English professor delivers poetry to World Trade Center shrine

by Kate Daniels

On Nov. 10, I visited Ground Zero. I took with me a collection of poems and quotations from Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff members. Emerging from the subway at Park Place and walking around to Broadway, the devastation was immediately visible and the acrid smell of burnt buildings, some of them, two months later, still smoldering, formed an invisible cloud one walked through, breathing. Every now and then, a light, sweet smell -- as if of chocolate or sugar -- gusted up from the wreckage. Momentarily, this was a delight in the cold and the wind. But then one realized that this was the odor of the human remains, the blood and the bodies. Then, the horror that had seemed immediate enough over the radio airwaves or in the images from the New York Times achieved a new level of intensity and one hurried away from the bubble of sweetness.

Like many, when the events of Sept. 11 transpired, I was sure I would never visit the site. Despite the fact that I happily lived in New York for several years during my 20s, the scale of the horror was so terrifying that I felt it would be impossible to visit the site while the recovery effort was still in progress. It would be like visiting a mass grave, I said to myself, gruesome and morbid. Despite those feelings, I found myself drawn to the site when I realized I would be in the city for a few days early in November. Somehow, faced with the possibility of witnessing, of paying my respects, it seemed more gruesome not to go. It seemed wrong. And so I went.

On the sidewalk in front of St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway, I found a huge shrine of posters, flowers, candles and photographs from around the world. In my hand, was a laminated sheaf of messages from Vanderbilt: "Poems and Ruminations on the events of Sept. 11. To the victims, their families and friends, all rescue personnel and the City of New York. From Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee." Almost immediately, I found a large banner from a daycare in Knoxville, covered with the tiny handprints of dozens of children who had sent a message of support even though they could not yet read or write. I decided to post Vanderbilt's contribution beside it -- in some sense thinking of the often ugly rivalry between Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee and how senseless such things had come to seem in the aftermath of Sept. 11. I hung our poems and messages from the wrought iron fence and laid a spray of roses draped with black-and-gold ribbons beneath. Almost immediately, a woman approached, introducing herself as a Tennessean, from Oak Ridge. She knelt down before our poems and began to read them.

Because I am a poet, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to take a poem to one of the many shrines that have spontaneously emerged on the fences and sidewalks forming the perimeter of Ground Zero. As the time neared, however, the gesture seemed unnecessarily solipsistic, too lonely. And so I decided to ask my students and some of my colleagues to participate. A few days before I left, I sent out a call for poems -- original or written by others -- or any other kind of message people felt moved to contribute. A variety of materials ended up in the packet.

Visiting assistant professor of English and fiction writer Leah Stewart sent a quotation from James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues: "For, while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." Victor Judge, from the Divinity School and the editor of The Spire, contributed a brief quotation from Isak Dinesen: "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story." -- a statement that seemed so apt I placed it first in the packet. University Chaplain Gay Welch contributed a poem by Wendell Berry, a piece that ends with these calm and prayerful words: "and we pray, not/for new earth or heaven, but to be/quiet in heart and in eye/clear. What we need is here." In a lyric whose refrain line echoes Berry's poem, Professor of English Mark Jarman wrote, "This is the real world."

Students sent poems they had written on the catastrophe itself, or other poems written afterwards that had clearly been influenced in various ways by the overwhelming imagery of the event. Sophomore James Neisen, in a poem inspired by Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," was surely influenced by the imagery of death that consumed the entire world after Sept. 11 when he wrote this: "Masses of riotous flesh with tender faces./And Death everywhere in it." And his poem's violent resolution bespeaks the painful empathy we have all experienced, witnessing the extraordinary dimensions of the carnage. Perhaps it also echoes the stoical resolve Americans have shown in retrieving the victims, mourning appropriately and then, pragmatically, getting on with life.

I thought that I was the man on the harp

Being crucified by what I could not say,

Being tortured by the obligations of music,

And love and death, too.

Now I just admire the humanity,

The kindness shown to this filth.

How can we love in the world shown here?

By stabbing ourselves to the table,

By closing our eyes and letting

The tarnished background take care of itself.

It has been particularly rewarding this semester to teach in the arts and humanities. Offering students the opportunity to help construct a bridge between the worlds of feeling and fact, to help them navigate the murky, chaotic and unconscious terrain of the interior self has certainly never been more important during the 20 years of my teaching career. To observe my students this semester -- traumatized like all of us but without the resources that those of us who are older possess -- struggling to find the language that will release them from their prisons of inchoate subjectivity and anchor them in a reality that can be tested has been a profound privilege. I have been astonished at the poems some of my students have written themselves, as well as amazed at the ways in which Sept. 11 has brought a new level of maturity and seriousness to their literary studies. In my literature class this semester, lines of Emily Dickinson's that had seemed hopelessly convoluted and obscure only days before suddenly achieved a new clarity. Reading "Because I could not stop for death/it kindly stopped for me" -- a poem that operates around a central metaphor of conveyance, students easily connected it to the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. Their reading of the poem was animated and intensified by their sympathetic identification with all the victims who left home innocently the morning of Sept. 11 only to discover, shortly before 9 a.m., that Death was approaching in his "carriage," as Dickinson calls it. Suddenly, the whole idea of metaphor was apprehensible in a way it had not been before Sept. 11.

While most of the poets I know have not yet been able to write directly about the events of Sept. 11 -- "There are no words," former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove said on National Public Radio shortly after the catastrophe -- some of our students have been able to do so. I think I will close with two of these poems, which were part of the packet I left at Ground Zero. The transformative power of poetry is not, of course, relegated to the poet who creates the poem. It extends to all those who read it, as well. My hope in taking these poems to Ground Zero as a message of support from Vanderbilt University was that they would be read by others who have made or will make that pilgrimage. It is hard to imagine anyone reading either of these poems without being powerfully affected and without finding themselves better able to cope, imaginatively, with the disaster of Sept. 11. Such is the power of poetry ...

Ascent

by Darian Duckworth

In my room hangs a poster of Manhattan Bridge,

its bolts and wires alongside the city.

I run my finger along white sky, along towers

puncturing dusk like arrows tense to fly.

I sense the wall's jagged edges,

a third dimension of the buildings.

Eyes closed, I tap the portrait.

Then silence.

Eighty stories high

a man in a navy suit

stands on a window sill.

He utters not a word,

steps off as if air

were just another brick,

and falls through dense clouds.

His dark figure changes little:

two fists cutting the wind,

a forehead white and exposed,

and his tie a flag,

the last of him

to hit the ground.

I open my eyes to the bridge

and follow the path of his body

at the horizon,

the twentieth floor,

the bridge's end.

I touch nothing coarse

but trace

above bridges

and skyscrapers

a smooth outline

of thick smoke

rising

to a gray dawn.

Brushing My Teeth
at 2 a.m. after Sept. 11

by Jennifer Casale

I stand there -- foam gathering

at the corners of my mouth

one hand forming small circles,

the other resting on the white sink.

Silent -- we are silent, eyes down

as if these sinks were our altars.

The girl next to me, washing her hands --

she is wearing red slippers and two

sinks down, someone is washing

her face. We are all silent --

sleepless -- standing there

in front of cold porcelain --

eyes avoiding mirrors,

other eyes, afraid of breaking

this numb inattention with the self

awareness that we are all walking vigils.

Kate Daniels is an associate professor of English and is the author of Four Testimonies: Poems, published in 1998.

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