[Rick Mullin]

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.