826 The American Century: Literature since 1945Pieces” (2001). “Come back, Camerado, wind your way back to Ground Zero where
you belong.” “I am at once myself & Whitman we two ghosts,” Bill Kushner (1945–)
claims in “In the Hairy Arms of Whitman” (2001), as he imagines the two of them
together grieving for “so many martyrs,” raging at “the fragments flying papers ash
flesh” and “calling all the hatemongers Stand back Stand back.” Even when Whitman
is not called on for poetic assistance, the sense of his presence is still there in the
plainspeaking, pedagogical thrust of these poems. So, in “Speak Out” (2003),
Lawrence Ferlinghetti does just that, warning his audience that “the attack on the
Twin Towers” is in danger of being turned into “the Third World War / The war with
the Third World.” “Now is the time for you to speak / ,” he declares, “Before they
come for you.” “This is a rant,” Terry Tempest Williams unashamedly admits at the
beginning of “(Statement) Portrait of George W. Bush as a Cowboy, or: America’s
Foreign Policy of Peace” (2003). She then embarks on a diatribe against “the romance
of the American cowboy” in general and what she calls “the cowboy president” in
particular, while warning her fellow Americans that “the ‘war on terror’ is first being
waged at home” against them. The “rant” is followed by two short poems, “Freedom
of Speech” (2003) and “Freedom from Speech” (2003), which offer a further warning:
“The erosion of voice is the build-up of the war.” But it is almost as if Williams feels
compelled by the crisis to write a kind of anti-poetry here, since that is what the age
demands: to write the facts down in a clear, bold hand. Perhaps the suspicion, the
sense is that after 9/11 conventional poems can no longer be written; the poet needs
to speak out, or even to rant, in order to stand a chance of being heard, because
austere times necessitate a new verbal austerity.
That returns us to the bass note sounded in so many – perhaps most – post-9/11
poems: the question of how to write in a time of acute crisis. Related to that is the
suspicion, not just about the tools of the trade, the potentially “helpless” nature of
words – their use or otherwise in saying the unsayable – but about voice and
audience. “We’re as silent as sparrows in the little bushes,” Robert Bly complains in
“Call and Answer” (2003). “What’s the sense / of being an adult and having no voice?
Cry out!” The cry is muted in this poem, however, and the reason is clear: the poet
may want to “cry out” or “speak out” but is often deeply uncertain about what form
this crying or speaking out should assume – and, for that matter, about whether or
not she or he will be heard. “Everywhere people are weeping and afraid, / ” Peter
Coyote (1949–) writes in “Flags” (2001), “waving flags, plotting check and mate.” In
a climate of confusion, with the trauma of terrorism fueling a widespread desire for
revenge, some poets appear to feel challenged, not just by the problem of how to
imagine disaster, but by the possibility that what they say might be ignored or even
suppressed. “I bought a flag and / blended in with / the other sheep,” Adrian C. Louis
(1955–) confesses at the end of a poem, ironically titled “Liberty Street” (2001), that
chronicles his futile attempts to stand apart from “our shivering heartland” and a
climate of fear. “Write as if you lived in an occupied country” is the injunction from
Edwin Rolfe (1909–1954) that Eleanor Wilner (1937–) uses as the epigraph to her
poem “Found in the Free Library” (2003). Wilner then develops the conceit that the
poem is a fragment, a document discovered in the library of its title, describing howGGray_c05.indd 826ray_c 05 .indd 826 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM