inspiration from the harmony of the spheres.

Three major poems

In traveling vast distances by car, we often follow small, slow “blue highways” to larger freeways into a metropolis, and then without stopping we emerge from the city farther along toward our destination. History has that kind of routing, as many writers have noted, and the grand cities are those immensely significant interchanges or transfer points that redirect a society, often a vast community of nations, in a direction full of mystery and transformation. The birth and death of Jesus is the most popular example, as we find it, say, in 
T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” in which the kings after a long journey toward a birth that was “Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” find themselves “no longer at ease . . . in the old dispensation” and waiting for a resurrection of the spirit that moved them to travel toward Bethlehem. Those who write about 9/11 are haunted by their lives in the aftermath of a time transcending time, a place beyond the normal narrative turns and closure. Deborah Eisenberg reports on the post-apocalyptic period following 9/11 in her short story “Twilight of the Superheroes”:

The past has been remade entirely by the event that happened, and of course the future also. The future will always be redolent of the ineradicable event, choking on the ashes of its psychic fallout. Which is to say, the period before 9/11 became a victim of its terror, when the future was unmasked as a place where terror lay waiting. All of this thinking belongs to the ideology of modernism, not because the apocalyptic did not have a significant place in the premodern world—of course it did and does—but because 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” threatened to put the public imagination in a state of permanent anxiety.

For poets the challenge, from the first hour, was to invent or recover a form, a verbal container, that would vivify or refresh the reader’s understanding of the radically reconfigured (dis)continuity of past and present. In most cases, a literary, religious, or occult tradition suggested ways of shaping such unruly material. In “Curse” Frank Bidart hurls imprecations at the terrorists, wishing upon them the unimaginable punishments of the afterlife commensurate with their sadistic ­actions.

Grace Schulman in “Kol Nidrei: September 2001” adopts the form of Jewish lamentation to testify against language as a carrier of meaning in a meaningless sabbath: “No ark with scrolls, no benches, // no prayer-shawls, holy books / or ram’s horn.” Tom Sleigh adapts the “Lamentation on Ur,” a Sumerian spell from 2000 B.C., as a means of thinking about “men annihilated” in his own imperial city; Billy Collins in his mystical poem “The Names,” finds on natural and manmade objects the names of 9/11 victims; Amiri Baraka in “Somebody Blew up America” performs a jeremiad in the ranting style of antinomian preachers of the seventeenth century, with the same incendiary intentions as his models; Charles Martin turns to Dante’s magisterial terza rima in “After 9/11” to weave an intricate design in time that links New York’s infernal past and present; Martin Espada in “Alabanza” chants in litany form a eulogy for the doomed workers at Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center: “Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, / like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium . . . / Alabanza I say, even if God has no face”; Timothy Liu in “A Prayer,” part of a sequence of poems about 9/11, gives the poem over to questions (left on a cell phone) in a ritualized paratactic structure meant to enact the loss of communication between a fated “you” trapped in the wreckage and a surviving “we.” Even more paratactic are poems by Lawrence Joseph such as “Unyieldingly Present,” eyewitness accounts of the chaos of perception and fractured understanding near Battery Park on 9/11:

The “loop in the head” afflicts all who suffer the recurrence of those compelling images as a condition of our postmodern lives, until we are tempted to identify the images as a new language, full of vicious circles of repetition and atomized, disordered linkages. And with each reiteration the images gain power in our visual imagination, just as the catch-phrases of 9/11 poetry linger in our ear. In works like these the “skittery” poem of disassociation so widely practiced in workshops and poetry slams receives its temporal rationale, its affective function in an era when reflection itself has been collapsed down to shards of language under the pressure of extreme violence and the eclipse of rational discourse. What was once experiment and novelty, an avant-garde rebellion against the accessible rhetoric handed down from generation to generation, now receives the sanction of historical necessity.

