In honor of the 10th anniversary, from "Words In Your Face"
Chapter Twenty-Four:
Words That Comfort: The Aftermath of 9/11 on the NYC Poetry Slam Community
[The chapter in which the reader will learn how the events of September 11, 2001 would transform the New York City Poetry Slam community, as they did all of New York City]
When the planes hit the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, some slam poets were on the road touring colleges or scheduled to perform at other poetry slam venues nationwide. Those poets found themselves stranded for days in strange cities as flights were grounded.
Other poets were already at work, others still getting ready to work, and, in one strange case, a poet was on his way to work when his subway car stopped for over two hours between stations with no hint of what was happening other than a repeated announcement that the trains were halted because of “police activity at the World Trade Center.” When the poet finally was released from the subway tunnels, he was dumbstruck at the crying faces, the businessmen covered in white dust walking in the middle of the street in shock.
But no matter where any of the poets were geographically, like everyone else, we all ended up in the same place, seated in front of the TV set, watching in horror, our hearts breaking.
Slam poets are a nomadic breed, and to many, cell phones are their main, if not only, form of communication. The World Trade Center towers held some of the city’s most powerful cell phone antennas, however, so that morning many people’s cell phones stopped working or picked up nothing but a perpetual busy signal. As one of the lucky few poets who had a landline telephone, I began collecting the names of all the poets who were confirmed to be OK and posting them online via my dial-up internet connection to the National Poetry Slam listserv. Everyone seemed to be OK, much to the collective relief of the local and national poetry slam communities. But as evening fell, there was one name that wasn’t confirmed: Bob Holman.
I had worked on and off as Bob Holman’s assistant for a few years and knew that his Duane Street apartment was about a half-mile from the World Trade Center. Both he and his wife, painter Elizabeth Murray, worked from home (when not teaching at Bard College). Their daughters were still in school. I thought that the family was likely OK, but were probably not at home. After all, the area that Holman lived in had been evacuated hours after the incident.
Still, I began to think it might be good to call and at least leave a message on his machine. Imagine my surprise when Holman himself picked up. After an initial exchange of relieved confirmation that we were both OK, I had to ask, Bob, why are you still there? I thought they evacuated your neighborhood a long time ago?
Oh, Holman replied, That explains why everything is so quiet now.
Shortly after our conversation, Holman and his wife set out several days worth of food for their cats, put their dog Otis on a leash, and began walking uptown.
Throughout this book, I have avoided publishing poems from the poetry slam. After all, to truly understand the power and attraction of the poetry slam, you can’t simply read some words on a page. You have to attend a poetry slam yourself, see the faces of the poets, experience the raw and thrilling performances firsthand in a room thick with noise and people. The electricity and the emotion of these events can barely be captured by film, let alone trapped mutely in a book.
But the events of 9/11 left everyone speechless. No one knew what to do, what to say, how to react. Being poets, many of us retreated to our rooms, took out a pen and paper and tried to make sense of it. So I think it is only fair that I lift the self-imposed embargo on poetry in the book so that I may allow my community to tell its story in its own words.
Then as now, Holman was the Poetry Guide for the web portal About.com. In the days after 9/11, he collected and posted new poems that dealt with the tragedy’s aftermath. It seems right, then, to begin this section with Holman’s poem “Cement Cloud.”
Cement Cloud
for Reesom Haile & Saba Kidane
Front window TV breaking news just breaking
Lucy at the assembly line. Must eat more pastries faster!
When One falls, I think if the Other comes this way
It would flatten my flat yet Dad waits for family to come
Home what is that a place of safety laughter breaks
The sky so clear and how beautifully plunging my Friends
From the flaming pickets of the “World” nefarious
Brilliance blinds from death even “Is the air controller's
Computer broken or what?” asks the newscaster when news
Is history lies jokes tell themselves leaving trails of skin
The panic from just outside is my story holes of plane
Flames of symbol clocks of hearts the ash and human
And human there is first the body keep telling yourself
That or anything because what comes next to LIFT us
Ineffable dies in the utter unspeakability political under
Standing or taking of everything the value of freedom
Of peace and the seed that grows into a home where
The door can open a fireball erupts your tongue
Is suddenly singing Remember eyes locked forever
On the double tombstone that is not there and always
When Holman posted this poem online at About.com on September 13, 2001, he also included several small descriptive paragraphs about where he was-physically and emotionally-which I’ve chosen to include here as well:
Dear Friends-we’re camping out on Duane St w/o phone/electric but lives yes just live em till till, I guess. I’m at my dear brother's office on 20th St-Internet, phone, hooray!
Yesterday, Elizabeth looked me in the eye and said, Do not withdraw! The first time anyone’s ever had the nerve to say that to me (the other side of my maniae, donchaknow). It was amazing to hear. I heard. And I recommend it to everyone. Do not withdraw!
The horrors are everywhere; it is incomprehensible. It is bitter and ugly and sad and the concrete-the streets they are the same but what’s on them now are vehicles of death and pollution, of clean up and try to wash off the stench of destruction. This is hard to imagine in my City, my beautiful City full of energy and sharp beauty.
The smell is powerful, acrid; masks are important. I ride my bike, checkpoint at 14th is calm, Houston is tough, Canal varies. I have not walked below Duane. The rubble of 7WTC [7 World Trade Center] still smolders at the end of Greenwich St, 5 blocks away.
Rumors fly about why there’s no electric-gas leaks was the leading reason until I turned on my gas and it worked. The giant floodlights at night maybe?-they get direct hooks, perhaps that’s why the neighborhood’s unplugged.
Hard to do anything. I missed my class at Bard on Wednesday but I do find the books we’re reading (Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You) soothing.
One thing-we don’t think of when things will return to Normal. There’s a new normal now, with tentacles in many directions and time is needed to grip them, for them to grip us and each other. Don't withdraw. Use words.
Of the three weekly poetry slam series, NYC-Urbana was the only one still on its summer hiatus with no shows scheduled until November. But even if louderARTS and Nuyorican had wanted to put on a show that first week, it would have been impossible. All three miles of Manhattan below 14th Street-where all three slam venues are located-were off-limits to anyone who was not a resident. This was strictly enforced at armed checkpoints. Our friends who lived down there said that all the movie houses in this locked-down area were showing movies for free-a distraction from all the reality going on around them. No one took them up on it; no one could leave their TVs, their computers, or their phones long enough.
When the area between 14th Street and Canal finally opened up on Monday, September 17, louderARTS announced that there would be a show held that night. They did not charge a cover, did not have a featured poet; they didn’t even have a structure of how the evening would go. Instead, they just wanted to open their doors to the community. Let people see each other, hug each other, and come together to share their words, their fears, and their experiences.
It was a cathartic show, and a relief. After all, with many poets temping in corporate settings to make money, nobody’s presence was guaranteed. Poets embraced each other, exchanged stories, and used their spots on the mic to express the hysterical maelstrom that was their feelings. At this point, no one considered what they were doing as really writing poetry. It was part therapy and part journalism; our way of trying to record things much bigger than voices.
In my interview with Lynne Procope, one of the founding members of the louderARTS slam, she said she didn’t remember any specific poems from that night; rather, she remembered “the incredible mood, the need, the sense of safety in the company of like-minded folk who could sit in their sadness without wanting to lash out and folks who were just as heartbroken as we all were.”
It was the same at the Nuyorican, which held its first post-9/11 show on Friday, September 21. Slammaster Felice Belle hand-picked the poets she thought would make a good balance for the first official poetry slam held in New York City after 9/11.
I was invited to participate because, as Belle explained to me, “everybody needs to laugh right about now.” When I arrived, the Nuyorican Poets Café, which would normally have been filled with tourists for their normal Friday Night Slam, was instead filled to standing-room only capacity with true blue New Yorkers, desperate to hear their feelings manifested in poetry.
It was beautiful and comforting, heartening and heartbreaking all at once.
The featured poet that night at the Nuyorican was New York City’s own Jennifer Murphy, who was a frequent presence at the local slams and who had lost friends in the towers.
Murphy’s poem, “Fall, New York” starts off the following brief selection of poetry written by slam poets directly after the attacks. She dedicated the poem to her fireman friend, Captain Patrick Brown, who died in the attacks, although she didn’t know of his death when the poem was written. He was still among the missing. In fact, she hadn’t realized he was a firefighter until she saw his face among the ubiquitous missing person flyers posted everywhere downtown. Murphy had known him only from yoga class. When she went to his funeral several weeks later, the line of mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral went out the door.
