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Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets

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I'm tempted to try and hook you into a very goodbook of poetry today.
Good poets trying to do the impossible, while bleeding a city and nation's pain.
But I will say it was a book given to me that is worthy of a read on the day of rememberance of a national horror. Because of this day so many of us changed.

My daughter wrote a poem on one of those 9-11 days remembering. While helping me teach my 1st grade as a Principal read a poem on the intercom and life went on. Like a lot of things her words on that little day a few years later might wash away, as so much ink, but I keep the poem around because it holds me, and contains some of our joint family memory....a day we remember how we worried over our family in New York, and the nation's safety...I think I'll share her work. It won't help you evalate this book, but it will send you to it I think. It should.... the poets in the book are among our best.

september 11th, by Sylvia Puglisi,
A depressing sort of poem. But there could hardly be a happy one today, I suppose.

* * *

september 11
17 first-graders
moment of silence skipped
for the immediacy of fresh strawberries
and the novelty of pencil sharpeners
(which may never wear off in this lifetime)

invisible principal over the intercom
(like in the old cartoons that reliably reproduced so many aspects of school particularly the cliched plots and precocious love lives)
reading bad poetry in a
flat lifeless voice
like shakespeare in junior high
with unenthused classmates
esoteric
and meaningless.
stephen asks me to sharp his pencil
and wonders why i
teacher stands there for several moments
staring blankly ahead
looking like she's about to cry
and then laughing quietly
at how absurd it all is.

come to the rug, children.
i want to tell you a story
of something that happened before you were born
to people you will never get to know
in a place you've never been.
(next will be a story of a
giant blue-green ball hurtling through space
and a giant yellow ball
they hold like lovers
el sol y la tierra
we love story time
especially doctor seuss!)

in the story it is a tuesday
just like today.
here is the sign for tuesday, make a t with your fingers and circle
tuesday
a cold bright tuesday just like today
it was september 11 that day
just like today.
september is a long word that starts with an s
and let's count to eleven
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven
and in spanish
uno dos tres quatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez once
once upon a time
in the year 2001
before most of you were
born or when you were the tiniest infant
gnawing your fist and smiling to the delight of your parents.
on a day just like today
when little children just like you were counting the date
a bad thing happened.
a very bad thing.

bad people
very angry, nasty people
who perhaps did not have enough
people to love them
hurt our country
the United States of America
you know America in sign language, children
it is like a hug in a circle
show me, children.

our country was attacked
some airplanes were flown into buildings
important buildings
two tall ones in New York
which fell down
also a military building called the Pentagon
which has five sides
show me five fingers, children.
very good.
and the last plane
the good people took from the bad people
and flew into the ground instead of a building.
many, many people died.
the people in the planes and the buildings
and some of the firefighters who tried to save them
they were heros, do you know that word?
it means brave, brave people who did something amazing
like going into a building that is on fire and falling down
and rescuing people.
are you listening, children?
isaac, put your head down.

this was the biggest attack on American soil ever
which means
that it was really scary for us
really scary for your parents
who probably grabbed you
their babies
from the cradles
and held you close
and whispered soft comforting words to themselves
as they watched pictures on the tv
and cried or
just sat
watching.

the world is different now
you don't know because you don't remember
how it was before
you can't ever know the time when parents
worried about teething rings and toes
and not fiery explosions.
you weren't sitting there like i was
in a classroom on tuesday
(which was picture day and everyone
was dressed to the nines
it was two days after my birthday
and i had new clothes
i was looking sharp)
a whisper went around
that something terrible had happened
a disaster
an earthquake
a bomb
people were dying
where? new york
new york which was more magical and mystical to us than disneyland
new york with the giant apple and the statue of liberty
with the buildings that scraped the sky.

there was a moment of silence

kids fidgeted a little just like
you fidget today just like
we fidgeted when old men with gravelly voices told us of pearl harbor.
they speak of it like an old scar
the memory is still fresh.
september 11 is for me a cut
that it took a long time for me to realize was bleeding
like the scrape on the leg that i got from band
which i didn't feel at the time any more than a poke
but later my band teacher gasped and
pointed at when the blood was dripping to the floor.
i have a scar now, too.

but you children have no scars
you are young and
tiny and unblemished and i
truly hope no history is made in your lifetime
because it is a messy business
or so i have found.
we with memory scars will age and fade
recounting stories for
our childrens' school reports on historical events.
you will grow and replace us and get your own scars
falling off your bicycle.
you will remember the date as a
sad story and me
teacher crying a little when you're not looking
and so will move past me
into the future
without my fears and doubts.

this consoles me, children
on this big blue ball going around the big yellow ball
you have danced around six times
keep dancing, children
the slow beautiful waltz of time.

I've added one star for the benefit of modern poetry lovers, who will no doubt see more in this collection than I did.

In the introduction to this slender collection of poems, the editors plump the persistence of poetry. Immediately after the Towers came down, poems appeared everywhere. Nailed on poles, taped in windows, scrawled in dust, poetry answered a need of expression that other forms could not. In their extremity people just let their feelings pour out in verse.

Unfortunately, all the poems collected here are by professional poets. I daresay that nobody reads contemporary poetry except other poets, so this collection betrays a pretty self-absorbed mood. As the editors proudly note in the forward, few of the poems make any direct reference to the atrocity, and only two mention retaliation, and that in a negative way. Instead, these curdled by irony bards spin blank, meterless lines of...whatever comes to mind, apparently.

Poetry as therapy seems the dominant theme. The closest to a recognizably human sentiment anyone comes up with is one poem ticking off all the missing street vendors. Others just muse upon their mute shock, using descriptions of bric-a-brac in their apartments for grace notes or codas. Still others focus on a single incongruous detail out of the surrounding calamity, funny how some things catch your attention. One guy goes cruising in the gay Chelsea district, an imaginary Walt Whitman on his arm, while decrying all ickiness in life. Another types up a passable Guardian editorial, blaming America, but we know it's poetry because of all the indentations. And there's an alphabet of alliterations in another.

Okay, poets are people too, and must have their own ways of dealing with disaster. Other poets reading this will no doubt nod in sage recognition of many of these images and moods. No one expects the War on Terror to have a Rudyard Kipling or a Rupert Brooke, or for that matter a Civil War-era Walt Whitman. But it does seem to me that the plainest, most heartfelt poems of 9/11 must have been washed down the drain along with the ash they were written on.