 
So there is no consolation from the poets who construct sequences of distressing images derived from the emporium of media representations of the event. The only consolation is that of historical retrospection, in which by artful reference to earlier alarmist texts the events of 9/11 are put in the long-view context where their power to disturb can be generalized or abstracted. By replicating the rhetorical strategies and signature passages of earlier poems, the poet can establish solidarity with the literary tradition itself in ways that defy the social fictions, the often meretricious narratives, offered by ideologists of all political stripes. Poetry offers itself as the stable ground of knowing, of right reason, required by a population terrorized by violent events. This is the intention and effect of C. K. Williams’s poem “Fear,” which at this writing has become the canonical meditation “after” 9/11 (that is, following it in time and translating its effects into legible language). “Fear” is the poem most artfully designed to mimic the contemplative thought patterns of a citizenry struggling to understand the new zeitgeist by means of its historical and literary precedents.

Williams intuits that a poem like “Pearl Harbor” cannot serve as precedent because it is under-intellectualized and understated. The intertextual scaffolding for “Fear” is a poem in the lyric tradition perfect for his purposes, though it never achieved prominence on the Internet: Samuel Taylor Cole­ridge’s “Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion.” Coleridge, who in 1797 had anatomized the topic of vindictive violence in parabolic poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” turned his attention to the threat of an invasion from revolutionary France, which had already sent troops across the borders of Germany, Italy, and Belgium. Coleridge composed another poem, “France: An Ode,” in the same month to protest the invasion and occupation by France of Switzerland and the renaming of the country as the Helvetic Republic. The panic in England at the prospect of French invasion began with the rise of the Jacobins and continued during the reign of Napoleon, crescendoing in the frenzy of terror preceding the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

A former partisan of the French Revolution, beginning with his celebratory poem of 1789, “Destruction of the Bastile,” Cole­ridge in this poem somberly acknowledges his complicity not only with the imperial designs of the Revolution but the imperial injustices inflicted on colonized peoples by his own government. The self-blaming lines Williams found especially useful to his purpose are these:

In Coleridge’s Protestant imagination, the Jacobin forces across the English Channel look a lot like God’s punishment upon people like himself who misjudged the fundamental nature of revolutionary action. Yet, though he presents himself as an idolater of the false god of power, he pleads for compassion:

He affirms his love for his country, “dear Britain,” and prays that his happy solitude in a part of the Lake District far from Dover be protected from harm. His prayer was answered. Britain triumphed over France and continued to expand its imperial power throughout the nineteenth century, as if blessed and guided by God’s favor. In the twenty-first century Coleridge’s text provides a comforting message that belies its anxious surface, its nervous exhortations and self-pitying pleas for divine mercy.

“Fear” appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times in 2002 just as “France: An Ode” graced the Morning Post in 1798. These are newsworthy poems appealing to citizens fixated on world events. As a dramatic element, fear has been more the province of fiction writers and dramatists than of poets, who lack the room to build suspense and dread through a heightened sequence of episodes. But Fear as an allegorical figure, a personification of an emotion, resides in the poet’s domain, always threatening her or him as an incubus sucking the poet’s being into itself. One spots the conventions at work in Williams’s poem, beginning with the Gothic trappings of black birds of omen (here, grackles) and disgusting vermin (here, cockroaches) brought into association as part of the natural world invading the space, and in the roaches’ case infesting the body, of vulnerable humans. The speaker, in fearful solitude, muses disconsolately about the horrors of Hiroshima and the looming shadow of nuclear weapons, what might be called the cultural form of nature’s genocidal possession of all our bodies. So far the poem trades on recognizable motifs that go back to the Graveyard School of poetry in the eighteenth century. Only the date (“September 2001–August 2002”) printed after the poem’s closure tells us what inspired this dark meditation.