Fall, New York
My eyes have seen steel crumble like sand
and orchids last in a vase without water
for more than a week. Now, how am I to
reconcile death with what continues living?
Ash lifts like confetti from the sewer,
tanks sink inside the Hudson River.
They barricaded the park last night
but I know the trees are out there shimmering,
doing their thankless work; I know the branches
must grow tired of holding up all that life;
the leaves keep changing their minds-
they want to be green then red then brown,
and who can blame them for wanting to fall
and throw themselves like open hands
upon the warm unbroken ground.
City
by Ishle Yi Park,
louderARTS Team 2001 and future Poet Laureate of Queens
1.
we have become
a city of skittish colts
hooves on iron
fumes rise like
distended grief
dreams involve
the sound of glass
diffused and minimal
levels of light
2.
there are windows
blast of mares
teeth
water
all God
I have watched loved
wild
crescent
gutted
thirsting
with
no words
for all the wars
in me
I Saw You Empire State Building
by Edwin Torres
Nuyorican Team Member 1992
I saw you Empire State Building
looking for your twin brothers
I saw you
watching your brothers burning
helpless to the ground
I look up at you, tall proud beacon
I too am a tower
it's my last name in spanish
I look at you
glistening in the morning
shining at night I saw you
watching your brothers die
they were beautiful
and tall although
I think you have more character
but, older brothers wear their age well
I saw you helpless
and wanted to comfort you but
you're too big to hug
so I just keep looking at you
crying for you
holding you in my stare
us towers
we have to stick together
Many poets barely remember writing their poems from this time. The words they wrote came from a place of genuine shock, a time when people were desperate to process this tragedy in some way.
Established poets weren’t alone. New Yorkers who hadn’t composed verse since high school-and even then it was because they had to-taped poems to walls, to gates by hospitals, beside the missing person posters, with flowers left in an eerily quiet firehouse.
It is impossible to explain what it was like to be in New York during this time. No more survivors would be found once darkness fell on the night of September 12th. The coverage of our city shows nothing but fire, twisted steel and the faces of the missing, and there were no living bodies pulled from that wreckage. Just platoons of ambulances, waiting.
The following poems were collected by City Lore, a non-profit organization founded in 1986 to produce programs and publications conveying the richness of New York City’s cultural heritage. In the weeks and months after September 11, City Lore found and collected anonymous poems and other writings that had been left at memorials, hospitals and gathering places throughout the city.
In his essay about the experience, “Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?” Steve Zeitlin, the Executive Director of City Lore, writes:
The first memorials written in the dust and debris-on a car hood, a single word, “Pray.” On the window of the McDonald’s a block away, “we are not afraid.” In the first hours and days, family members and friends, in their grief, coming as close as they could to Ground Zero, the place where loved ones died, where souls may have lingered. Written by a child in the dust of a shopwindow close to the scene, “Daddy, I came here to find you.” Another, “God Be With You Dana-Love, Mom,” seen by Dan Barry, a reporter for the Times (Barry, 2001). The City did not wait for the poets. As streams of water poured over the smoke at Ground Zero, the city hosed down with words. Distraught and bereaved New Yorkers scrawled missives in the ash.
Here is just a sample of the dozens and dozens of poems and writings City Lore collected. These poems serve as witnesses and proof of the resilient and poetic hearts that beat in all New Yorkers.
Open Letter to a Terrorist
Well you hit the World Trade Center, but you missed America
You hit the Pentagon,
Again you missed America
You used helpless American bodies to take out other American bodies,
but like a poor marksman, you still missed America
Why? Because of some things you guys will never understand
America isn’t about a building or two, not about financial centers not about military centers
America isn’t about a place, American isn’t about a bunch of bodies
America is about an IDEA.
An idea that you can go someplace where you can earn as much as you can figure out how to, live for the most part, like you envisioned living, and pursue Happiness
(no guarantees that you’ll reach it, but you can sure try)!
Go ahead and whine your terrorist whine, and chant your terrorist litany
”If you cannot see my point, then feel my pain.”
This concept is alien to Americans.
We live in a country where we don’t have to see your point. But you’re free to have one. We don’t have to listen to your speech. But you’re free to say one. I don’t know where you got the idea that everyone has to agree with you.
There’s a spirit that tends to take over people who come to this country, looking for opportunity, looking for liberty, looking for freedom.
Even if they misuse it.
