9/11 and Poetry

When the planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York, I was on my way to a Humanities lab led by my colleague, John Blosser. Together we had devised a mask-making activity as part of our arts and literature class at Goshen College, and when I arrived at the lab with the unbelievable news of the terrorist attack, students were in the process of preparing their materials. The students were stunned, but in Indiana there was little we could do but make futile cell phone calls, so we continued with class. John very calmly conducted a demonstration with one of the students, showing how the entire face needed to be covered in vaseline, and how to make a cardboard frame before molding the moistened plaster of Paris strips to the face. The entire process was an act of trust--offering the vaseline-coated face with closed eyes to the hands of another who would create the mask. This act contrasted vividly with what had occurred in New York, and served as a kind of balm as we began to absorb the awful news. We suggested to the students that they could respond to the fall of the Towers in the ways that they painted and decorated their masks in the coming days.

Perhaps because I was team-teaching the Humanities course with an artist colleague at the time, and we sought out art that responded to tragedy and suffering to share with our students in the aftermath of this event, or perhaps because I am a poet, I noticed the frequent use of poetry to express the inexpressible. Poems responding to the tragedy appeared in prominent magazines. Adam Zagajewski's poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" was published on the back cover of The New Yorker, which also published poems by W.S. Merwin, Deborah Garrison, C.K. Williams, and Galway Kinnell, among others. As the US began to move towards war in Iraq, poets protested by refusing an invitation to the White House to a gathering on American poetry in January 2003. Poet Sam Hamill, who declined the invitation, started the Poets Against the War website, which now contains over 20,000 poems--the largest poetry anthology ever published. Martin Espada's poem "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," remembering the kitchen workers who died in the attack, was published in 2003, and ends with a memorable passage in which smoke clouds from New York and Afghanistan rise and meet:

When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Meanwhile, during this same period, American journalism grew saturated with Orwellian wordsmithing--Weapons of Mass Destruction, Orange Alert, the Patriot Act. The news seemed to be stuffed with double-speak. The President, always a bit of a klutz with words, became a speaker of vapid nothings. Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 exposed much of this verbal evasiveness, and audiences watched his narrative that began with the election fiasco of 2000 and culminated in an expose of the many ties between Saudi oil and the Bush family. It was a grim, discouraging time. Poet Jena Osman, in this time of language spill when fictitious WMDs led to the invasion of Iraq, printed off political memos on her computer, tore them up, and "bombed" her office floor with them. She made a poem, Dropping Leaflets, out of the torn phrases to express her frustration with the ways in which language had become a cover-up, rather than a precision tool for revealing new truths.In this way, poetry took up its work of reviving the language--of "making it new" once again.

Photo of Jena Osman.