A History of American Literature

828 The American Century: Literature since 1945

around the image announced in the title, using the compulsions of memory to

describe a sanctuary: the school as a redemptive site of work, routine, and community,

a refuge from a landscape of chaos where “nightglare / misconstrues the day,” “rooms

from the upper city / tumble cratering lower streets” and “fear vacuums” “the whole

town.” In other post-9/11 poems, the story is a simple one told plainly. So, in

“The Dispute” (2002), Alice Ostriker subverts the whole notion of either terrorists

or counterterrorists winning; only those who stand apart from war, she suggests, will

really “win.” And in “How to Write a Poem After September 11th” (2001), Nikki

Moustaki (1967–) advises poets simple to stick to the facts. “Say: we hated them then

we loved them then they were gone / ,” she advises, “Say: we miss them. Say: there’s a

gap.” Whatever the terms of their engagement with crisis, though, these poems do

engage with it; they offer a verbal equivalent of a personal encounter with trauma.

Or rather, a series of equivalents, since there is no single formula at work here.

Poets have responded to the problem of how to write poems after 9/11 by

reformulating that problem in the singular. And they have begun to resolve it in

terms that are fundamental to the traditions of American poetry: by acknowledging

the human presence at the heart of the historical experience and announcing that

presence in a single, separate voice.

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