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The Poetry of September 11:

The Testimonial Imperative


Karen Alkalay-Gut
English, Tel Aviv

Abstract In October 2001, Lawrence Ferlinghetti declared that from now on, poetry
would be classied as B.S. and A.S.Before and After September 11. Despite the
exaggeration, it is clear that testimonial and elegiac elements of poetry and spoken
or sung text have become more valued. In public places and forums, there began
to surface poems in which aesthetics were apparently subordinated to communicative function and direct expression. Indeed, poetry has acquired a long lost social
purposeto order, inform, unite, and console a confused and grieving people. The
Internet, accordingly, became the primary venue where the narratives and the emotions collected. Its intrinsic democratic character was utilized, and every testimony
of emotion or witness was accepted as equally privileged, so a television witness had
as much right to feel and express this emotion as an actual witness. As George Lako
noted, The people who did this got into my brain, even three thousand miles away.
All those symbols were connected to more of my identity than I could have realized.
This study attempts to characterize this distinctive explosion of testimonial and elegiac poetry.

Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the
World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, poems began to surface in
public places and public forums. They appeared on the sidewalks of southern Manhattan, on pages tacked to trees near the site of the twin towers,
and on bulletin boards around the country. Those who could not appear at
ground zero in person created symbolic sites at home and sent delegations
to lay the tribute of words. As Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians
Poetics Today 26:2 (Summer 2005). Copyright 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

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(2002: ix) noted, Prose wasnt enough. There was something more to be
said that only poetry could say. Everybody, apparently, knew this. This
medium of poetry, in which a makeshift memorial is dotted with torn pages
or pages encased in plastic envelopes, is well-known to Israel and prominently characterized the square in which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was
assassinated in 1995 as well as nearly every site of a terrorist bombing before
and since. But this intimacy and spontaneity of language seemed a unique
phenomenon in the United States, where more formal and measured emotional displays are usually encouraged.
Like the media of trees and walls, the subject and form of these street
poems presented themselves in a spirit of impulsivity and spontaneous emotion. Direct statements of grief, anger, or outrage characterize these writings. If classic poets or writers are quoted, it is from memory, paraphrased
or decontextualized, as if academic accuracy would be in bad taste. Where
there is leisure for ction there is little grief, said Samuel Johnson (1906
[1779]: 112), explaining his distaste for John Miltons elegiac Lycidas, and
the obverse rule of thumb is apparent in the art that reacted to the immediate disaster. Grief seemed to instill a desire to communicate directly
and to disdain articial gures, elegant verse, complex explanations, and
Latinate language.
This reaction does not come ab ovo but is in a way the development of a
growing trend in literature and literary criticism away from the convoluted,
academic, and remote and back to the immediate, popular, and direct. A
parallel backlash against artice in the critical-academic world precedes
this phenomenon on the streets. In Manhattan, for example, poetry slams
and popular readings in such clubs as the Nuyorican Caf attempt to appeal
to a general audience that values communication and social messages over
literary complexity. The concomitant scholarly shift is also apparent. For
years, literary scholarship has been rening the art of stepping away from
humane connection, Lisa Ruddick complained in a 2001 article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education. Nevertheless, the mass of poetry appeared as
a spontaneous and unique phenomenon. In the weeks since the terrorist
attacks, Dinitia Smith (2001) noted in the New York Times, people have
been consoling themselvesand one anotherwith poetry in an almost
unprecedented way.
Not only did the poems appear everywhere in public places in Lower New
York City, Brooklyn Heights, Union Square, in shop windows, and at bus
stops, but the Internet became an extension of ground zero. The immediate result on the Web was a spirit of democratic inclusion in electronic literary journals. The day after the attack, almost every literary journal on
the Web called for submissions to special issues devoted to September 11,

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many online journals promising uncharacteristically that everything submitted would appear. As with ground zero, where a known writer such as
Jack Kerouac and an apparently unpublished poet, such as Foggy Starbuck,
appear side by side, the Web proved a democratizing force, reinforcing artistic equality through thematic equation.
The Web, which has already transformed poetry in innumerable ways,
providing unlimited outlets for unlimited works, operated in a hypertextual function as wellconnecting poems to give a cumulative response to
the disaster. For example, any search engine will nd several thousand Web
links when looking for September 11 poetry, thereby providing the eect
of universal response (see the appendix). Many of the links do not state
the name of the editor, as if to deny the intervention of an artistic censor. Also, the sites may link internally to each otherwith the sense of
a universal link/connection among all those aected by the disaster. As
Jennifer Ley (1999) had previously noted in an online essay on hypertext:
One thing that hypertext seems to be doing to the concept of poetry on the
net is changing our expectations as to what makes up an individual poem.
Once we click/link/layer to a new associative thought, have we entered a
new poem, or merely ipped an electronic page? The language of hypertext turns almost any reading experience into one that has poetic, imagistic
properties, thus expanding the role of poetry in digital writing.
Immediately after September 11, this phenomenon served to give a sense
that in writing an original poem about the unique individual perception
of the disaster or about ones private grief, one was simultaneously participating in a universal event and contributing to the understanding of a
communal trauma. This kind of communal experience was delineated by
Cathy Caruth (1995: 11):
The pathology [of post-traumatic stress disorder] cannot be dened either by
the event itselfwhich may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equallynor can it be dened in terms of a distortion of the
event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal signicances
attached to it. The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time,
but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.

Poetry, in the pure form of experience, makes then a signicant contribution


to a healing process.
While the initial response to the September 11 tragedy has been the transient aesthetics of the art of raw emotion, there has been an equally strong
and immediate demand for a transcendent, suitable, and mighty art. Art
has lost the facility for rapid reaction or even considered response, com-

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plained Norman Lebrecht in the September 19, 2001, edition of the London
Daily Telegraph. Lebrecht was not alone in his reproach, and this complex
demand has continued. Acknowledging the continuing truth of his evaluation of the dearth of great art responding to September 11, Anne Midgette
(2002) nevertheless responded to this view more than six months later in
the New York Times: The task of the artist is to shape a voice strong enough
to rise above the cloud of emotional responses that arises in the wake of a
crisis. Indeed, many of the more recognized poets, such as the poet laureate Billy Collins, warned against immediate reactions in poetry and, for
a sense of comfort, advocated instead tried and true poems from the past.
American poets will have a hard time if they attempt a direct response
to these events, because poetry by its nature moves us inward, not outward to the public and the collective, he notes in Poetry and Tragedy
(2001). Adam Zagajewskis Try to Praise the Mutilated World and Lawrence Ferlinghettis Are There Not Still Fireies were among the more
recent poems quoted and requoted. W. H. Audens September, 1939,
H.D.s The Walls Do Not Fall, William Butler Yeatss Lapis Lazuli, and
other poems written before and during World War II were read at numerous
memorial ceremonies and spread over the Internetsometimes in response
to requests for appropriate readings for funerals, sometimes in an attempt
to give strength to traumatized victims, witnesses, and viewers. In the classroom, as Milton J. Bates (2003: 170) has pointed out, selections from classic
texts like T. S. Eliots Four Quartets helped to speak of the unspeakable.
Whether the poetry was recent, raw, and personal or classical and
recycledwhatever poetry was chosenthe only criterion for mass consumption was eect. If the poems were judged to reect an appropriate
mood or to provide comfort in the immediate situation, they were included.
No criticisms were made of the quality of any workanymore than the
ower arrangements on graves would be judged for their artistic value or
epitaphs on gravestones assessed for their poetic signicance at the time of
their inscription. Even the two anthologies that emerged within the year,
both introduced and edited by well-known poets, focused upon the theme
of grief and tragedy, clearly seeing an aesthetic response as inappropriate.
We asked [poets] to simply chime in with work they had done since the
event that they felt showed its inuence. Thats all, wrote the editors of
Poetry after 9/11 ( Johnson and Merians 2002: ix).
Now that some time has passed, however, it is possible to begin to evaluate some elements of the unique situation, the unique response it engendered, and perhaps, the inuence on poetry and its relationship to society
since that fateful day.
The atmosphere of genuine grief and the inclusiveness of New York

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streets and the Internet are not the only features of the poetry of September 11. Other parameters provided a singular environment for poetry and
inspired and continue to inspire specic kinds of poetry. The rst is the temporal framework: the fact that the dramatic event took place in its entirety
in a very short time but its signicance and consequences still remain to
be evaluated is an important consideration. Not only is a formal closure
lacking, but the testimony is current and therefore not yet historically contextualized. Therefore, intellectual and political questions of ultimate signicance cannot even be addressed with authority, and the emphasis must
be upon sensations and experiences.
Another contributing element is the universality of the witnessing of the
tragedy. Although the number of victims, survivors, eyewitnesses, and those
aected physically by the catastrophe may not have reached enormous proportions, the entire world was literally witness to the event. The repeated
scenes on CNN and other news channels reached into the furthest corners
of civilization.
Furthermore, along with the victims, the survivors, the eyewitnesses, and
those whose lives were physically altered by the attack, the entire world was
aected and transformed by viewing the event as well as its consequences
and implications, far more than by any universal event in history. Billy
Collinss protest against writing about September 11, that poetry takes you
inward and not outward, simply did not apply to the case in point, because
the rest of the world had the same intimate experience. The viewing of this
event may have taken place while one was alone, but the intimate reactions
of individuals in their private spaces, though unmixed with the responses of
others at that moment, was both private and universal. The more intimate
the response, the more likely that others shared that response; the way in
was indeed the way out.
And the awareness of this universality contributed signicantly to the
power of the event itself.Unlike, for example, people who were hidden away
during World War II, who only discovered after the war that suering was
not only their own lot, those experiencing the monumental event on television were simultaneously aware that the rest of the world had been traumatized and threatened in the same way. This knowledge that the private
and the public are identical can comfort in its universalization while it terries in its proportions.
One result of this knowledge was the conceptualization of the event. As
George Lako (2001) noted in an essay entitled Metaphors of Terror:
The people who did this got into my brain, even three thousand miles away. All
those symbols were connected to more of my identity than I could have realized.
To make sense of this, my very brain had to change. And change it did, pain-