“And now these bewildering times,” begins the eighth quatrain, the pivot of the poem’s thematic structure:

(I have printed the 2002 version of the stanza; the most recent version in Collected Poems changes “cynicism” to “purposes” and “Yet” to “Yes,”.) The series of abstractions and conjunctions makes for puzzling reading. All “times” are “bewildering,” are they not? At least as poets report them. And who precisely are “those” who “consternate” us? The Bush administration? The religious establishment? The pundits of the media? And what is the logic of “Yet we have antagonists?” The phrase is inscrutable if we do not insert the terrorists of 9/11 as a clarifying referent, all the more so since their depredations seem to accord with the invasion of the grackles and cockroaches, themselves brought into overt association with the Nazis and the makers of nuclear weapons in earlier stanzas. “But is no one blameless” turns the poem in the opposite direction: perhaps “we” deserve what our antagonists are inflicting upon us. And when the next stanza quotes Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” we cannot help but translate the inchoate fear expressed by the poet as fear of being overwhelmed by ruthless enemies, with just grievances against American power, whose legions include the jihadists of Al Qaeda though are not limited to them.

As Williams says two stanzas later, his fear is fundamentally of “more politics of terror; threats of war, war without end.” The cold war is over, so he must be summoning the clash of civilizations that pits militant Islamism against the Judeo-Christian West, a war whose moment of Fort Sumter, of Pearl Harbor, is the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (And perhaps, via Flight 93, the Capitol.) To say as much would narrow the poem, however, just as Yeats would have made a big mistake in “The Second Coming,” his poem of apocalypse, if he had mentioned the Irish troubles and the Great War. “Fear” would be (more) incoherent, however, if we could not anchor its sentiments in the event casting its shadow over 2002, just as we would misread not only “The Second Coming” but T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” if we did not appreciate the Great War’s shadow darkening the poet’s vision of modernity, though the war makes no appearance in either account of violence and cultural degradation.

The final stanza of “Fear” intends to disorient us further:

(The revised version of the poem substitutes “shadows” for “darkness.”)

No reader of twentieth-century poetry can miss the clearly intended allusion here to the final stanzas of Robert Lowell’s signature poem, “Skunk Hour,” which describe the apparition of skunks rooting in the trash and marching down the main street of the resort town described in detail in earlier stanzas. The passage has provoked from critics entirely opposite interpretations: the skunks as figures of rescue for the neurotic, denaturalized speaker; the skunks as demonic emblems of otherness, with their red eyes and indomitable determination—they “will not scare.” But the grackles have already been associated with the specifically military dangers Williams fears; in the opening stanza “a battalion of transient grackles invades the picnic ground” and the speaker goes on to compare them to the roaches pullulating on the body of a concentration camp survivor. By what twist of logic can they be apotheosized, at the poem’s crucial concluding moment, as angelic, as redemptive? It is a desperate attempt at being consolatory, this magical transformation of the invaders into rescuers. Only by considering the measure of guilt adhering to “We” who have offended very grievously, to cite Coleridge’s quoted line, would this emotional and spiritual rescue be credible as a gesture of renewal.

“Fear” is an ode, a formal structure in which conflicting feelings and ideas are allowed to battle it out within the poet’s imagination. It is “a poem in the shape of a psyche,” to use Theodore Roethke’s formulation. We do not seek remedies in odes, but the entertaining of irreconcilable contraries; hence the turns in poems like “Fear,” all the “but” and “yet” phrases that enact the poet’s ambivalence. In the narrative arc of the poem, from the opening image of the “exterminator’s panel truck” with the portrait of a cockroach on the side, to the rise of the grackles into the darkening sky, the poem wrestles with the questions raised by 9/11 without locating them in the event itself. C. K. Williams’s fears in solitude are intensely realized, but the poem is not hopeless, not bitter, and in the image of the speaker’s grandsons playing on the swings in the penultimate stanza we have a conventionally positive prospect of the future, a welcome assertion of the normal as a supreme value. And in 2002 that was the best one could expect from a public poem on the preceding year’s most barbarous act.

 
At the center of modernism is the metropole and its abundance of crowds, noise, speed, spectacles, and transformations. Poems about the fall of the World Trade Center are in a way additions to the New York school of poetry stretching back to Walt Whitman, with canonical contributions by Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca, all of whom glamorized the city and reified it in the imagination of readers as a type of the dynamic American spirit of the age. Some poets who had most famously burnished the image of New York after World War II—James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, May Swenson—did not live to see the catastrophe of 9/11. But it’s interesting to consider how Galway Kinnell treated the fatal day. His long imagistic poem of 1960 about Columbus Avenue, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” praised the city’s diversity in the genial manner of Whitman. Forty-two years later, “When the Towers Fell,” a collage poem in twelve sections, mimics the fractured or fragmented consciousness both of observers of the unreal sensations battering them all day, all week, and of the ghostly citizens it watches in their staggering movements across Broadway and other avenues filled with smoke, ashes, asbestos, burning cinders, bodies and body parts, the smell of burning metal and the bleating of sirens.

As with the grackle-filled ending of C. K. Williams’s “Fear,” where we are directed to the iconography of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” so here readers are expected to recognize the rhetoric of Ezra Pound’s bitter enumeration of the causes for enlistment in World War I in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920):

Pound and T. S. Eliot perceived wartime and postwar London as sites of historical crisis, locales for the breakdown of Western civilization, and sought a hectic style and leaping montage structure to shatter the iambic orderliness and long, serene strophes of Victorian poetry, as they saw it. New York had not undergone that kind of deconstruction in twentieth-century poetry, because it had not been assaulted by the impact of horror, as London had in the shell-shocked era following 1914. The nightmare events of 9/11 justified the opening of the poem to a European dissonance and indeterminacy, to the jump-cutting of cinematic form. A noir version of the city, already a fixture in films and novels—see the aerial attack on New York in H. G. Wells’s novel of 1909, The War in the Air and John Dos Passos’s dizzying mosaic of scenes, Manhattan Transfer, from 1925—emerged in poetry very swiftly after the towers fell.

New York, in effect, became a Gothic space, wrenched from its mainly joyful or camp associations from the New York poets. (Ginsberg’s “Howl” offers the prominent exception.) Now its vaunted modernity had to pay the penalty for being the cynosure of the world’s envious gaze. Kinnell spells out the new genealogy of the city literally enough to be understandable even by readers who have never heard of Pound or Eliot. Despite the German quotations from Paul Celan framing key sections of the poem, Kinnell labors to make his discursive point as plainly as possible:

Though this passage has some similarities to mordant catalogues in Kinnell’s earlier volume The Book of Nightmares (1971), it is operating at a lower level of inspiration and expression. It formulates the conventional wisdom about 9/11—that the catastrophe can be understood as the latest outrage in a Hobbesian universe of human wolfishness—and in effect lets that catalogue of horrors write out the day’s malignant script. Kinnell summons Whitman to serve as an antidote to the toxin of his debilitating despair; Whitman is both the booster-bard of New York—“City of the World! . . . / Proud and passionate city—nettlesome, mad, extravagant city,” he is quoted as praising it—and the chronicler of the “debris of all the slain soldiers of the [Civil] war.” Whitman’s cited lamentation over the suffering survivors, “the wife and the child and the musing comrade,” opens onto a fundamental nihilism in the closure of Kinnell’s poem, an absolute collapse of the creative spirit at seeing the fevered cycle of murderous hatred rise from the swamp of the nineteenth and twentieth century to harrow the world once more. The towers in their vanishing become ghostly figures for the spiritual annihilation of those who witness and record their implosion:

You cannot write an epitaph of spiritual extinction more absolute than that. The erasure of the towers is figured as a cosmic death, an end time for every creature on the planet.

 
The iconography of September 11, 2001, is heavily invested in place: New York skyscrapers, ashen people fleeing the target zone in terror, the stalled subways and wayward taxis, the NYPD and FDNY mobilized for action. But the event is also anchored in time. Many people will remember that Tuesday morning as embedded in the week following Labor Day, the first full week of classes for students across the country, and the day of an election primary in New York City. Summer is beginning its transition to autumn: The days grow short when you reach September. October is waiting with all of its immense poetic resonance: the whirl of wind-swept leaves in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” “like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”; the harvest in Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” conspiring with the sun to “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”; the fateful shadows on sundials of Rilke’s “Autumn Day,” warning “Whoever is alone will stay alone.” September, in the poetic tradition, is the period of anticipation and therefore of aftermath; it is the exit from summer that offers the most poignant perspective on the horizon beyond the harvest, the season of death. The days dwindle down to a precious few.

