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Post Magazine
This Week: "9/11"
With Robert Pinsky
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, Sept. 9, 2002; 1 p.m. EDT
Robert Pinsky wrote a new poem, "9/11," that appeared in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine. Pinsky was online Monday, Sept. 9 at 1 p.m. ET, to field questions and comments about that poem, about poetry in general and about the mood of the nation.
Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University and is poetry editor at the online journal Slate.
A transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Washington, D.C.:
Robert, I'm most touched by the historical wandering of "9/11." The shared sense of "lowbrow memory" the common literature of television grants us alongside the symbols chosen by our Founding Fathers and the icons of American History.
When the ghosts of Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass are cohabitating along side a half-forgotten Donald Duck my question is:
Do you feel that this reaching for symbol in the wake of 9/11 is fundamentally different because it is more media-touched, than the earlier American tragedies of Pearl Harbor and the Civil War (to name the two that leap to mind first)? Do you feel that we have grown more blind to our own participation in the creation of meaning? Or do you feel this is simply a reflection of the faster pace of today's world, a desire for immediate understanding?
Robert Pinsky: "Historical wandering" is a good phrase. It evokes for me my own process in trying to answer the question: who did 9/11 happen to, who are we?
"Historical wandering" also evokes the American adventure that answers that question. We were perhaps more uniformly a Christian nation at the time of the Civil War, but the roots of Douglass, Moore, Rogers, Dickinson, Charles-- maybe even the roots of the angry, spunky little sailor-suited anthropomorphic duck-- go back at least that far.
To put it simply: the American national character has always involved the sublime and the vulgar in proportions so mixed and mysterious that the two aren't easily distinguished. That is part of our strength as well as our vulnerability, my poem supposes.
Cambridge, Mass.:
Mr. Pinsky --
I was living about a mile away from the Pentagon on 9/11. I listened to you talking on the radio a few days later, from a parking lot near a mall not far away. It was very comforting at the time.
You were talking about the fact that you were writing about 9/11 and sort of collecting your thoughts at that time.
My question is -- as a writer/poet, do you feel like sometimes you become sort of a channel that others' feelings pass through, and then you put it on paper in the style of a poem? How influential are those around you to your poetry? How much of what you see and hear around you seeps into your poetry? How does the "process" of writing about something like 9/11 work for you? Do you feel the feelings first? Or are you simply relaying them?
Thank you.
Robert Pinsky: My job is partly to absorb what I see and hear, striving the best I can to be a sort of Baloney Filter. That is, I am not a political expert or international affairs expert or philosophical expert-- I am expert only in putting words and rhythms and images together.
But that expertise implies some ability to tell what is most true and what is most false in the great clouds and avalanches of language and image that surround an event.
So I try to listen and to try out what I hear in my own voice.
As a specific example, it came to me that as a patriot of the modern world, as well as of America, I am devoutly proud and happy to be part of the world where a woman who wears high heels and lipstick performs brain surgery or runs a large organization-- feminism, cosmetics, a whole bundle of modern phenomena are not merely virtuous or commendable to me, but emotionally at the center of what I like.
But when I tried to put that image of the brain surgeon putting on her heels, it seemed easy, sentimental, glib, preening. The Baloney Filter excluded it, though it perhaps comes back in the two images of the Rayettes at the end-- in sequins, and then in sneakers, maybe with reading glasses . . .
San Diego, Calif.:
What a terrific ode to the spirit that drives this country -- and what a risky undertaking it must have seemed, going in. I so admire the fact that you found a way to write a moving poem on this occasion without falling into sentimentalism or jingoism. Clearly, you're not afraid to look at the American character -- indefatigable, fallible, hoky, courageous, energetic, wholehearted, and resilient. The poem is all the more affecting because of your honesty -- I wonder, was it difficult to strike this balance? Were you worried that you might go too far in one direction or the other and offend someone?
