TOP39-DES36
This Old Poem #39:
The Poets Laureate Special Edition #3:
Robert Pinsky’s 9/11
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 11/23/02
Sometimes 1 can only sit agog in helplessness when bad things happen. No, I’m not talking about the tragedies that occurred on 9/11/01, but the horrors that occur at the confluence of a bad poet & a trite theme. Such it is with the titular poet & poem. Robert Pinsky is a bad poet who rose through the Academic mills. He, however, makes claims for being a ‘working class poet’. This dubious posit is belied by a quick scan of his online resume:
Robert Pinsky was born in Long
Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. He is the author of six books of poetry: Jersey
Rain (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); The Figured Wheel: New and
Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry
Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History
of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness
and Happiness (1975). In 1999 he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The
Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz (W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc.). He has also published four books of criticism, including The
Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), which was a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988)
and The Situation of Poetry (1977); two books of translation: The
Inferno of Dante (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate
Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); and a
computerized novel, Mindwheel (1985). His honors include an American
Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal
prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation
fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and in 1997
was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress. He lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts.
Yes, working
class folk are often tempted to essay the 3,237th translation of The Inferno.
But it was not until the late 1990s that RP achieved a Q rating outside of
poetry- &, no, it was not his 1997-2000 tenure as American Poet Laureate,
nor his obligatory attempts to ‘bring poetry to the masses’, etc. No, it was
recurring appearances reading his doggerel on PBS’s Newshour that gave
RP visibility.
He attempted
to live out the classic PL function as ‘Occasional Poet’- except his work
was so banal the lowercase equivalent of that sobriquet was more apt. But, the
worst of all was the dreadful 9/11, which was written not long after the
attacks, & given immense media play after its appearance on PBS. I regret
that such worthless tripe is what the mass public thinks of as what passes for
poetry today, when there are poets who have poems that would have been far
better in serving ‘the moment’. Then, again, prosaic, clichéd, unmusicked
garbage IS emblemic of poetry as it is today, so let’s take
apart this crap:
9/11
We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched
The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us
But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings--who keep so few,
More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May" or "Fourth of July."
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes
Tell the interrogator their commanding officer's name
Is Colonel Donald Duck--he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it's nearly
Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.
Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor
Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve
When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?--Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,
The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed
The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans--as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together
A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?--
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities
And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle's head
From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty--
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror
And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing "America
The Beautiful." Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance--or in the studio
In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.
Look at the 1st 2 stanzas. There is nothing, whatsoever,
poetic- no attempt at meter (even were it a legitimate poetic entity)- & not
even a syllabic count. Then we get in to numerous enumerations of Americana, a
lame attempt at inserting Ashberian discursiveness into this piece of prose,
& then we- incredibly- end up with this 4 a.m. tv station signoff imagery of
Liberty, herself, gleaming at the reader. Boy, this’ll be a doozy to condense-
I’m really fearing I may not be able to do it….
9/11
But of the very systems of our watching.
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it's nearly
Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together
A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence
our being?
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.
Concision is the only way to add a little bit of poetry. By starting
& ending the poem with singular lines we immediately add punctuation to some
of the images. Given the trite title, & the reams of bad poems that have
appeared in the last year bearing that & similar titles, the best way to
start the poem off is to be a little off balance- thus starting with the
‘But’. In the original the systems are the various routines of American
life- not very original. By dropping the 1st 2 stanzas the very word
‘systems’ becomes mysterious- aka ‘poetic’. By dropping assorted lines
& stanzas the very trite images are renewed. In the rewrite we get an image
of heroes as blood-givers, not –takers. In the original the blood-givers are
simply the public as usual. The rewrite also allows the questions ‘Whence
is our courage? Is what holds us together/A gluttonous dreamy thriving?
Whence our being?’ to be defined by a song- & 1 not known. The
original’s placement of these queries was answered by a prosaic recitation of
American symbology- not even symbolism. How pallid.
I’ll admit I was tempted to change the title, but I though- what the
hell- that won’t add much. In doing these TOPs I often think there should be
some poets who are not so easy to improve. Especially PLs. Of course, that would
obviate TOP’s rationale. RP’s whole oeuvre is as banal as this poem-
that’s the problem. He really should be working a punch press in New Jersey.
Instead, he’s spent decades pushing poetastry; for this your tax dollars are
put to such valuable use- ain’t Academia wonderful?
Final Score: (1-100):
Robert Pinsky’s 9/11:
50
TOP’s
9/11: 65
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