"Poetry in a Time of Crisis"
Juliana Spahr
Earlier version appeared in Poetry Project Newsletter 189 (2002), 6-8. It was originally written for the "Poetry in a Time of Crisis" panel at the 2001 MLA.

Shortly after I finished Everybody's Autonomy, my critical book, I got to thinking about how many years it had taken me to write. Then I started thinking about all the things that had happened in those years. Some of these things were personal, the death of my father for instance. But I also realized I could chart my progress through this book through various U.S. military actions. I began the book during the Gulf War because I remember watching the coverage to avoid beginning writing. I finished rewriting it while we were bombing Belgrade. When I realized this, I felt a momentary hope that I had been writing during unique times, that I was writing in a time of crisis. But as I thought it over, I realized I had done no writing at any point in my career when the U.S. was not bombing someone. I wrote this paper, for instance, during the bombing of Afghanistan and the continued bombing of Iraq. Even my sometimes home was being bombed: as I wrote this as the U.S. military was practicing their bombing skills on the Makua valley on the North Shore of Oahu. I could go on. I'm living in New York City this year. Some where around 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center while I watched from a street corner in Brooklyn. But that is nothing. Some 72,000 have died from AIDS in New York City since 1981. There is, thus, constantly crisis. We cannot say that unique, or interesting, times arrived on September 11.

There is always crisis. There is always poetry. Genre essentialism makes me nervous, but I think it is safe to say poetry is unusually international-everybody does it. I think poetry is special in that no nation or culture can claim to have invented poetry. Thus it can be anyone's art. But poetry, of all the genres and media, seems to have a special relationship to the politics of crisis. The genre of poetry is especially useful in times of crisis because of its flexibility, the broadness of its definition. A poem can be short or long. It can rhyme or not. Its meter can be strict or loose or non existent. Poetry has rules…or not. That is its attraction. Because it can take all these different forms it make rooms for very different emotions. Poetry can both comfort and confront. It can unite. It can divide. I always cringe a little when people make sweeping optimistic statements about poetry being all about love or poetry being all about countering the oblivion of darkness or poetry being the genre to comfort. Of course it does all these wonderful things; but it does a lot of other things as well. It has many different roles. And yet a special role in times of crisis.

There's no doubt about poetry's special role in times of crisis in other parts of the world. To use an extreme example, Osama bin Laden thought it important enough to use his son's wedding as an opportunity to recite a poem about the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. And we've all seen the videotapes in which he resorts to poetry as a tool of explication when talking with the Shaykh. A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that television was once again being broadcast in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Among some of the more popular shows: recitations of new Afghan poetry. The Times tells us that this frequently war-torn nation is, not surprisingly, a nation of poets. Similarly, poetry has always played an important role in places dealing with the continuing crisis of colonialism. In the last decade in Hawai'i, for instance, there have been two very public discussions of poetry that have ended up being front-page stories in the newspapers. The first was over a Haunani Kay Trask poem called "White Racist Woman" and a cartoon in a student newspaper that mocked both poem and poet. The other was a controversy over issues of race in Lois Ann Yamanaka's poem "Kala Gave Me Anykine Advice Especially About Filipinos When I Moved to Pahala."

We live in peculiar times. I wonder if there was any moment in recent, pre-9/11 history when so many poets in this country (and in parts of Europe) found it possible to deny, downplay or circumscribe poetry's relationship to crisis and politics. Poetry got a lot of public attention after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon…or more than it usually does. It began with Auden's strangely relevant "September 1, 1939" and took off from there. The mainstream press seemed intent on defining poetry's somewhat limited social role for us. Publishers Weekly, in an article titled "Solace and Steady Sales," let us know that "people turn to poetry in times of crisis." For comfort, of course. Mary Karr announced in the New York Times that "The events of Sept. 11 nailed home many of my basic convictions, including the notion that lyric poetry dispenses more relief-if not actual salvation-during catastrophic times than perhaps any art form."

Then there's Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who caused a stir with his statement, quoted in USA Today, that "A poem about mushrooms or about a walk with the dog is a more eloquent response to Sept. 11 than a poem that announces that wholesale murder is a bad thing." I'm not interested in joining in on the complaints about Collins' work: if there's anything I want in a Poet Laureate, it's whimsy. But as a PR spokesperson for poetry, I find him somewhat problematic. I am troubled, for instance, by the word "eloquent." Do we want our responses to September 11 to be eloquent above all else? Should we exclude out of hand the awkward, the shrill, the fragmented, the raw, the unpolished? And Collins continues, as if there were no tradition-in this country or elsewhere-of poetries of anger or resistance, "All poetry stands in opposition to [this calamity]. Pick a poem, any poem, from an anthology and you will see that it is speaking for life and therefore against the taking of it." He might be right about picking up most mainstream anthologies and finding poetry that is speaking for life, but this might tell us more about our anthologies than about our poetry.

But what I really want to question today is Collins' claim that "poetry by its nature moves us inward, not outward to the public and collective."

The obvious way to do that is to talk about poetry that is attentive to collective possibilities. So, I'm going to talk about a reading Alan Davies gave in early October at a small café in Brooklyn, New York. Davies is a contemporary poet who's been writing and publishing since the 1970s. He is a Buddhist. I was one of about 15 people at his reading.

Davies divided his reading into three parts. He first read a long poem titled "Pain." Next, he read a Buddhist tract by Dogen, a 12th-century Zen master. Finally, he returned to "Pain," reading the same poem a second time. Drew Garner accompanied him on percussion. In its first rendition, the lines of "Pain" were interspersed with chunks of percussion and silence, making it seem spread out and slow. The second time, Davies read the poem straight, with no interruptions; it was faster and angrier. The poem opens like this:

These words
Are the only words

This time
Is the only time

This love
Is the only love

These victims
Are the only victims

These friends
Are the only friends

This day
Is the only day

This town
Is the only town

"Pain" more or less maintains this form throughout it's 122 stanzas. There are small variations, such as the last stanza (which is a repeat of an earlier stanza): "But no one is absent/No one is absent anymore."

