With the murder of Bin Laden by Navy Seals almost ten years after the Twin Towers fell, I am thoughtful about the impromptu tailgate parties that sprung up in televised cities right after Obama took full credit as Commander-in-Chief on May 1, 2011. As if the U.S. team had just won the World Cup. As if our national collective shame had been momentarily redeemed. No talk anywhere about the price tag on wars waged without end. Now Bin Laden’s body is “buried at sea.” Today we learn that photos of Bin Laden’s bullet-fractured skull will not be released. Yesterday in a Creative Writing workshop, a student of mine turned in a poem that questioned how easy it is to project the shadow of evil onto a figure like Bin Laden and to forget the complicity of our own elected officials in sanctioning mayhem; he was worried that his poem would not be well received by his peers, that his writing would betray him as a traitor. No one in my class, as it turned out, seemed to care one way or another, only thought that the poem was “cool” and might’ve had something to do with the shooting of Bin Laden, if indeed the poem had just been written the night before. What I am getting at here is that dizzying sense of things happening from moment to moment, commemorated and just as quickly forgotten via Facebook and T witter, far from that Wordsworthian sublime of “moments reflected in tranquility.” Ten years ago, people thought the great poems about 9-11 would have to be written years (if not decades) after the fact, certainly not in the wake of trauma. I begged to differ. I thought of Wilfred Owen on the front lines. Of Whitman. And Robert Desnos. And Mandelstam on his death march. Of what they had seen. Twenty years ago, the academic halls I sauntered through were all abuzz with notions of “poetic witness,” Milosz’s The Witness of Poetry and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting anthology in the foreground, on the frontlines of our poetic imaginations. Where are we now, and by we, I mean both American poets and American citizens? What holds our attention? American Idol? Beheadings on youtube? Gossip Girl? Torture manuals and bomb-making guides just a Google-search away? Ru Paul’s Drag Races? Where do we get the news? From poetry? From wiki leaks? I remember sitting at breakfast a few weeks back and not being able to simultaneously eat my instant oatmeal and devote my attention to the Afghanistan Kill-Team photo spread in Rolling Stone that my partner asked if I’d had the chance to see. The literal disgust I felt. All I know is this: I don’t want to read or write “sanitized” poems. I don’t want poems to participate in a kind of “mind-numbing” mystique. I don’t mind if poems fail in their ambitions to enlarge the soul or to bear witness to tragedy however ancient or contemporaneous. I’m not prescribing or proscribing. What I’m looking for is work that snaps me out of my own moral stupors and torpor, art as a wake-up calling to live a more authentic life, whatever that may be, or as Rilke said, whomever we may finally be.
TIMOTHY LIU is the author of For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence (2001); Say Goodnight (1998); Burnt Offerings (1995); and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, (Talisman House, 2000). His poems have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in such magazines and journals as American Letters & Commentary, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and Virginia Quarterly Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
TIMOTHY LIU is the author of For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence (2001); Say Goodnight (1998); Burnt Offerings (1995); and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, (Talisman House, 2000). His poems have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in such magazines and journals as American Letters & Commentary, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and Virginia Quarterly Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