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fully. Day and night. By day, the consequences ooded my mind; by night, the
images had me breathing heavily, nightmares keeping me awake. Those symbols lived in the emotional centers of my brain. As their meanings changed, I
felt emotional pain.
It was not just me. It was everyone in this country, and many in other countries.
The assassins managed not only to kill thousands of people but to reach in and
change the brains of people all over America.

This knowledge that it was not just me appears to be connected with the
metaphorization of the event. Lako was not alone. Ani DiFrancos poem
self evident (2002) begins: yes, / us people are just poems/were 90%
metaphor. The destruction of the World Trade Center was reality, metaphor, and metonymy for Apocalypse, wrote David Ray (2002: 316), and
other writers and poets also strove to nd the universal signicance in this
universal grief.
This conceptual transformation of the way people had understood their
world and their positions in it was also a universal characteristic of the
poetry of September 11. In order to process this new information, many had
to alter their views of how they conceived of everything about their lives,
from their geographical security to their attitudes toward the other to
their concepts of political theory and its actualization. Characteristic is the
monumental tone of Larry Jae (2001), who connects the towers with the
fall of Rome:
If it falls, will it be heard?
A panorama falls
Everyone was there
It was heard
The sirens heard it
The ambulances heard it
The police cars and re trucks heard it
The TV channels broadcasting around the world heard it
It was heard far away in Afghanistan
It was heard in Beverly Hills
Even Moscow heard it
It was heard in the South Bronx where I was born
And it was heard in Los Angeles where my children were born
I know for a fact it was heard in Las Vegas where my grandchildren
were born because
My daughter called me at dawn to let me know she heard it
I am afraid to sleep tonight because last night I slept like a baby and
when I awoke,

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it was a nightmare
It had fallen
Steel by steel
Stone by stone
Person by person
Like Rome
Like Nero.

The fact that it is not clear whether Nero here is the president of the United
States, some other leader like Bin Laden, the implied poet himself, or all
of them is part of the general confusion, the knowledge that some other
way of thinking is necessary to process this event, but what exactly is as yet
unknown.
One way of avoiding this confusion was the new patriotism toward the
United States, which ourished. Poems such as Maya Angelous tribute
to the reghters of New York, Extravagant Spirits (2004), and such
songs as Theres an Eagle (2001) by Steve Vaus, endeavored to unite and
strengthen the American people with the use of the standard symbols.Using
a line from W. E. Henleys powerful Invictus, Vaus sings, We may be
bloodied, But were unbroken / Despite the darkness, We are not lost. . . .
Theres a brave new spirit in America / United Forevermore. This is a
genre in which clichs succeed, and the genre of poetry spills over into popular culture. Life magazine published Angelous poem, and Vauss song not
only comforted and united a nation, it also catapulted his career.1 Even Paul
McCartney and Michael Jackson wrote songs, Freedom and What More
Can I Give respectively, to inspire and uplift.
A more personal form of patriotism is evident in the dramatic monologue
employed by the popular Canadian songwriter and singer Neil Young in
Lets Roll (2001).Using the media of the popular song to its greatest eect,
Young assumes the voice of Todd Beamer, one of the men on Flight 93 who
helped resist the attackers. Beamer had called the authorities to report the
hijacking, and the recording of his voice had been replayed frequently. But
realizing the urgency and responsibility involved, he had declined to call
his wife.2 Incorporating Beamers now-famous words, Youngs song imagines Beamers parting from her. It begins with the ringing of a cell phone;
then, after declaring his love, the speaker sets o the heroic operation by
declaring, Lets roll. This is the rst verse:
1. In A Tale of Two Songs (2001), published in World Net Daily, Joseph Farah analyzes the
success of this noncommercial song, recorded one day after the event.
2. Todd Beamers last words on the phone were: God help me. Jesus help me. Are you ready?
Lets roll (Head 2003).

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I know I said I love you,


I know you know its true,
I got to put the phone down,
And do what we gotta do.
Ones standing in the aisleway,
Two more at the door.
We got to get inside there,
Before they kill some more.
Time is runnin out. . . .
LETS ROLL!

