Strong is Your Hold

"Soon after 9/11, no more than a year, I heard Kinnell read this poem and it was an experience I will not forget. “When the Towers Fell” really demonstrates what poetry can do that other art forms can’t – provide catharsis by finding the right words to describe the otherwise unspeakable. Making art of tragedy is tricky. How do you do it? Is it unseemly? In what I have read of the literature connected to 9/11, I’ve observed that passages describing the day just don’t work for me. “When the Towers Fell” is as powerful a record of what happened as anything I’ve read. As I heard him read his poem I was struck by the idea that poetry was truer to the experience of 9/11 than non-fiction. The disjuncture. In “When the Towers Fell”, the dissonance and unexpected juxtapositions of images and details allows us to see more clearly and feel more deeply what occurred on September 11. To quote the poem, the air “too foul to take in but we take it in”. Even though this is the only poem that is explicitly about the events of 9/11, there are echoes throughout the whole collection. Many of the poems are about mortality and mourning more broadly. The question of how we live on interested me deeply. We all pay so much attention to the memorial. But, in life, how are the lost remembered? How do we deal with death when it seems premature or unexpected? These are questions I explored through my reporting and my characters’ plight."