You guys seem to be incapable of understanding that we don’t live in America,
America lives in US! American Spirit is what it’s called.
And killing a few thousand of us or a few million of us won’t change it. Most of the time, it’s a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of Spirit
until we’re crossed in a cowardly manner, then it becomes an entirely different kinds of Spirit.
Wait until you see what we do with that Spirit, this time.
sleep tight, if you can. We’re coming....
~Anonymous, poem posted to a memorial wall set up in Grand Central Station, seen on Sept. 25
Written in the white dust on an apartment building on West Street:
“All people in this building are fine”
To the Towers Themselves
They were never the favorites,
Not the Carmen Miranda Chrysler
Nor Rockefeller’s magic boxes
Nor The Empire, which I think would have killed us all if she fell.
They were the two young dumb guys,
Beer drinking
Downtown MBAs
Swaggering across the skyline,
Now that they are gone,
They are like young men
Lost at war,
Not having had their life yet,
Not having grown wise and softened with air and time.
They are lost like
Cannon fodder
Like farm boys throughout time
Stunned into death,
Not knowing what hit them
And beloved
By the weeping mothers left behind.
~Anonymous
Excerpt from poem from memorial wall at Grand Central Station, seen Sept. 25
In Gods Hands
Mothers, Sisters Aunties, Friends, Lovers Grandmas Nieces, Wives
On the day that you died, the world looked on in silence
an Angel whispered to me ... that Even God Cried....
~C. Turner
Messages posted on the windows of Nino’s Restaurant on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan seen by Steve Zeitlin and Joseph Dobkin
We remember all those who show the true heart and spirit of America.
Forever beating strong.
In memory of those who perished.
In honor of those who fight on.
~C. Velos
Emily,
We don’t know if you are dead, but we love you.
~Anonymous
Jackie and Jay please take care of each other. We miss you.
~"WN, JK, etc"
Bitten but not beaten
~Anonymous
From a card penned by a child at the firehouse on 113th and Amsterdam, seen on Sept.25 by Ilana Harlow
Dear Hero,
I am vrey vrey prawd of what you are doing.
I thik you are grate.
Words from the Memorials:
-“Stay strong, keep our faith.” (Union Square)
-“Our grief is not a cry for war.” (Union Square)
-“Today I cried a million tears, tomorrow a million more...”(fragment from poem, Washington Square Park)
-“Ginger, hope is everlasting as is your love.” (Washington Square Park)
- “It’s one thing to be a hero once in your life. It’s another to be a hero every single day. That’s what you firemen are.” (Firehouse Ladder 5 Engine 24 [6th Ave. and Houston Street])
-“You have lit a fire of inspiration in all our hearts! Thanks.” (Ladder 5 Engine 24)
-“Missing: two towers, age 28” (from a flyer in Union Square)
The final poem I’ll include (which closes this chapter) really defines that period of time for me-that period of absolute grief and loss over things you may not have even realized you would miss.
New York is a big city, a huge city, and sometimes it feels like the only thing that you can feel any ownership of is your own neighborhood. Even if you don’t know their names, you grow accustomed to the people in your neighborhood: the Crazy Moustache Guy, the Talks to Her Dogs Lady, the Always Jogging Couple. You know these people well enough to recognize them from halfway down the block, maybe well enough to nod hello, and-in some strange way-you are always comforted to see them. This experience is something that makes you feel like a real New Yorker.
After the towers were struck, the first instinct New Yorkers had was to make sure their friends and loved ones were OK, and then that their friends’ friends and loved ones were OK, too. After that, we checked in with people who had slipped out of our day-to-day lives but still were active in our hearts and minds-our old bosses, favorite professors, the intern at the arts center who was always reading Ayn Rand.
It was only after all the names we cared about were accounted for that we remembered the people in our neighborhoods who were without names-or at least, nameless to us. For weeks afterwards, my roommate and I walked like zombies through our neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, searching out these odd people who had worked their way into our lives. The relief we felt at seeing them, at being at being able to confirm that they were alive, was astonishing.
Not everyone in New York City was so lucky, and many New Yorkers grieved for friends whose names they never knew. This final poem, which so perfectly illustrates this feeling for me, was posted anonymously on a small square piece of paper put over a missing person flyer on Grand Central Station’s Memorial Wall.
Every morning
I see you
smiling.
I miss you.
We never met.
