A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 819

are told, the other replied, “with a Spanish tongue: / I will teach you. Music is all we

have.” In this magical realist moment,the different worlds invaded by terrorism and

counterterrorism converge, their point of convergence being not only “smoke,” the

fog of war, but also “music” and “dance,” the liberating energies of rhythm, peace,

and poetry. “Alabanza” is a poem that enacts as well as announces its belief in a

hybrid space as the only one in which the location of cultures can properly occur; it

performs and also praises an act of cultural encounter. To that extent, it is as much

about the fundamental possibilities of community as it is about the fierce actualities

of crisis. Not only that, by inserting the terrorist attacks in a “chant of nations,” it

makes that attack and its aftermath, if not fully understandable, then at least

susceptible to understanding. It pieces the fragments of traumatic events together

into a meaningful story and, in doing so, offers one answer to the question of just

what form a post-9/11 poetry might assume.

On one level, “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” is a variation on the elegy; and a

commemorative approach is one that has been favored by many poets choosing to

write in response to 9/11. So, in “September 8, 2001” (2001), Michael Atkinson

(1962–) talks of those killed at the World Trade Center as “treasure buried / in the

underworld beneath a new mountain”; in “Our New York Room in the 1930s

Remembered in September 2001” (2001), Willis Barnstone (1927–) pays tribute to

those “thousands gone” both before, during, and after 9/11; and in “Elegy for the

Victims and Survivors, World Trade Towers, N.Y., 2001,” Mark Irwin (1953–) honors

both those who were killed and those left behind, uniting them in one community,

a “Stadium of sorrow.” In “Umeja: Each One of Us Counts” (2003), Rita Dove

similarly recalls and honors the dead, whatever their origins, allegiances, or

the manner of their dying. “One went the way of water / ,” the poem begins, “one

crumpled under stone.” It then goes on to chronicle the multiple forms that crisis

and death can assume and to insist, above all, that the dead should not be forgotten.

“Remember us” is the refrain of the poem, and the project of remembering is at its

heart. This is a memorial to all those who have fallen and continue to fall in the

ongoing war between terrorist and counterterrorist, “those absent ones” as they are

called here, “unknown and unnamed.” “Umeja” does not name the dead, but it does

permit them to be counted and known. In “The Olive Wood Fire” (2002), by

contrast, Galway Kinnell begins by writing of the named and particular: his son

Fergus, remembered as Kinnell “would carry him from his crib” to a “fire of

thousand-year-old olive wood.” In dream or reverie, however, the poem then

gravitates toward something more mysteriously anonymous. “Half-asleep” by the

fire once, with his son in his arms, the poet tells us that he thought he heard a

scream: perhaps “a flier crying out in horror / as he dropped fire” or “a child thus set

aflame.” So the poem moves, subtly but inexorably, from the peace of home and

hearthside to the trauma of war, from a sleeping child to a dying one, and from the

fire that nourishes to the fire that annihilates. This movement from domesticity to

dread, and from intimacy to horror, is one that characterizes a number of poems

that try to address September 11, 2001 and its aftermath: among them, “Pittsburgh,

9/10/01, 7.30 p.m.” (2001) by Melissa Altenderfer (1972–), “Making Love After

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