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

Rating:
Summary: The world outside their navels comes a'knocking...
Review: 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.