The poets from this week made me realize how, in many respects (whether poets accept this or not), we (poets) are historians. We look at the vast world around us (or the small neighborhood we live in) and we select the things we need/want to share for the purpose of a particular poem. There is so much information available to us and we can, if we want, write about that information in any form we want. Poets typically select poems as their medium. In these poems, we can make war seem like a heroic adventure. We can truthfully display a culture or exaggerate their existence on this planet (then we give it a cute name like hyperbole). My point is that this issue of placement in history and culture is important and can often be the element in the poetry that readers most connect to.
For instance, in the poem titled September 11, 2001 by Samuel Hazo, I am captured by the title alone. I know this date by heart and I remember what it felt like to sit in front of the television for hours not knowing what was really happening and not knowing if people I knew were in the towers or on the plane. When he says, “The natural and scheduled worlds keep happening” I am there. I am reminded that I was getting dressed for work when it happened. That I was still in my robe – that I still had my scarf on my head and that my boyfriend (now husband) didn’t believe me when I yelled to him in the shower, “a plane just crashed into the world trade center” and he responded, “what? did you say near or into?” I don’t remember much conversation after that.
Hazo uses powerful language to describe a horrific event without mocking it or degrading it. In line 19 he writes, “engulfing us like dustfall / from a building in collapse / The day / turns dark as an eclipse.” No matter where you were in the world when this happened, you will surely agree that your life was engulfed by this event and that the world metaphorically turned dark.
In the second movement of this poem, he takes us deeper into the bowels of the moment. He describes a scene where people “downfloated from the hundredth floor” and tells us that “there where others—plunging, / stepping off or diving in tandem / hand in hand, as if the sea / or nets awaited them.
By the end of the poem, we are in day two when we all woke to realize that it did actually happen. It was not a collective nightmare. That last image of “snapping from aerials or poles, / the furious clamor of flags” sticks with me because I wonder whose flags he is referencing. I assume that because he is of Arab descent that he means those flags to be the ones Arabs may have been flying in recognition of their homeland, that they were suddenly afraid to display.
This poem makes me feel that immediate movement towards the edge. I feel an entire nation of people being pushed closer to the edge when I read this and at the same time, I feel a nation that historically has felt dominate, suddenly feeling subordinate. It’s powerful and moving and doesn’t pick sides and doesn’t try to accuse or blame or justify – it just reports with the “poet’s eye” and brings me back to a discussion we had in class about the inseparable nature of poetry and politics.
I’m sure there are many out there in the poetry critique world who found this poem offensive in some way, because the critical eye is guided by our personal politics and our background and our experiences in the world and our age and so many other factors. I’m not discrediting anyone’s opinion of this poem. I feel strongly that this piece touches on many of the elements we have discussed in class regarding poets of color – how history and poetry relate to one another, how we can identify the natural elements from a colonial/post-colonial perspective, the question of what is place, the placement of history and culture, dominance and subordination, and the center and the edge.
***I wanted to talk more about other pieces, but got carried away with this one. Maybe I will post separately about the powerful pieces from Suheir Hammad and one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye or the poem “Pig” by David Dominquez, that made me react out loud in a quiet but crowded café filled with reading customers. There were so many in this section that I want to discuss. Maybe I will.
peacelovelight
Kiala
Kiala,
ReplyDeleteYour interpretation of the final line about the flags is interesting. I assumed he was referencing the unfurling of American flags around the country. (I left NY for Connecticut the following and literally felt like I was submerged in a sea of red, white and blue. they held me up, but they also pulled me down.) But the language is ambiguous: "the furious clamor of flags." There is no distinction as to whether they are being brought out or brought down. I like the double meaning: certain flags are put away, certain flags are brought out. Hazo is so good with subtlety and emotional impact!
Jessica
I'm glad that you're taking the class with you when you read. I'm also taking so many of the poems with me out in the world. I would love to hear your feelings about the other poets/poems in class. Its always so hard to recall the details, the evidence of 9/11. Were we even in our own bodies when it all happened and if we weren't with everything that's happened did we make it back to ourselves/to justice/to freedom/to love?
ReplyDeleteso now we need to find how this kind of poem moves over time
ReplyDeleteis the perspective a lense through which we can look at other things in the world.
your observations are strong and resonate with history and with the writing
e
The line “The natural/and scheduled worlds keep happening/according to their rules....” got to me too. Didn’t we all question our daily routines when this happened? In the scheme of such an enormous event, how did the worlds keep happening? Shouldn’t all the rules have changed? I liked how you connect it to the conversation we had in class about pre-Columbian, colonial and post-colonial contexts and how Hazo’s line “[t]he day/turns dark as an eclipse” fits so well into these contexts. I also found it hard to read the poem because the imagery was so vivid. He captured the feeling I had at the time – as if my hometown were no longer there – when he says “[w]e head/for home as if to be assured/that home is where we left it.” I think you’ve expressed the role of the poet as historian well, and you’ve given me more to think about in terms of the readers’ obligation to not only read the poem as art but to consider how the events themselves are chronicled by the poet.
ReplyDeleteSheila
I believe Hazo is amazing to. His choice of words definately puts him over the top as a poet. I especially liked Just Words, I liked the lightness and happy thought given within the poem, which I see may be a speciality of his, encouraging thoughts and feelings exact of the poem read. I also liked how you stated this poem pushed you to an edge and not the poem having an edge, you gained a very strong emotion from reading this poem and that just shows how much a good writer and listener that you are...listening in my point of view to be more important than the writing....
ReplyDelete-Dorothy
I appreciated your disucssion of movement toward the edge. I see the effects of a rippling or repositioning or perhaps strengthening of a center and edge tension/dynamic. I think it is this urgency ,this tension, this grief, this normalness within perpetual war that makes Hazo's poem lasting. Even without the title or the one line referencing the towers there is a vulnerable honesty in lines like "we head / for home as if to be assured / that home is where we left it." This is a jarring image applicable to events or realities beyond just 9/11. It also has a particular root in countries where the reality is that you leave your physical place of residence unsure if it will be there hours later. And what that looming sense does to one's daily existence and psychy is a question beyond neat resolution or a singular incident. And in Hazo's insistance on locating ourselves in a brutal and unforgiving frame he is drawing a distinction not between countries or cultures but between those willing to see the humanness even amidst the blaze.
ReplyDelete