The attempt here to relive the intensity of the moment is fortied by the
words, which have become part of the political clich of the war against terrorism. Anthony Pratkanis even noted on CNN: In my mind its a phrase
thats gone to the ages. Its become part of what it means to be American (CBS News 2002). Whether or not political and military action was
the intention of this song, it has become one of the results.
Despite a tendency toward patriotism,3 not all poetry was intended to
create a patriotic reaction. Some poems reinforced previous political criticisms. Lorna Dee Cervantess poem Palestine, written one day after
September 11, begins with a quotation from Mahmoud Darwish and is
addressed to him. By implication, the entire event of September 11 is caused
by the loss of Palestine, and the poem comes to the conclusion: And what /
if the source of death / is not the dagger / or the lie? / But both? The
metonymic shifting of blame from the attackers to the attacked society
was not unusual. But more humane and inclusive voices were also heard,
attempting to widen the concept of sympathy and identication to include
the attackers as well as their immediate victims. Suheir Hammads muchreproduced poem First Writing Since (2001), brilliantly and sympathetically discussed by Michael Rothberg (2003), acknowledges an identication with all the humanity involved in the September 11 tragedy. Hammads
poem concludes:
there is no poetry in this. there are causes and eects. there are
symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information
we will never know. there is death here, and there are promises
of more.
. . . .
arm life.
arm life.
3. For further information on the unwritten law of self-censorship during the aftermath of
September 11, see Biggs 2001.

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we got to carry each other now.


you are either with life, or against it.
arm life.

In alternative music,4 the identication with the exacting popular patriotism was perceived immediately as a danger, and the texts oered other,
more critical, approaches to the event. DiFrancos poem self-evident utilizes the well-known expression from the Declaration of Independence to
question the use to which the tragedy will be put, alternating identication
with self-distancing and ironically concluding:
look, another window to see through
way up here
on the 104th oor
look
another key
another door
10% literal
90% metaphor
3,000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day
should be more than pawns
in some assholes passion play
so now its your job
and its my job
to make it that way
to make sure they didnt die in vain.

DiFranco echoes the Gettysburg Address in these last lines to highlight


the manipulation of patriotism as well as the national responsibility for
the event.
Whatever the conclusions drawn and however polarized the opinions,
the transforming experience as witness to and often active participant in a
universal conict was a general one. Every individual had an active involvement in this event.
If everyone was transformed as witness and political individual, everyone was also transformed as victim. The universal reaction of personal loss,
of, at the very least, having ones life and ones world inalterably changed,
suggests in turn that everyone and anyone is equally privileged to express
emotion. Poems and essays depicting the actual experience of escaping or
4. For more information about the category, see, for example, free-denition.com: The
term alternative music was coined in the early 1980s to describe bands which didnt t into
the mainstream genres of the time (www.free-denition.com/Alternative-music.html).

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witnessing the burning towers rsthand appear side by side with poems
about the tragedy invading the living room and the individuals intimate
space, and poems of identication collocate with testimony seen on television.The interchange of the experience can be felt in the following section
of an anonymous poem, one of many on a Christian September 11 site 5 that
uses the sense of intimacy of experience to comfort through religion:
Silent NightSeptember 11, 2001
You say you will never forget where you were when you heard the
news on September 11, 2001.
Neither will I.
I was on the 110th oor in a smoke-lled room with a man who called
his wife to say, Good-bye.
I held his ngers steady as he dialed.
I gave him the peace to say, Honey, I am not going to make it, but it
is OK . . . I am ready to go.
I was with his wife when he called as she fed breakfast to their
children.
I held her up as she tried to understand his words and as she realized
he wasnt coming home that night.
I was in the stairwell of the 23rd oor when a woman cried out for Me
for help. I have been knocking on the door of your heart for 50
years! I said, Of course I will show you the way homeonly
believe in Me now.
I was at the base of the building with the Priest ministering to the
injured and devastated souls. I took him home to tend to his Flock
in Heaven. He heard my voice and answered.
I was on four of those planes, in every seat, with every prayer. I was
with the crew as they were overtaken. I was in the very hearts of the
believers there, comforting and assuring them that their faith has
saved them.
I was in Texas, Kansas, London. I was standing next to you when you
heard the terrible news. Did you sense Me?
I want you to know that I saw every face. I knew every namethough
not all know Me. Some met me for the rst time on the 86th oor.

Although the speaker of this anonymous poem is God and this use of a
divine speaker deserves further inquiry, the manner in which the events of
September 11 were processed morally and ethically in this and other poems
is too vast to encompass in this essay. What is signicant in the present context is the inclusion of actual television and newspaper testimony.The poem
5. Song is available through the Citadel Communications Web site at www.lilcountrycottage
.com/911.html (original link: ctknet.com/silent night september 11 2001.htm).

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is lled with details of numerous events broadcast widely on CNN and Fox
News, recounted in the newspapers, and told over various radio channels.
Everyone was no more than one step removed from all the experiences,
and everyone can identify the details. Moreover, these details are ltered
through the universal witness, an omniscient Deity, whose order and organization make sense of the chaos, give perspective and position to the details
that are otherwise too numerous to absorb. It is not surprising that almost
six hundred sites reproduced this poem and many more link to it.
For those whose faith is not so absolute as that oered in Silent Night
(whose author is not mentioned, preserving the realism of the ction of
divine authorship and authority), the trauma is not so easily fathomed; and
yet it is analyzed through these same kinds of familiar references. Diane
Seuss begins Falling Man (2002) with an emphasis on the reported evaluation of one of the iconic events: The man falls. Im told / he jumped. She
distances herself, through reported (told) information, from the terrifying live footage of victims jumping from the towers to avoid the alternative
ery death. This tragic vision was one that many witnessed, either live or
replayed, on television and therefore can be identied universally from a
few details.
Nor can the trauma be graded. Unlike second- and third-generation
Holocaust survivorswhose tragedy is diluted and intensied by the guilt
of survival and the remoteness from the immediate catastrophenot being
there does not invalidate the right to grieve or to feel fear, shame, or guilt.
This universal entitlement is a characteristic unique to this experience
and interrelates with all the others previously mentioned. Rosalynne Carmine Smiths The Poison Birds (2002) ends each verse of birdsong with
the line, I want you dead, illustrating this universal experience and the
specically personal sense of self as victim. Similarly, Alicia Ostrikers The
window, at the moment of ame (2001b) connects even the unaware, unaffected individual with the signicance of the event:
and all this while I have been playing with toys
a toy superhighway a toy automobile a house of blocks
and all this while far o in other lands
thousands and thousands, millions and millions
you knowyou see the pictures
women carrying bony infants
men sobbing over graves
buildings sculpted by explosion
earth wasted bare and rotten
and all this while I have been shopping, I have

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been let us say free


and do they hate me for it
do they hate me.

In the course of the poem, Ostrikers speaker slowly separates herself from
her previously unaware existence and concludes with the possibility that
she has been personally perceived as an American and part of the Western exploitation of the third world (they hate me for it). The sense here is
that September 11 is not a nameless, generalized expression of the anger of
a few people but a personal attack on everything connected with the identity of the speaker. Whether cognizant of politics or not, the individual is
held culpable by the terrorists. Yet despite the intensely personal reaction
in this poem, where her life and activities are described with no reference to
any of the actual victims of September 11, Ostriker elsewhere perceives the
desired role of the writer in this situation to be objective. In an introduction to poems on the subject, Ostriker (2001a) contextualizes her approach,
prescribing this function:
The writers task in times of trouble is, I believe, rst of all not therapeutic but
diagnostic. For we cant be healed if we do not know what our sickness is. The
task is clarity. In the present time it is very hard to know how to respond to the
terrorism that has attacked us, which is at once so horrible and such a mirror of
the terror which we as a nation have unleashed against othersin our ignorance
and pride.

The task is clarity, claims Ostriker, and although her own work might
seem to run counter to this task, it does not, for one way clarity is achieved
is by collecting poems of personal and even intimate details. The individual
poems need not attempt to make sense but only to record events, feelings,
reactions. Once they are collected in an anthology, these details together
help to create an entire picture of the signicance of September 11 and form
the clarity of which Ostriker speaks.
Few poets seem to have felt a diagnostic urge. Rather, the idea of testimony as tribute is present in numerous projects encouraging contributions of poetry. People wanted to share griefto write, publish, participate
in readings. But it was clear that a certain kind of censorship prevailed:
no graphic details of horror, no complex political and moral analysis, and
above all no polished, poetic poetry. The style expected is generally conventional and the treatment of the subject positivepatriotic, elegiac,
heroic. New Yorkbased Poetic Voices, for example, called for patriotic poetry
literally before the smoke had cleared, the day after the terrible tragedy.
The perception of the role of poetry here is as support:

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Poetic Voices has always had a vision of being a forum where the voices of poets
would not only ring out to America and the world, but also as a community of
people who reach out to each other.
In light of this, I have decided that over the next few days and weeks, we will be
calling on all poets to put their voice out there about these events.We ask that you
do what you do best and write. Write poems in honor of America, write poems
in comfort to victims and families of victims, write poems about the heroes who
rise up out of the dust to risk their lives to save others, and write poems about
the strength of the American people in the midst of trials.
Submit these poems to us and we will publish them in a special memorial and
commentary section of Poetic Voices. All poems will be published that follow the
guidelines. (Travis-Murphree 2001)6