Robert Pinsky: Thank you,
In a way, the problem of poetry always is to make distinctions without sacrificing passion. In other words, merely avoiding mistakes won't do -- blood and tears and laughter, etc., are part of it. For young poets, the temptation is perhaps to be opaque and mysterious, to avoid the risk of clumsiness by saying little. For an older artist like me, the risks and rewards of the explicit are more in the foreground: my job in this poem is not to write a judicious editorial, or a political speech, or a prayer, or a rousing jingle or pop tune: my job is to make what you describe: a "terrific ode." That is exactly what I had in mind: an honest ode with terror
in it.
In other words, balance, yes-- but not at the expense of passion, of the intuitive feeling. Why Douglass and Dickinson are heroes for me can be talked about but never completely explained.
Arlington, Va.:
A beautiful poem. I was most touched by the line about the firefighters writing their social security numbers on their arms before they rushed into the World Trade Center. That act alone defines bravery in the face of duty.
Robert Pinsky: It's the ordinariness of the number, and our ability to picture them joking about it -- maybe even obscenely?-- that stirs me, I think.
Charleston S.C.:
From Mr. Wright's Creative Writing class:
1. Is there a difference between concrete and abstract poems such as the realism of an event like 9/11 and the messages you intend to express through the tragedy?
2. Will you write any more poems in the furture about this event?
Robert Pinsky: Greetings to the young writers. "Abstract" and "concrete" and "realism" are not easy categories for me to deal with-- I'd refer you to my earlier response about distinguishing the baloney from the true, the plausible fake from the moving, the easy-to-say or posed from the fact.
Also, the interesting: I urge all of you in Mr.Wright's class to try in your writing to find some specific detail that is interesting to you-- that you think not everyone would have noticed.
The word "about" is tricky, too. I think of "9/11" as "about" certain ripples that spread from the event. Identifying those ripples, calling them up, deciding why and how they give me feeling is the interesting, complicated part.
Specifically, I tried to think about who we are-- how we respond to this differently than a more homogeneous country , or a non-democratic one, might.
Washington, D.C.:
When Mr. Pinsky read his poem on the home page he used/added the word "we" in two places not in the printed text. In the third line, third stanza after the dash he said "we who" not "who"; and in the fourteenth stanza last line he read "Then we survivors" not "Then the survivors". Are his spoken words correct or the printed words?
I liked the poem very much -- enough to explore The Washington Post online for the first time.
Robert Pinsky: What an alert reader and listener!
In the course of working on the poem for the last month or so I have parts memorized, and some with slight variations of revisions.
In the phrase "an anniversary/ that we inscribed with meanings-- we how keep so few" (as I read it aloud) the "we" may make it more clear. But is it a bit too formal or stiff? Is "we inscribed with meanings--who keep so few" more natural?
This is the sort of thing I encourage Mr. Wright's students to take seriously!
This good reader has noted a fascinating thing-- the word that is crucial in both of his/her examples is "we"!! In a poem where I am trying to speak unpompously as an American-- of, if not for, a plural!
Washington, D.C.:
On the subject of the sublime and the vulgar, I thought one of the the most interesting entanglements was the final image of engineers at the soundboards -- showing us the 'vulgar' logistics in a way of attempting to construct the sublime -- something that seems so tied to the current effort, to create a memorial.
I wonder if you would comment on your connection of Marianne Moore's 'What are Years?' to your own phrase 'glutttonous dreamy thriving'?
Robert Pinsky: Yes-- the engineers helping the musicians-- that technological image is very important to me: we are not making a 19th century memorial or even a 20th century one, but a 21st century one. We must speak to our children and grandchildren, etc., to the future, in terms that are true to who we are. The "vulgar" or common processes, in a way, are a redemptive, human-scale version of the "prodigious systems" of the opening passage.
Marianne Moore's poem was the first one I read on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer after 9/11/01. The poem will always now be linked with that event for me, and Moore's stoical, practical notion of courage is part of my own poem's attempt to find an American core that is not bombastic, and beyond mere prosperity.