~ Anonymous
Excerpt from Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years in the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press, 2008)
Words That Comfort: The Aftermath of 9/11 on the NYC Poetry Slam Community
[The chapter in which the reader will learn how the events of September 11, 2001 would transform the New York City Poetry Slam community, as they did all of New York City]
When the planes hit the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, some slam poets were on the road touring colleges or scheduled to perform at other poetry slam venues nationwide. Those poets found themselves stranded for days in strange cities as flights were grounded.
Other poets were already at work, others still getting ready to work, and, in one strange case, a poet was on his way to work when his subway car stopped for over two hours between stations with no hint of what was happening other than a repeated announcement that the trains were halted because of “police activity at the World Trade Center.” When the poet finally was released from the subway tunnels, he was dumbstruck at the crying faces, the businessmen covered in white dust walking in the middle of the street in shock.
But no matter where any of the poets were geographically, like everyone else, we all ended up in the same place, seated in front of the TV set, watching in horror, our hearts breaking.
Slam poets are a nomadic breed, and to many, cell phones are their main, if not only, form of communication. The World Trade Center towers held some of the city’s most powerful cell phone antennas, however, so that morning many people’s cell phones stopped working or picked up nothing but a perpetual busy signal. As one of the lucky few poets who had a landline telephone, I began collecting the names of all the poets who were confirmed to be OK and posting them online via my dial-up internet connection to the National Poetry Slam listserv. Everyone seemed to be OK, much to the collective relief of the local and national poetry slam communities. But as evening fell, there was one name that wasn’t confirmed: Bob Holman.
I had worked on and off as Bob Holman’s assistant for a few years and knew that his Duane Street apartment was about a half-mile from the World Trade Center. Both he and his wife, painter Elizabeth Murray, worked from home (when not teaching at Bard College). Their daughters were still in school. I thought that the family was likely OK, but were probably not at home. After all, the area that Holman lived in had been evacuated hours after the incident.
Still, I began to think it might be good to call and at least leave a message on his machine. Imagine my surprise when Holman himself picked up. After an initial exchange of relieved confirmation that we were both OK, I had to ask, Bob, why are you still there? I thought they evacuated your neighborhood a long time ago?
Oh, Holman replied, That explains why everything is so quiet now.
Shortly after our conversation, Holman and his wife set out several days worth of food for their cats, put their dog Otis on a leash, and began walking uptown.
Throughout this book, I have avoided publishing poems from the poetry slam. After all, to truly understand the power and attraction of the poetry slam, you can’t simply read some words on a page. You have to attend a poetry slam yourself, see the faces of the poets, experience the raw and thrilling performances firsthand in a room thick with noise and people. The electricity and the emotion of these events can barely be captured by film, let alone trapped mutely in a book.
But the events of 9/11 left everyone speechless. No one knew what to do, what to say, how to react. Being poets, many of us retreated to our rooms, took out a pen and paper and tried to make sense of it. So I think it is only fair that I lift the self-imposed embargo on poetry in the book so that I may allow my community to tell its story in its own words.
Then as now, Holman was the Poetry Guide for the web portal About.com. In the days after 9/11, he collected and posted new poems that dealt with the tragedy’s aftermath. It seems right, then, to begin this section with Holman’s poem “Cement Cloud.”
Cement Cloud
for Reesom Haile & Saba Kidane
Front window TV breaking news just breaking
Lucy at the assembly line. Must eat more pastries faster!
When One falls, I think if the Other comes this way
It would flatten my flat yet Dad waits for family to come
Home what is that a place of safety laughter breaks
The sky so clear and how beautifully plunging my Friends
From the flaming pickets of the “World” nefarious
Brilliance blinds from death even “Is the air controller's
Computer broken or what?” asks the newscaster when news
Is history lies jokes tell themselves leaving trails of skin
The panic from just outside is my story holes of plane
Flames of symbol clocks of hearts the ash and human
And human there is first the body keep telling yourself
That or anything because what comes next to LIFT us
Ineffable dies in the utter unspeakability political under
Standing or taking of everything the value of freedom
Of peace and the seed that grows into a home where
The door can open a fireball erupts your tongue
Is suddenly singing Remember eyes locked forever
On the double tombstone that is not there and always
When Holman posted this poem online at About.com on September 13, 2001, he also included several small descriptive paragraphs about where he was-physically and emotionally-which I’ve chosen to include here as well:
Dear Friends-we’re camping out on Duane St w/o phone/electric but lives yes just live em till till, I guess. I’m at my dear brother's office on 20th St-Internet, phone, hooray!