And in part because of the nature of the Internet, in which new work can
be easily incorporated into an existing site, the call for poems continues.
The project Testimony Continues: Museum of the City of New York 5th
Avenue and 103rd Street, for example, is an Ongoing web project which
allows the contribution of poetry and images that commemorate 9/11 in
the spirit of the shrines which appeared in Union Square in the aftermath
(Museum of the City of New York 2004). This and numerous other projects
give a sense of a massive archival eort.
More poems are necessary, and so accepted, by the same rationale that
the continual archiving of evidence is necessary, in part because physical
evidence is missing.The bodies have disappeared. In We Cant Make More
Dirt . . . Tragedy and the Excavated Body, Jennifer Wallace (2003: 107)
notes that, although 2,823 people died in the WTC, in 2003 only 1,264 had
been positively identied, and the biographies that appeared daily in the
New York Times in the months following gave some substance to these vaporized human beings. In the midst of devastation, naming and lamenting a
particular bodyeven 2,800 of themasserts the human capacity to bring
public confusion and conict home (ibid.).
The classical advice to delay publication until sucient time has passed
for review is completely inappropriate to this situation.The encouragement
to speak out immediately is great. Because this is a communal experience
and the poem seems to serve the purpose of alleviating some fears and anxieties and assuaging others, the language and form are of necessity communicativeclear, direct, and immediately accessible. This form of discourse
6. The page is signed by the executive editor. This call for poems is still on the Web and is
updated regularly. It has also maintained the grammatical inconsistencies of speaker with
I, We, and Poetic Voices.

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is usually seen in engaged poetrypolitical poetry, minority poetry, and


poetry with social commitments and messagesbut is rarely granted critical attention and is therefore less well-known as poetry.
Many of the writings take the form of the media that accompanied the
tragedy. Almost in imitation of the CNN breaking news model, poems
chart the unfolding of the events. The idea of up-to-date information may
well have been the model for the books of poetry sequences that have since
emerged, such as Janet Bucks Ash Tattoos (2002) or the Missouri housewife
Sue Ikerds Lady Libertys Still Standing: Poems in Memory of September 11, 2001
(2002).7 It is also the model for Bucks cover, a photograph of the burning
towers.
The breaking news headline, which kept so many of us glued to CNN,
is also the model for poem journals published serially on the Internet. Certainly Charles Bernsteins long prose poem Some of These Daze, which
was sent serially to the University of Bualo Poetry Discussion Group in
the immediate aftermath, gives the sense of the poet as reporter, not of the
news but of the developing understanding as events proceed. Bernstein had
been theorizing about this before; in Poetry and/or the Sacred (1999), an
essay that appeared in the Web magazine Jacket just before September 11,
he concludes:
Poems are no more sacred than the use to which they are made, any more than
you or I or Uncle Hodgepodge is. They are scared and looking for cover, scarred
by the journey. They may be good company but more likely resemble the man
in the train compartment who never stops talking. What time is it now? Are we
there yet? What do they call this town?

Bernsteins poem Some of These Daze is precisely in this form. Although


carefully structured, it looks like a to the moment journal. Here is one
section, entitled Aftershock:
Thursday night it started to pour. The piercing thunder claps echoed over Manhattan. We all woke up with a start and couldnt nd the way back to sleep.
Andrew tells us the story of a British man who showed up on time for his hair
cutting appointment, 4pm, Tuesday. He had been on an upper oor of the Trade
Center when the jet hit.
By mistake I rst wrote Word Trade Center.
7. Amazon.com explains: Sue Ikerd is a farm wife in Missouri who was aected by this terrible event and inspired to write these poems. Her daughter, Leah Savage put the poems and
pictures on a website. After receiving several thousand visits to the site from over 76 countries
and over a thousand positive emails, many asking for this in book form, it was decided they
should publish this book.

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Tuesday morning I rouse my friend Stu from a profound slumber to tell him what
has happened to the twin towers.Theyre ugly, he says, after a pause, but
theyre not that ugly.
In the last few days, everyone I know seems to need to be in touch with everyone else. At rst, it was mostly calls and emails from outside the U.S. Now there
is steady stream of local calls: where were you when, how are you feeling now.
Every story is riveting, from the ones where the people were alone watching live
TV to the many who watched the events unfold, how to put it?, live and in person.
Those who saw the towers collapse, who saw the people jumping, were seared
in a way the rest of us have been spared.
A visceral need to lash out, to strike down, to root out, to destroy in turn for
what has been destroyed, seems to grip so many, grips part of me. When a coworker expresses just this sentiment, someone complains to her, Dont you think
we need to nd out who is responsible before we do anything? She shrugs: not
necessarily.
Its as if the blasts occurred dozens of time, the actual blasts being obliterated by
the constant replay.
I feel like I am going through those stages in an unwritten book by KublerRoss: rst denial, then manic fascination, then listlessness, then depression. Now
denial again.
I cant get the lm out of my mind. You know, the one in which a crackerjack
team of conspirators meets in an abandoned hanger [sic] and meticulously plots
out the operation on a blackboard. Synchronize watches! This image stands
in the way of what occurred in the way that a blizzard stands in the way of
the sky.
Out of the blue, ags everywhere.
Things I do everyday like make airplane reservations on the phone are now
fraught with an unwanted emotional turbulence.
In some ways the blasts are a natural disaster, like an earthquake or volcanic
eruption. Though we might wish to ght it, human beings and what they do are
also a part of nature.
The letter trains are mostly running but I always think in terms of IRT, BMT,
IND. Well, the A is OK from 207th to West 4th but the Cs down; the D now
ends at 34th. The Es canceled service below West 4th indenitely. As to my local
trains, no service on the 2 & 3 and the 1 stops at 34th.
After the initial crash, an ocial period of panic set in. During this time, all bets
[sic] were o. We were told to expect anything, any target next. This period of
ocial panic has set the tone for the days after and may have a more profound
eect than the events.
Now, Sunday, its cold for the rst time. The summer is over.

