A Nation is Turning Pain into Verse
The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 15, 2001
This particular miracle is a little more than a month old - and growing. It has the texture of the human voice, the flexible flight of the human mind. Like a gardener in the green, I've been tending it and learning.
Within hours of the televised destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the lives therein, poems started coming in to us here at the paper. And they just kept coming and coming, from men, women, children (youngest so far: 6), adolescents, seniors (oldest so far: 87). People from around town and people from afar. People even sent in poems by other people too shy to send them. This is really good. You have got to print this. I really hope this will help somebody.
At first, beleaguered editor that I am, I looked at all this verse and thought of hitting Delete. But then my better angel whispered: Make a Web site. And he made it and it was good. It's at http://home.phillynews.com/inquirer/opinion - select Sept. 11: Readers' Poems; I've been posting as fast as I can and am way behind. But as of this writing, more than 100 poems now grace the site. I'm not editing them much; I want them to go up just as they were written.
Several other papers have created similar sites; they, too, are flooded. People are writing poetry as a way to get through this, as a way to praise courage, cry down evil, pledge solidarity. An Oct. 1 article in the New York Times meditated on the nationwide verse explosion. And many local papers - the Morning Call of Allentown, for example - have run special sections with poetry by local poets.
People turn to poetry at times of suffering and crisis. Poetry makes you focus - on your experience, your emotions, the world around you and what you want to say about it. It bids you concentrate - think something all the way through, craft a form for it (rhyme? free verse? iambic pentameter?). It throws you into the mysteries and musics of language. It presents you with the challenge of what's difficult. And people find that comforting. They find solace in creation and expression.
To be frank and of few words, it breaks my heart. What you realize, reading down the page, is that this thing hurt people. It hurt them to see the hole in the Pentagon, to watch the collapse of the glittering towers, to hear of the heroism and fate of the passengers on United Flight 93. So, whether they lost friends and relatives or suffered simply by watching it all on TV, they turned to poetry, its way of telling it, nailing it, making a world available to others.
Is it all Shakespeare? No - and it doesn't have to be. Even if it were all Hallmark-card stuff, I'd want a place for it. In fact, there are some tremendous poems. On Tuesday, I did a reading at Kelly Writers House at Penn, at which I made sure to read a couple. One was Glen Mazis' superb poem September Eleventh of a New Millennium, which ends this way:
Like dominoes, they are trying
to make us topple, too, into our nightmare
of an eye for an eye. We will fall headlong,
being pushed so, for there is no other way but
down, yet, it can be into the arms of others
where we open our eyes to their bright glance.
In Fliers, Margaret A. Robinson beholds a group of photos of missing persons and has this chilling realization:
The faces in the pictures don't know
what we know. They're smiling.
And in The End of the World (For Jim Marinell), Daniel Maguire meditates on the beginnings and endings brought on by Sept. 11:
the world jumps
clings to ledges
the loud world, big
bang of every universe
the world quiet
listens for breathing
broken-winged, a small
white room, where waiting ends
the world ends every day
begins
The crowd at Writers House loved these moments. And so do I. There are many others. And the thing just keeps growing.
John Timpane's e-mail address is jtimpane@phillynews.com.