Robert
McNamara, 11/30/02
In the days after September 11, an old friend sent me back to reread Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” He had been a few blocks from the World Trade Center that morning, had seen the second plane hit the tower, and later, from amid a crowd of refugees crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, watched the towers collapse. Auden’s poem mattered to him then because it did something so difficult: it spoke back to the unspeakable.
What struck me was Auden’s unflinchingness, engaged and ironic, and committed – but not to any orthodoxy, not to any ready answers for how to make a terrible world a better place. Like my friend, I found this compelling in a time when premature certainties abounded, when the ideologies of left and right were brandished like charms against recalcitrant experience.
Sometime in the next few weeks I began writing my poem. I decided to take Auden’s poem as defining a genre with its own topoi and formal conventions. Working within those, I would try to be unflinching as I thought and felt my way toward an articulate response to the terrible events. The poem became both a response and an homage to Auden’s poem.
The poem had its first airing at a poetry group I belong to, one that’s less a group of poets than of poetry lovers. Some of us bring our own poems, others work by writers we have recently discovered. I read the poem to them twice (we listen to poems, we don’t follow text), and then a conversation began that went on for maybe half an hour. While I no longer remember exactly what was said, I do remember well the pleasure and gratitude I felt for the generosity with which my friends entered the poem or let it enter them. If the poem was a gift, so too was their reception of it, though riven by pain and fear, dread and loss. Art’s answer was in making, not an anodyne or analgesic, but a place whose meanings remained open to contest and discussion.
A month or so later, in announcing the winner of an annual prize, a distinguished poet began by gratuitously noting the popularity of Auden’s poem, which she then dismissed, finding its “pacifying sonorities . . . strangely out of tune.” Her juxtaposition of the two observations – the popular response and the strange out-of-tuneness – seemed telling. It invited a question: was it something about the poem that was out-of-tune, or something about the poetics it had been read through, one that would erase all marks of self and voice, of narrative and lyricism, the rich complexities of which had recommended Auden’s poem to so many?
I find no “pacifying sonorities” in Auden’s poem, and hope there are none in mine. But I will be pleased if my poem gives pleasure as well as voice to a way of thinking in the face of the unspeakable.