The trauma of 9/11 is involved inextricably with September, the time of impact, and October, the immediate aftermath of mournful remembrance. For a poet like Louise Glück the terror attacks settled into the series of ongoing meditations about time, the self, and nature that she had undertaken since her first volume of poems in 1969. Born in 1943, she had very self-consciously entered the autumn of her life by the time of 9/11, and it was predictable that her meditation on the subject, if she chose to offer one, would pay little attention to the details of place in the manner of Kinnell and much attention to the subjectivity that sought to distance the event from her naturalized imagination. The falling towers would not be an event in history or in Manhattan so much as an event in her garden, and as part of the mythic identity she was busy creating for herself suitable for mourning: the figure of Persephone. In her sequence of lyrics, “October,” published first in the New Yorker on October 28, 2002, then as a chapbook by Sarabande Books in 2004, then in her volume Averno (2006), she acknowledges that “violence has changed me,” but she lends that violence no historical being; there are no images of 9/11, no representation of the incident she gestures toward throughout the poem. The poem is constructed to be read both in 2002 and in the distant future as a generalized reflection on any act that harrows the reader with grief. The poem will never date. Future readers will even be free to read the “violence” as domestic if they wish; the word is a blank space for the insertion of afflictions contemporary to themselves.

The poem was welcomed in 2002 because it effected a triumph over the Medusa power of September 2001. The radical recasting of 9/11 as a drama of seasonal change thrust the events back into a classical paradigm, insisting upon the perennial rather than the timely, the abstract rather than the historical, as a presentational mode. The rhetorical strategy recalls Marjorie Perloff’s comment, in a symposium on poetry and the Holocaust, that “[Samuel] Beckett is perhaps our great poetic chronicler of World War II, even though he never talks overtly about war.” That is, Waiting for Godot and other works represent the crystallized emotions of survivors of the war without any of the journalistic data that may estrange readers of later generations.

“October” takes it as a given that the events of 9/11 are devastating, yet not irreparable.

Glück’s task in this poem is to render commonplace sentiments as pearls of wisdom. She eschews the voice of panic and outrage, and chooses instead a cool, austere poetics in the manner of H.D. or the chastened Wordsworth. The experience of mankind as registered in its literature is that the perpetual shock and pain of suffering, received daily into consciousness, contributes to “the still, sad music of humanity” that Wordsworth noted as the moral ground of mature adult experience. Wordsworth believed that recognitions of our altered nature are fundamentally unspeakable, though poetry can come close to articulating them. It is a compliment to poetry to think of it as treating the unspeakable, an aid to peace of mind, a verbal force against the force of time and the force of arms. And this is all the more true, Glück affirms, when horrific events occur as we reach the autumn of bodily decline, the winter of age and death. “So much has changed” is the refrain of the elder poet. Yet, or “still,” the poet must rejoice to be of service to the community: “Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.” Readers cherish poets who speak from the abyss when circumstances demand, though they have limited patience for poets who do nothing but complain.

In “October” Glück declares a bitter impasse between herself and the earth. Mortal time runs in one direction only, toward death, and much as she, or we, resist the analogy that history is locked into the same trajectory, each new outrage of violence enforces that bitter parallel. Natural religion had been Glück’s recourse in volumes like The Wild Iris (1992), but at some point, at a crisis of time, the cultus of the garden, of sexual fulfillment, of spring in the blood, fails her deepest wish for requited joy. “I think we must give up / turning to her for affirmation,” she writes about Nature in the concluding lyric of “October.” Yet—that crucial conjunction, the sun also rises:

In Averno she writes numerous additional lyrics about the struggle for understanding between the Persephone self who moves from underworld darkness to the light-filled upper world of her nourishing mother Demeter. Persephone has become for poets one of the most popular figures from Greek mythology in large part because her half-life in the terrestrial world rings so true to the experience of humanity vulnerable to the shocks of temporal affliction. Glück, in the closure of “October” rests calmly in the night of her post-apocalyptic experience, blind to flowers and bitter about her experience of autumn, but bathed in the light of moon and stars. To be alive in this state is to be “fortunate,” still a survivor on the earth with ripeness around her and within her. She settles for the ever-replenishing sentiment that human beings can and must endure, stoically, any injury as they await among the fruits of earth the call to enter “the sojourn in hell.”

Unlike Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was not an attack by a foreign nation initiating an international war, a “world” war for which there was no alternative. True to its modernist and postmodernist epoch, 9/11 may or may not lead to a military clash of cultures. What it has undoubtedly led to is a radical change in the imagination of Americans. Don DeLillo put this well in an essay for Harper’s three months after the attacks, “In the Ruins of the Future”:

Each year there will be the anniversary, and poets will feel obligated to write, for their own satisfaction, for journals, for the Internet, some memorial that will establish or entertain meaning(s) for the day. “The date became a word,” Robert Pinsky writes, “an anniversary / We inscribed with meanings—who keep so few.” There was some speculation in the months following 9/11 that the recent collapse of Enron, and its clear meaning—that a massive degree of fraud underlay the economic system of our nation—would ultimately emerge as the more significant crisis for Americans. At this writing both collapses are in active play. But it’s safe to say that poets will always gravitate more toward 9/11 as subject matter because it has so many associations with the world-shaking historical and intellectual turns that poets have tended to scrutinize in their greatest texts. Poets of today feel the lamentations and consolations of their predecessors weighing upon them and inspiring them, just as future poets, and readers, will look back to the elegists of this century’s first decade for guidance amid the danger and rage to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [undated]), xvi.

Baraka, Amiri. “Somebody Blew Up America,” CounterPunch, October 3, 2002, www.counterpunch.org/poem1003.html.

Bidart, Frank. “Curse,” Star Dust (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 25–26.

Cohen, Allen and Clive Matson (eds.). An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11 (Oakland, CA: Regent Press, 2002).

Collins, Billy. “The Names” at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/july-dec02/collins_9-6.html.

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), 42.

DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 303, No. 1819 (December 2001), 33–40.

Dunn, Stephen. “The Insistence of Beauty,” The Insistence of Beauty (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 86–87.

Edwards, Thomas R. Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 77.

Eisenberg, Deborah. Twilight of the Superheroes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 28.

Espada, Martin. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 231–232.

Field, Edward, “After the Fall,” After the Fall (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 45–52.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?,” Poetry Foun­dation Online Journal http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.

html?id=178612.

Glück, Louise. “October,” Averno (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 5–15.

Hartzler, Christine. “The Diver,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XLII, No. 2 (Spring 2003), 385.

Heyen, William (ed.). September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Silver Springs, MD: Etruscan Press, 2002).

Johnson, Dennis Loy and Valerie Merians (eds.). Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2002).

Joseph, Lawrence. “Unyieldingly Present,” Into It (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), 35–37.

Kinnell, Galway. “When the Towers Fell,” Strong Is Your Hold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 37–42.

Liu, Timothy. “A Prayer,” For Dust Thou Art (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 27–28.

Martin, Charles. “After 9/11,” Hudson Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 3 (Autumn 2005), 367–371.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Can a Contemporary Poet Write about the Holocaust?” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XLV, No, 2 (Spring 2006), 336–340.

Pinsky, Robert. “The Anniversary,” Gulf Music (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 19–21.

Rhein, Christine. “In Code,” Wild Flight (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008), 40.

Schulman, Grace. “Kol Nidrei: September 2001,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XLI, No. 3 (Fall 2002), 632–633.

Sleigh, Tom. “Lamentation on Ur,” Far Side of the Earth (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2003), 38.

Stokesbury, Leon (ed.). Articles of War: A Collection of Poetry about World War II (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1990).

Thomas, Heather. “Poetry after 9/11: Beyond the Dreamrim of Grief,” The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall 2002), 40–45.

Williams, C. K. “Fear,” Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 601–602.

Notes

• *

  Kinnell’s note: “We’re digging a grave in the sky there’ll be plenty of room to lie down there.”—from Paul Celan’s Death