Looking for examples of the list poems that will be the subject of our next bakeoff, I was reminded of this one:
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
It's one of the many poems of mourning that were written in the aftermath of 9-11. Finding it made me recall that only a few weeks ago we had reminders of another such disaster and another such poem, Hardy's
The Convergence of the Twain, about the sinking of the Titanic.
Soon after that I heard a choral setting of a poem that was new to me, Herman Melville's
Shiloh.
Other terrific poems came to mind then, like Howard Nemerov's poem on the Challenger explosion,
On an Occasion of National Mourning. And I thought too of Larkin's
The Explosion, even though that disaster hasn't stuck so prominently in the public memory apart from the poem.
How about a thread of your favorite great public poems? Sad and sobering, I know, but potentially an impressive collection.