In one sense, this poem proves Collins right. It is a trance-inducing chant that speaks from the position of the individual and mirrors the inward motion of thought. A possible reading of it is as an exploration of what happens to the mind in shock: one's whole world becomes focused, crucial and particular. On Sept. 11, I stood on a Brooklyn street corner and watched the first tower collapse. I was part of a crowd. We had gathered to investigate the loud sounds we had heard outside, or because we had been alerted by the news or by friends who had called on the phone. When the tower sank in a cloud of dust we all screamed or gasped…and then we scattered back to our homes. I heard people around me saying things like "I'm getting out of here" and "this is too fucking weird." And, when things got weird, the public turned private.

The word "only" in Davies's poem is large and important: this is the only thing that matters right now. At the same time, it's small and insignificant. As the poem progresses he inserts words like "pizza," "soda," desk," and "pets" into the form and these things are "only" mundane objects that do not matter in the big picture.

As I listened, I kept wishing that the nouns in each stanza were plural. For instance, the line "This country/Is the only country" bothered me because it seemed to echo so much of our sense of American exceptionalism. I worried that it overlooked our bombing of other countries. I worried that it ignored foreign policy decisions that have encouraged a dangerous sense of "only" in others…the first step in making enemies.

However, in my discussions with other poets who had attended the event, I came to realize that Davies's reading allowed us both to "inhabit" a realm of private, personal pain and to critique its solipsism. It was, as Gary Sullivan pointed out to me, Dogen's Buddhist tract that enabled this second reading-not simply because it inserted a third religion into the dichotomous, us/them or muslim/christian framework the media had been fostering, but because Dogen's piece revolved around themes of vision, blindness, distortion, and perception.

Davies's performance thus rewrote the "only." He complicated the inward movement of pain without dismissing or devaluing it. He made explicit what every New Yorker already knew: that pain is also communal. It is something we share, not only with our immediate neighbors, but with the world. An insight built into Buddhism, perhaps, but one we all need to understand in times like these.

The final stanza, "But no one is absent/No one is absent anymore," resonates outward, embodying the collective sensibility that Collins wants to overlook. Davies's language invites compassion as it calls attention to selfishness: the selfishness of terrorism and the selfishness of bloody retaliation. No pain is the only pain. No victims are the only victims. This stanza tells us that no relationship is hermetically sealed; that we cannot separate ourselves from the others who lurk at the imposed borders of the national or the personal. Pain forms political, public communities in which no one is absent, not even the dead. It challenges our sense of who we are…and of who we are with others.

When USA Today asked recent poet laureates "to select a piece of their work that they believe has a message for these difficult times," none chose poems about collective, connective necessities. Instead, they chose the inward turn, mainly poems about their own encounters with death. There's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with the poems themselves; they are good poems. However, I found them less useful than a poem like "Pain." The poet laureates ask me to experience an inward, personal mourning, rather than an emotion that connects me to other people. This doesn't help me. It is comfort that cannot reach out, comfort without possibilities.

All I know with any certainty about recent events is that planes slamming into buildings and bombs falling on villages have a lot to do with groups of people on different "sides" who have trouble thinking about the people who aren't on theirs. And I cannot help but think of Antigone. The tragedy of that play revolves around two people caught up in their own individualistic mourning. Neither Antigone nor Creon questions the "only."

In this time of crisis, as in others, it is philosophies of connection that help me think things through. In this time of crisis, as in others, I need models of intimacy that are full of acquaintance and publics; that are declarations of collective culture and connective agency. And I need those models to also leave room for individuals, to respect their multiple "onlys." Currently, cultures once kept geographically separate are meeting at unprecedented rates. This obviously points to a need for complex models of connection that recognize not only points of contact and mixing, but also relational difficulties, cultural and linguistic difference, so that people may interrelate and develop as individuals.

Through it's use of the word "only," Davies's poem has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which "no one is absent anymore." Since I heard it, I have been trying think about autonomy without selfishness, autonomy that belongs to everyone. That is how I see his "only"-as a collective singular.

Davies's poem is not the answer. It will not save us and Davies would never claim it could. There is never enough. I am simply talking about a local poetry of sorts-local to New York City, local perhaps to the language movement-and what it says to me about an international issue. The answer, if there is one, would include different poems from all "sides." But this particular poem stimulated my thinking. It caught my attention for the way it addresses communities and individuals in a time of great difficulty, when negotiating such issues is our most important task. It caught my attention because it was about pain, not anger, not mourning.

Instead of an argument about Davies's works, please hear this as an argument about how writing and reading matters, not just for it's comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking. I want more poetries of connection in the future. More poems dealing with the complex questions of how to talk to one another. More poems that acknowledge how difficult that is. More poems that look outward.

Bibbins, Mark. "Solace and Sales in Poetry." Publishers Weekly 248 (47), November 19, 2001, 29.
Davies, Alan. Pain. New York: Other Publications, 2001.
Karr, Mary. "WRITERS ON WRITING; Negotiating the Darkness, Fortified by Poets' Strength." The New York Times. January 14, 2002. E1.
"Poetry and Tragedy." USA Today. September 24, 2001.
Solomon, Andrew. "Arts Awaken After the Taliban." The New York Times. March 10, 2002.

This paper indebted to discussion with Alan Davies, Ben Friedlander, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Carol Mirakove, Gary Sullivan, Mark Wallace, and Charles Weigl. But don't blame them for any errors.