Yesterday, Elizabeth looked me in the eye and said, Do not withdraw! The first time anyone’s ever had the nerve to say that to me (the other side of my maniae, donchaknow). It was amazing to hear. I heard. And I recommend it to everyone. Do not withdraw!
The horrors are everywhere; it is incomprehensible. It is bitter and ugly and sad and the concrete-the streets they are the same but what’s on them now are vehicles of death and pollution, of clean up and try to wash off the stench of destruction. This is hard to imagine in my City, my beautiful City full of energy and sharp beauty.
The smell is powerful, acrid; masks are important. I ride my bike, checkpoint at 14th is calm, Houston is tough, Canal varies. I have not walked below Duane. The rubble of 7WTC [7 World Trade Center] still smolders at the end of Greenwich St, 5 blocks away.
Rumors fly about why there’s no electric-gas leaks was the leading reason until I turned on my gas and it worked. The giant floodlights at night maybe?-they get direct hooks, perhaps that’s why the neighborhood’s unplugged.
Hard to do anything. I missed my class at Bard on Wednesday but I do find the books we’re reading (Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You) soothing.
One thing-we don’t think of when things will return to Normal. There’s a new normal now, with tentacles in many directions and time is needed to grip them, for them to grip us and each other. Don't withdraw. Use words.
Of the three weekly poetry slam series, NYC-Urbana was the only one still on its summer hiatus with no shows scheduled until November. But even if louderARTS and Nuyorican had wanted to put on a show that first week, it would have been impossible. All three miles of Manhattan below 14th Street-where all three slam venues are located-were off-limits to anyone who was not a resident. This was strictly enforced at armed checkpoints. Our friends who lived down there said that all the movie houses in this locked-down area were showing movies for free-a distraction from all the reality going on around them. No one took them up on it; no one could leave their TVs, their computers, or their phones long enough.
When the area between 14th Street and Canal finally opened up on Monday, September 17, louderARTS announced that there would be a show held that night. They did not charge a cover, did not have a featured poet; they didn’t even have a structure of how the evening would go. Instead, they just wanted to open their doors to the community. Let people see each other, hug each other, and come together to share their words, their fears, and their experiences.
It was a cathartic show, and a relief. After all, with many poets temping in corporate settings to make money, nobody’s presence was guaranteed. Poets embraced each other, exchanged stories, and used their spots on the mic to express the hysterical maelstrom that was their feelings. At this point, no one considered what they were doing as really writing poetry. It was part therapy and part journalism; our way of trying to record things much bigger than voices.
In my interview with Lynne Procope, one of the founding members of the louderARTS slam, she said she didn’t remember any specific poems from that night; rather, she remembered “the incredible mood, the need, the sense of safety in the company of like-minded folk who could sit in their sadness without wanting to lash out and folks who were just as heartbroken as we all were.”
It was the same at the Nuyorican, which held its first post-9/11 show on Friday, September 21. Slammaster Felice Belle hand-picked the poets she thought would make a good balance for the first official poetry slam held in New York City after 9/11.
I was invited to participate because, as Belle explained to me, “everybody needs to laugh right about now.” When I arrived, the Nuyorican Poets Café, which would normally have been filled with tourists for their normal Friday Night Slam, was instead filled to standing-room only capacity with true blue New Yorkers, desperate to hear their feelings manifested in poetry.
It was beautiful and comforting, heartening and heartbreaking all at once.
The featured poet that night at the Nuyorican was New York City’s own Jennifer Murphy, who was a frequent presence at the local slams and who had lost friends in the towers.
Murphy’s poem, “Fall, New York” starts off the following brief selection of poetry written by slam poets directly after the attacks. She dedicated the poem to her fireman friend, Captain Patrick Brown, who died in the attacks, although she didn’t know of his death when the poem was written. He was still among the missing. In fact, she hadn’t realized he was a firefighter until she saw his face among the ubiquitous missing person flyers posted everywhere downtown. Murphy had known him only from yoga class. When she went to his funeral several weeks later, the line of mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral went out the door.
Fall, New York
My eyes have seen steel crumble like sand
and orchids last in a vase without water
for more than a week. Now, how am I to
reconcile death with what continues living?