Washington, D.C.:
The reference to sequinned back-up singers made me think of Norman Mailer's recent rant: "In America we're playing musical chairs -- don't get caught without a flag or you're out of the game. Why do we need all this reaffirmation? We don't need compulsive, self-serving patriotism. It's odious..." Where do you fit in with this sentiment?
Robert Pinsky: As to the flag, and waving it, I guess it all depends upon how you wave it and at whom. I agree with Norman that it's odious (and to coin a phrase un-American) to test people for patriotism by seeing if they have the Stars & Stripes in the right place. I try in my poem to honor the sequins and the sneakers, the flamboyant and the practical sides of our genius. The transformation by Ray Charles of Katherine Lee Bates's rather critical, liberal's anthem is the kind of transformation that inspired my poem.
Patriotism, like God, like Motherhood, etc. will always be manipulated by rascals. So the work of Baloney-filtering, and saving the ore that remains, goes on.
Vicksburg, Mich.:
From Ms. Hill's high school English students:
You mention early in the poem about our adoration of images, our fascination with "prodigious systems." We find it difficult in our writing to narrow our focus from these huge ideas, to translate the visual into mere words reflecting those images. What do you do when writing to shut out those things? Do you work in a quiet place, or do you use the "noise" as inspiration?
Robert Pinsky: The actual place of writing is not important. (I sometimes do it on airplanes and airports. "9/11" was written largely near the beach on Cape Cod, but worked on in some noisy places including the airplane.)
More essentially, I find that American life is crowded with images, musics, dross and gold-- it is even more various than all those satellite TV channels, noisier and more diverse than any dance club!-- it is our job as writers to attend to that. If we were Inuit we would write about Caribou. If we live amid our music, advertising, etc. then . . . I guess we write about it. But not slavishly on one side, necessarily, or contemptuosly on the other.
With attention.
New Jersey:
Mr. Pinsky --
I have just read your poem, which I greatly enjoyed. I'd like to know if the spacing and paragraphs of the poem as it was printed were intentional, and if so, why? I am (obviously, from this question) not a poet, but I find the syntax almost distracting and am curious to know if there is a specific reason behind it.
I greatly enjoyed the line "...The date became a word..." as I find the addition of the word(s)'Nine-eleven' to the American lexicon fascinating. Nine-one-one still refers to the emergency phone number that people dial, but Nine-eleven has meaning all its own -- even more, in my opinion, than Sept. 11th. I'm curious to hear you expound on the subject.
Thank you!
Robert Pinsky: Thank you.
Poets apply the Italian word for "room"-- "stanza" to those divisions of white space. My three-line stanzas, as you notice, let the syntax pour across them quite often.
For me, that jagged, syncopated effect conveys the way that these rooms, though distinct, flow architecturally into one another.
For instance, "Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed" //--new room-- "The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand./ O Americans" The portrait of Mohamnmed Atta is not meant to be a room to itself-- by stretching the walk of the sentence from room to room, I am trying to suggest that "Whence is our courage" belongs in the room with the Name of God, etc.
Sometimes, you want the thought to be contained completely within the line or stanza. Emphasis rather than tension. Sometimes, you want the thought and the formal elements to contend and dance with one another, with lots of tension. This poem, I wanted to be nervous yet symmetrical.
The event was named after the date by a large consensus. It would be follow to give it a name other than the one-- rather more like Europeans or Latin Americans than our custom-- we made of a date.
Robert Pinsky: Thank you all. I appreciate your attention and your good words about my poem. I've enjoyed this, and learned from it.
My apologies to those whose questions we didn't get to, and thanks for sending them.
Allow me to recoommend the videos of Americans reading poems they love at www.favoritepoem.org.
Goodbye, and thanks again--
Robert Pinsky
washingtonpost.com:
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