9/11
I wrote three little poems shortly after 9/11 and posted them to smallpressers@yahoogroups.com. I was responding to posts by an American who felt that we shouldn’t be talking about or writing about anything else, that this single event should recontextualize everything. Of course I understood (or could only attempt to imagine) people’s horror, grief, and trauma of both the many individuals and their families who suffered and the people of NYC and the US. However, I also responded to the notion that America’s issues necessarily should define the paradigm for the rest of us. We are free to choose our paradigms. Indeed, I think we must insist on it. That doesn’t preclude compassion and understanding for others.
Where is the centre (or center) of the world? It is where each of us is standing.
As far as I understand it, the American writer was so offended by my poems (as well as posts by some others) that he left the list.
Here are the poems:
the twin towers fall
I still cannot find my sock
*
the trade center crumbles
people who were already dead
or will be dead
are still dead
*
what comes after 9/11
9/12
*
The meaning of the second poem has shifted as time as passed.
Comments
But the American who didn't, and who left the list, wasn't an American. He was a Canadian who was living in New York at the time of The Slam (as Eileen Myles tried to rename 9/11). He plucked glass shards out of his forehead. He sort of became American, because he subscribed to the theory that the world had changed. The world only changed later, when the American regime refused to even question how the attack could have resulted from their own actions and started killing tens of thousands of brown-skinned earthlings.
Stu