Charles Martin on 9/11
 

Please forgive (& feel free to fuse threads) if this appeared previously, but I just ran across this brief newspaper piece on Charles Martin's "After 9/11." The poem is also in his new book Signs & Wonders.

The book is impressive, as you'd expect; but the poem is one of the best I've read on 9/11, period: restrained and deeply moving.

Here's the article; the link to the poem is about halfway down the profile in which the poet talks about the challenge the subject posed. Thanks.

http://blog.syracuse.com/entertainme...9/post_58.html

Thank you, Ned, for posting this. I've printed it out as it needs to be read with reflection and for me, paper provides more room for contemplation than than a screen does.

I've also put the book on my "to buy" list. Thank you.

(PS. Your book finally arrived. I haven't opened it yet, I don't want to read it when I am stressed for time--that would be like eating a gourmet meal when rushing down the street to keep an appointment. But I will savor it and am looking forward to it.)

For about 6 semesters now, I've been doing close readings of this poem with my students. It really is a great poem. I'm still learning from it.

Hi Ned

Many thanks for sharing Charles Martin's wonderful 9/11 poem with us, Ned.

Best regards

Chris

You've got that right Ned. Charles' poem dwarfs anything else written about 9/11. I've treasured it for nine years. He's just mailed me the new book, and I'll comment on it when I've read it. High expectations!

How would you know that?

A magnificent and heartbreaking poem. Thanks for posting it.

Anything else I've seen, Quincy, and I pay attention. Actually, Paul Lake's Charlemagne's Vision runs a close second, so I retract the verb "dwarfs." I think Charles' poem appeared in the Hudson Review, and I still remember my excitement at reading it.

Oh, don't get me wrong--I like the Martin poem. But "dwarfs"? Not a chance.

Ahem - maybe I can get us back on track by noting that Signs and Wonders really is wonderful - lots of good stuff to be found there, well worth adding to your shopping lists.

Frank

What Frank said ... Indeed, I have a book review to that effect forthcoming in Think Journal.

Cheers,
...Alex

Seriously? What am I missing? You need to educate me on this one. Maybe I'm just not much for disaster poems? I didn't even like "Convergence of the Twain!" ;)

Or maybe it's the book title that put me off. Those words are dog whistles in certain circles. Of course, I have no idea if that's what he means. Perhaps its perfectly innocent.

Anyway, I'd like to hear about exactly why so many people, of such diverse tastes, like the poem. I'm seriously interested.

Thanks,

Bill

I will not be of much help, Bill.


At the risk of marginalizing myself even further in my corner of a sphere, may I?:

911 is a tough category. There are a lot of terrible 9-11 poems, as we all know. There is a reason for this. Martin’s isn’t terrible. But so much of his poem is a clever if not ostentatious framing of the disaster within a relatively obscure turn in the Revolutionary War—harrowing though it was. He spends too much time illuminating the frame rather than the picture.

Martin, as far as I’m concerned, makes (rather blatantly) the mistake of bringing his knowledge to an event that can only overwhelm and take us outside what we know. How many people read this poem and said, “Oh, I didn’t know about Wallabout Bay. Interesting. Let me Google that”? He imposes history on something bigger than history. Thus he also imposes intellectual control, in this case by offering narrative historical context, which I don’t generally admire in any art.

The best part of the poem is, of course, the end where he lets go. The middle is largely a well-written description of events. Some of it is moving.

Here he gets on the right track:

Like something we’d imagined but not known

Then he insists on aligning it with the past--a specificity in the past. With something we know. Well, perhaps that is a human tendency. But even a Pearl Harbor comparison would become utterly beside the point.


Some observations: The poem begins with a reference to himself as he tells us where he was when it happened—often the hallmark of a bad 9-11 poem. Oddly, it goes on to read as if it could have been written by someone who was in Kansas that day. And maybe the best 911 poem has been written by someone who was in Kansas that day.

He uses the word "paradigm" without irony—often the hallmark of a bad poem.

This poem succeeds, for me, to the extent that he brings experience, rather than knowledge, to the pile. But the personal experience is obscured in this. I would prefer the purely personal to being told how we all feel. It's a fine poem, but I really am amazed at how people cherish this as a great 9-11 poem.

Here's Paul's poem, which was a winner of our sonnet bakeoff, even though it's not fourteen lines:

Charlemagne's Vision


Remembering his father's last campaign
To purge the south of Saracen and Moor
And how Grandfather stopped the tide from Spain,
Driving the Muslims from the fields of Tours,
King Charlemagne surveyed the scattered dead
At Roncesvalles, where Roland's ivory horn
Lay shattered on the ground beneath his head,
Then left his slaughtered Paladins, to mourn,

And saw, in troubled sleep, a second Rome
Encoiled by hydra heads--a living net
Encircling London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Each serpent-head poised like a minaret
Above the drowsy heart of Christendom--
Loud cries, bright shafts, red flames, a streaking jet,
Then bodies bowed down in a vast salaam.

I love Paul's poem and Charles' poem for precisely the reason Rick dislikes the latter, their historical sweep. They are ambitious. Of course I love Paul's poem for calling it as I see it. We are both inimical to Islamofascism.

Wow, Lake's poem is the sort of thing Le Pen would read to his children. It's really, really awful! But then again, I'm inimical to Islamophobia. (Which implies no fondness for "Islamofascism," whatever that might be.)

What Quincy said.

Not buying the historical pole vault from Roncevalles to 9/11 either.
Drowsy heart of Christendom?

This is exactly my point about the title. It's hard to imagine anything more christofacist than the vineyard movement. All the elements are there: the cult of personality, the mysticism, the received authority, which is yet undetermined, the separation. It's almost as if they've never read Martin Buber, much less Maritain. ;)

Maybe he didn't know anything about that movement when he chose that title, even though that's hard to imagine. But readers can't be blamed for wondering if there isn't some kind of intended association.

Thanks,

Bill

I think I can assure you that everything about Paul's poem is intentional.

Bill, I'm assuming that by "that title" you mean Martin's Signs and Wonders. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
With respect, I've never heard of the Vineyard movement until just now. American religion is such a ferment of stuff that everybody can't be aware of everything. In the Martin books I've read, I see nothing like that--very little, in fact, that's overtly religious.

Readers who wondered, if there were any, would be set straight by reading one or two reviews of the book (and there are already a few online) that mention its introductory epigraph, a tiny little poem in which he explains what sense of "sign" and what sense of "wonder" he has in mind.

It's a very good book, as I see things. I think people ought to go back one and read his Starting From Sleep as well; it's even better.

Maryann,

Thanks for your note, and thanks for the clarification. There is indeed some strange, strange stuff out there, and it's pretty hard to keep track. To read the story of John Wimber's life, one just has to shake one's head and say "only in America." But his seems uneventful, in comparison to Lonnie Frisbee...

Clearly, I don't know enough about Martin's work, although I did find some things online today. I've got some research to do...

Thanks,

Bill

Same here. Or should that be, me neither.

But I do know, having sat through many a hellfire and damnation sermon in my day, that it has biblical origins, and just as so-called patriots do their damnedest to take over the flag, so are there factions who want to take over the Bible. In fact, that seems to be a common practice over there across the pond, folks grabbing a biblical quote, usually out of context (see below), and applying it to whatever they want to sell, be it a presidential candidate or horse medicine.

Romans 15:19 Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

PS. Just to add that I am not including Professor Charles Martin in that category mentioned above. Until someone proves otherwise, I won't believe there is a connection between the poem's title and the organization Bill informed us about.

Martin is politically liberal, and is from what I gather a not terribly religious ex-Catholic. Total red herring.