The Oxford Round Table Forum on Public Policy,
Vol. 2, Summer 2008

" 'Ancient Wisdom' to 'Supreme Fiction': Ideas of God in the Poetry of H.D. and Wallace Stevens
http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/summer08papers/archivesummer08/Thomas.heather.pdf

 

The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 35, No. 3, December 2002
 
Poetry After 9/11: Beyond the Dreamrim of Grief

We turn to poetry because Tom Brokaw doesn’t have the words, and homeland security chief Tom Ridge, then Pennsylvania’s governor, begins his 9/11 statement, “There are no words to describe...” We turn to poetry because events seem unspeakable and must be “claimed as loss,” to quote poet Beverly Dahlen. Because, in Donald Hall’s words, poetry is “the unsayable said.” A poem can transgress the limits of reason breached by death. Poetry is mourning’s hedge, language for the longing and lament always flowing somewhere under our blood....

When the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan, poetry slipped back into a ghostly after-image of the cultural conversation. Perhaps it seemed suddenly irrelevant because of the notion that a poem only heals: it doesn’t interrogate, incite, resist, and subvert....

These are times that demand creative dissent. To those who would limit poetry to the dubiously “private” sphere of singular reflection and “master narrative,” I ask, isn’t this conventional role ultimately a disabling one? Might poetry instead be the space where private and public urgencies meet and invent a third place of possibility? Where the individual connects with the other beyond our tired, vicarious identifications? Where one and many, mind and world arise together toward what must be understood, borne, and changed.

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Copyright © Heather Thomas