Ash lifts like confetti from the sewer,
tanks sink inside the Hudson River.
They barricaded the park last night
but I know the trees are out there shimmering,
doing their thankless work; I know the branches
must grow tired of holding up all that life;
the leaves keep changing their minds-
they want to be green then red then brown,
and who can blame them for wanting to fall
and throw themselves like open hands
upon the warm unbroken ground.
City
by Ishle Yi Park,
louderARTS Team 2001 and future Poet Laureate of Queens
1.
we have become
a city of skittish colts
hooves on iron
fumes rise like
distended grief
dreams involve
the sound of glass
diffused and minimal
levels of light
2.
there are windows
blast of mares
teeth
water
all God
I have watched loved
wild
crescent
gutted
thirsting
with
no words
for all the wars
in me
I Saw You Empire State Building
by Edwin Torres
Nuyorican Team Member 1992
I saw you Empire State Building
looking for your twin brothers
I saw you
watching your brothers burning
helpless to the ground
I look up at you, tall proud beacon
I too am a tower
it's my last name in spanish
I look at you
glistening in the morning
shining at night I saw you
watching your brothers die
they were beautiful
and tall although
I think you have more character
but, older brothers wear their age well
I saw you helpless
and wanted to comfort you but
you're too big to hug
so I just keep looking at you
crying for you
holding you in my stare
us towers
we have to stick together
Many poets barely remember writing their poems from this time. The words they wrote came from a place of genuine shock, a time when people were desperate to process this tragedy in some way.
Established poets weren’t alone. New Yorkers who hadn’t composed verse since high school-and even then it was because they had to-taped poems to walls, to gates by hospitals, beside the missing person posters, with flowers left in an eerily quiet firehouse.
It is impossible to explain what it was like to be in New York during this time. No more survivors would be found once darkness fell on the night of September 12th. The coverage of our city shows nothing but fire, twisted steel and the faces of the missing, and there were no living bodies pulled from that wreckage. Just platoons of ambulances, waiting.
The following poems were collected by City Lore, a non-profit organization founded in 1986 to produce programs and publications conveying the richness of New York City’s cultural heritage. In the weeks and months after September 11, City Lore found and collected anonymous poems and other writings that had been left at memorials, hospitals and gathering places throughout the city.
In his essay about the experience, “Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?” Steve Zeitlin, the Executive Director of City Lore, writes:
The first memorials written in the dust and debris-on a car hood, a single word, “Pray.” On the window of the McDonald’s a block away, “we are not afraid.” In the first hours and days, family members and friends, in their grief, coming as close as they could to Ground Zero, the place where loved ones died, where souls may have lingered. Written by a child in the dust of a shopwindow close to the scene, “Daddy, I came here to find you.” Another, “God Be With You Dana-Love, Mom,” seen by Dan Barry, a reporter for the Times (Barry, 2001). The City did not wait for the poets. As streams of water poured over the smoke at Ground Zero, the city hosed down with words. Distraught and bereaved New Yorkers scrawled missives in the ash.
Here is just a sample of the dozens and dozens of poems and writings City Lore collected. These poems serve as witnesses and proof of the resilient and poetic hearts that beat in all New Yorkers.
Open Letter to a Terrorist
Well you hit the World Trade Center, but you missed America
You hit the Pentagon,
Again you missed America
You used helpless American bodies to take out other American bodies,
but like a poor marksman, you still missed America
Why? Because of some things you guys will never understand
America isn’t about a building or two, not about financial centers not about military centers
America isn’t about a place, American isn’t about a bunch of bodies
America is about an IDEA.
An idea that you can go someplace where you can earn as much as you can figure out how to, live for the most part, like you envisioned living, and pursue Happiness
(no guarantees that you’ll reach it, but you can sure try)!
Go ahead and whine your terrorist whine, and chant your terrorist litany
”If you cannot see my point, then feel my pain.”
This concept is alien to Americans.
We live in a country where we don’t have to see your point. But you’re free to have one. We don’t have to listen to your speech. But you’re free to say one. I don’t know where you got the idea that everyone has to agree with you.
There’s a spirit that tends to take over people who come to this country, looking for opportunity, looking for liberty, looking for freedom.
Even if they misuse it.
You guys seem to be incapable of understanding that we don’t live in America,
America lives in US! American Spirit is what it’s called.