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Poetics Today 26:2

I bomb
you bomb
he/she/it bombs
we bomb
you bomb
they suer
Were ugly, but were not that ugly.
&, hey, Joe, dont you know
We is they.8

The turning of World Trade Center to Word Trade Center is crucial


here, because the poem is an attempt to reproduce the chaos and loss felt
at the moment. Only a few poetic techniques are visiblethe redening repetition of the Were ugly, the declension of the verb bomb, the
metaphorical The summer is over.
With its many sketchy anecdotes, the poem models itself on as-ithappens reportage, and yet there is a structural framework that gives order
to the chaos of feelings. The conclusion, that the we with which we have
come to totally identify is perceived by the other as they, demands a
rereading and reunderstanding of the poem as well as the situation. We is
they frames the close attention to details and personal reactions and grants
the poem a sense of order.
The problem of imposing order on chaosalbeit only poetic orderis
dealt with in an unpublished work by Patti Marshock and Tad Richards,
circulated at the time only through a poetry discussion group (see gure 1).
In this work, the words maintain the sense of chaotic emotions, and the
framework is imposed by the visual angular structure, interrupted in two
places, in imitation of the attack on the World Trade Center.
The imposition of the form of the twin towers upon disconnected words,
the voices merging into the repeated word horror, and a large black
spot upon the page in the place where the rst attack occurred proclaim
the insuciency of language to deal with this experience. Traditionally,
emblematic poetry combines images and text to represent an idea or principle. This work may appear to be emblematic in its use of shape, but it is
very dierent in the opposition between the visual and the verbal components, an opposition that imitates the actual situation.
This problem with language is formidable, as Joseph Richey (2002)
notes. Like a statesman, the poet needs access to privileged information
8. Some of These Daze was posted on Sunday, September 16, 2001, at 17:47:37, to the University of Bualo Poetics Discussion Group listserv (Bernstein 2001). It is also on Bernsteins
home page, epc.bualo.edu/authors/bernstein/.

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Figure 1 Unpublished work by Patti Marshock and Tad Richards, circulated at


the time of the September 11 event only through a poetry discussion group.

and trusty advisers. Some poets have neither.When language is as degraded


and abused as it is during wartime, its like what Henry James said about
The Great War, that it used up all the words: they have weakened, they
have deteriorated. Lies, propaganda, spin, hyperbole, etc., bring on an
increase in limpness, he said. In our time, the info-cuisine is a slumgullion
of Insta-Media. Just add state propaganda, interests of corporate power,
and stir. For alternative brands, take thick-skinned zeal, chopped left propaganda and blend smoothly. With the proliferation of media, language
deterioration multiplies, and the diculty of genuine communication is far
greater.
The availability of canonical poems, previously published works newly

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Poetics Today 26:2

brought out for the occasion of this tragedy, earlier ways of dealing with
disaster were not helpful in providing literary models to imitate. They did
not simplify the transmission of the immediate, unique experience. The disparity between Audens learning of the outbreak of war in Poland as he sits
in a Manhattan bar and witnessing the attack on the towers on CNN, either
live or in its innite repetitions, indicates the historical distinctiveness of
the September 11 event and the literary uniqueness of the challenge to react
to it appropriately.
In at least one case, there is an attempt to deal with the experience by
using the language of the media and the language of literature. This happens in a poem by Sophie Levy (2001):
This second: Coming
turning and turning
9.15 a.m.
dreaming in Yeats
two days until the exam
the alarm
of the phone
ringing
England
calling
in the widening gyre; the falcon cannot
dreaming of ight, the airman
foresees his death
10.00 a.m. Ground Zero
the common room
the common focus one box containing the
world
11.00 a.m. no subway no government employees
central Toronto a dead
town
its

its the girl and boy holding each other outside the lecture building sunshine
the blood-dimmed tide
already
in the ashen city

