The American Century: Literature since 1945 827a people moved from fear to fighting. “And we were made afraid,” the poem begins,
before going on to chart how “we” descended into the destructive cycle of “war, and
war, and war.” “Found in a Free Library” does not so much end as stop short, with
the bleak statement “(but here the document is torn).” The implication is clear.
Crisis generates fear which generates, not just war, but also what Williams terms “the
erosion of voice,” with truth and the speaking of it as the first casualties of conflict.
Which is to say that there is an undercurrent of paranoia running through some
post-9/11 poetry, the suspicion that “they” are out to suppress individual vision and
voice. “Coming man they’re right behind you / ,” Ross Martin (1980–) warns in his
small hymn to paranoia titled “This Message Will Self-Destruct in Sixty Seconds”
(2002), “they are right on your freakin’ tail. / Go.” Just who “they” are varies from
poem to poem. But one figure or group recurs: not the terrorists so much as the
counterterrorists, “The House of Bush” (2001) as Carol Muske-Dukes (1945–) calls
it in the poem of that title. Sometimes, the “frauds in office” as W. S. Merwin terms
them in “Ogres” (2003) are addressed directly. So, in “Complaint and Position
(2002), Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) uses an old American tradition of
plainspeaking to the powerful to tell the president that “we, the people” and
“especially the poets” demand that he “desist” from war, “otherwise the evil you
have / loosed will destroy everything.” And in “In Memoriam” (2002), Philip Whalen
derides “DEAR MR. PRESIDENT” as someone who knows nothing about the things
that matter most, now more than ever, “LOVE AND POETRY.” At other times, those
who seem to be dictating the direction of events and the terms of the culture after
9/11 are not directly addressed but directly attacked. In “Who Cares?” (2001) by
Ruth Stone, they are described as “aliens.” In “Poem of War” (2003) by Jim Harrison,
their leader is called “the theocratic cowboy.” And in the nightmare vision of
“Heaven as Anus” (2003) by Maxine Kumin, painful experiments on helpless
animals performed by “the Defense Department” become an image, or more
accurately an illustration, of the obscenity of power. In poems like these, there is no
room for subtlety or indirection; words are being used as weapons, perhaps the only
ones available to the powerless. “I don’t know your exalted language / of power,”
Carruth tells the president in “Complaint and Petition.” What he does know and has
instead is what Robert Pinsky claims for himself in “Statement of Conscience”
(2002), “an ‘American voice’ in the singular.”
And that, surely, is what the best of the post-9/11 poems have, whether they are
satirical or lyrical, declamatory or surreal, elegiac or apocalyptic. The poet tries to
take the measure of crisis, not by explaining its origins or examining its consequences,
but by registering one individual experience of it. “What can we do / but offer what
we have?” asks Katha Pollitt (1949–) in “Trying to Write a Poem Against War” (2003):
which, whatever their focus or persuasion, is what the finest of these poems do. They
seize on what Gregory Orr (1947–), in “Refusing” (2002), calls “The chance to be
part of / the poet’s chorus” and insert their story in the history of the moment. In a
poem like “The School Among the Ruins” (2001) by Adrienne Rich, that story is a
densely layered one. “Beirut, Baghdad, Sarajevo, Bethlehem, Kabul. Not of course
here,” the epigraph to the poem reads. Rich then weaves an intricate verbal tapestryGGray_c05.indd 827ray_c 05 .indd 827 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM