A week after 9/11, my husband and I took our baby daughter to Union Square in New York City, where round the clock vigils and protests were being conducted. As I circled the park, my daughter held against my chest, I read the posters telling of the “missing,” with names and phone numbers and physical descriptions of tattoos, scars and birthmarks, identifying features. Beside these posters were hundreds of poems, written by children, relatives, coworkers of the victims and people who wanted to express something about the event. For hours, crowds filed through the square reading these poems.
This was the moment where I began to rethink my relationship to poetry, to reading it, to writing it, to understanding what it could do in the world. Poetry, in this context, had a clear social purpose. The poems displayed on the fence and taped on trees were deeply personal and at the same time publicly displayed. And they were part of the city’s healing and recovery. Bravely, they told the truth.
As Muriel Rukeyser said, in The Life of Poetry, a book I would turn to throughout that fall and a book I still treasure, “Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world . . . . Art is practiced by the artist and audience.” All of us circling Union Square that day, that week, that year, all of us in the audience, all of us making art, were engaged in that knowing.
Rukeyser is a brilliant poet and, for me, a personal and poetic hero. Just two weeks ago, in my undergraduate poetry seminar on “Poetry and Disaster,” we discussed her long poem “The Book of the Dead.” The poem relates the story of those who died and suffered from silicosis in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia in 1929 due to Union Carbide mining practices. Poems look at the incident from multiple perspectives — the miners, the doctor who made the diagnosis, a mother who has lost all her sons. The sequence is a mixture of collage, documentary, and dramatic monologue. The poem is, above all, a call for social justice.
“The Book of the Dead” is an amazing poem, in part for its unflinching desire—its insistence—on telling the story beyond the “official story.” Certainly, there are many awful parallels between what happened in the mining disaster in Gauley Bridge and what happened on the Gulf Coast in the fall of 2005. As was the case in Gauley Bridge, many if not most who died in Katrina were African American. And there is an analogy to be made between the mishandling of the construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel by Union Carbide and the disastrous decisions—or, non-decisions—made by FEMA and the federal government in the weeks following the hurricane.
And what can we take from Rukeyser’s poems and carry forward into the future as we cope with other catastrophes? Her words that call us to action from “The Book of the Dead”: What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep Silent. Stand alone.”