12.00 p.m. hear the falconer WE WILL HUNT THEM DOWN &
KILL THEM
hushed the feeling/say it
things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
we are half-rhymed
if that
scattered in attitudes of gawk &
revelation
loosed upon the world
if the centre cannot hold [these things]
If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers . . .
it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life,
the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
4 p.m.

passionate intensity breeds


breath-holding
say

that echo of Lear in all our headache

worst

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5 p.m. everywhere / The ceremony we train ourselves in


correctness emergency procedures for such situations
and
we fail
(they fail us)
there is watching, slack-jawed
Tom Clancy on CNN
there is
breaking the news
The end of history is over
[e-mail from a friend at CityTV
THE HEADLESS HEAD OF STATE SLOUCHING
TOWARDS
JERUSALEM]
its hour come round at last
its second / this
unfolding of seconds at the speed of (f )light
suddenly grounded
and we move through rubble / bone-exposed
hearing every tick (as

A metapoem about poetry and disaster, Levys poem is a dialogue between


Yeatss vision of the end of civilization as we know it and the individual
speaker in the midst of the September 11 disaster. Conating lines from
Yeatss The Second Coming (in boldface type) and the title of An Irish
Airman Forsees His Death, as well as lines from Shakespeares King Lear,
with quotations from news commentators and President George Bush,
Levys poem embodies the fragmentation and confusion of the moment.
The interweaving between individual vision and television news, the personal voice and the voices of politicians, is saturated in the poetry of Yeats
being studied for a doctoral examination. The dawn of a world transformed
by the chaos, a world predicted by the Irish poet, renders poetry simultaneously irrelevant and central.The citation of Its hour come round at last,
a situation understood by Yeats as poetic prophecy and now experienced
as reality, centralizes poetry in a way that Yeats would have praised. This
centralization seems to have continued and developed parallel to the ceremonialization of the event. In the time that has passed since the immediate
event, the need for continual memorial ceremonies seems to have encouraged the continuation of the genre of commemorative poetry.
A year after Billy Collinss warning against immediate reactions, The
Names (2002), by Poet Laureate Collins, was read during a special session
of the U.S. Congress held in New York on Friday, September 6, 2002. It is
an attempt to represent the sense of inability to enumerate and cope with
the daunting and overwhelming lists of victims. So many names, he con-

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Poetics Today 26:2

cludes, there is barely room on the walls of the heart. 9 And the veteran
political poet Maya Angelou, who read at Bill Clintons 1993 presidential
inauguration, added her words to Life magazine (2004), praising the leaders
who helped soothe and comfort after the disaster as Extravagant Spirits:
These mothers, fathers, pastors and priests,
These Rabbis, Imams and gurus,
Teach us by their valor and mold us with their courage.
Without their erce devotion
We are only forlorn and only fragile
Stumbling briey, among the stars.

In early October 2001, at a sold-out poetry reading in a North Beach theater, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2001) proclaimed that art and poetry will be
classied from now on as B.S. and A.S.Before and After September 11.
Although it is too soon to evaluate the long-term changes in poetry and
their relevance to contemporary events, this may be a great exaggeration.
Yet, as Joseph Richey (2002) warned his fellow poets at the outset, this is
not the end: Get ready for the long haul. Keep your keyboards dust-free.
Keep your feet dry, your ink wet. And keep your poetry helmet on.
Appendix: Additional September 11 Poems from the Web
Academy of American Poets
2004 Poems of Grief and Condolence, Post-9/11 Poetry Resources, www.poets.org/sept11
.cfm (accessed October 3, 2004).
American Poets Society
2004 September 11: We Will Never Forget, www.poetryamerica.com/sept 11 poems.asp
(accessed October 3, 2004).
11 September 2001: The Response of Poetry
2004 Web site, www.geocities.com/poetryafterseptember112001 (accessed October 3,
2004).
Poetry.com
2004 www.poetry.com/us tragedy/searchgroup.asp (accessed October 3, 2004).
Poetry Today Online
2004 Poets Honor September 11, 2001, www.poetrytodayonline.com/bbs/wtcpoetry
.html (accessed October 3, 2004).
9. The entire issue of the poetic use of the names of victims deserves a study unto itself.
As Ginger Strand (2003: 42, 62) noted in her essay Diminished Things: How does one
name the unnameable, describe the indescribable, without blurring the fantastic paradoxes
that swirl around world-changing events? The inability to describe the reality of an overwhelming experience is what makes witnesses call it unreal, as if the reality of it has simply
overowed, exceeding the capacities of conventional description we use to x reality and its
signicance . . . As for us, from our vantage point in the wreckage there is nothing left but to
murmur name upon name, as a mother names her child.

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2004 Extravagant Spirits, Life, www.life.com/Life/lifebooks/911/poem.html (accessed
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