And killing a few thousand of us or a few million of us won’t change it. Most of the time, it’s a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of Spirit
until we’re crossed in a cowardly manner, then it becomes an entirely different kinds of Spirit.
Wait until you see what we do with that Spirit, this time.
sleep tight, if you can. We’re coming....
~Anonymous, poem posted to a memorial wall set up in Grand Central Station, seen on Sept. 25
Written in the white dust on an apartment building on West Street:
“All people in this building are fine”
To the Towers Themselves
They were never the favorites,
Not the Carmen Miranda Chrysler
Nor Rockefeller’s magic boxes
Nor The Empire, which I think would have killed us all if she fell.
They were the two young dumb guys,
Beer drinking
Downtown MBAs
Swaggering across the skyline,
Now that they are gone,
They are like young men
Lost at war,
Not having had their life yet,
Not having grown wise and softened with air and time.
They are lost like
Cannon fodder
Like farm boys throughout time
Stunned into death,
Not knowing what hit them
And beloved
By the weeping mothers left behind.
~Anonymous
Excerpt from poem from memorial wall at Grand Central Station, seen Sept. 25
In Gods Hands
Mothers, Sisters Aunties, Friends, Lovers Grandmas Nieces, Wives
On the day that you died, the world looked on in silence
an Angel whispered to me ... that Even God Cried....
~C. Turner
Messages posted on the windows of Nino’s Restaurant on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan seen by Steve Zeitlin and Joseph Dobkin
We remember all those who show the true heart and spirit of America.
Forever beating strong.
In memory of those who perished.
In honor of those who fight on.
~C. Velos
Emily,
We don’t know if you are dead, but we love you.
~Anonymous
Jackie and Jay please take care of each other. We miss you.
~"WN, JK, etc"
Bitten but not beaten
~Anonymous
From a card penned by a child at the firehouse on 113th and Amsterdam, seen on Sept.25 by Ilana Harlow
Dear Hero,
I am vrey vrey prawd of what you are doing.
I thik you are grate.
Words from the Memorials:
-“Stay strong, keep our faith.” (Union Square)
-“Our grief is not a cry for war.” (Union Square)
-“Today I cried a million tears, tomorrow a million more...”(fragment from poem, Washington Square Park)
-“Ginger, hope is everlasting as is your love.” (Washington Square Park)
- “It’s one thing to be a hero once in your life. It’s another to be a hero every single day. That’s what you firemen are.” (Firehouse Ladder 5 Engine 24 [6th Ave. and Houston Street])
-“You have lit a fire of inspiration in all our hearts! Thanks.” (Ladder 5 Engine 24)
-“Missing: two towers, age 28” (from a flyer in Union Square)
The final poem I’ll include (which closes this chapter) really defines that period of time for me-that period of absolute grief and loss over things you may not have even realized you would miss.
New York is a big city, a huge city, and sometimes it feels like the only thing that you can feel any ownership of is your own neighborhood. Even if you don’t know their names, you grow accustomed to the people in your neighborhood: the Crazy Moustache Guy, the Talks to Her Dogs Lady, the Always Jogging Couple. You know these people well enough to recognize them from halfway down the block, maybe well enough to nod hello, and-in some strange way-you are always comforted to see them. This experience is something that makes you feel like a real New Yorker.
After the towers were struck, the first instinct New Yorkers had was to make sure their friends and loved ones were OK, and then that their friends’ friends and loved ones were OK, too. After that, we checked in with people who had slipped out of our day-to-day lives but still were active in our hearts and minds-our old bosses, favorite professors, the intern at the arts center who was always reading Ayn Rand.
It was only after all the names we cared about were accounted for that we remembered the people in our neighborhoods who were without names-or at least, nameless to us. For weeks afterwards, my roommate and I walked like zombies through our neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, searching out these odd people who had worked their way into our lives. The relief we felt at seeing them, at being at being able to confirm that they were alive, was astonishing.
Not everyone in New York City was so lucky, and many New Yorkers grieved for friends whose names they never knew. This final poem, which so perfectly illustrates this feeling for me, was posted anonymously on a small square piece of paper put over a missing person flyer on Grand Central Station’s Memorial Wall.
Every morning
I see you
smiling.
I miss you.
We never met.
~ Anonymous
Excerpt from Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years in the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press, 2008)