Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971865914 ISBN 13: 9780971865914

Publisher: Melville House, 2002

Synopsis

How did poets in the capital of American poetry respond to the tragedies of September 11, 2001? This survey of New York's poetry community provides a unique snapshot, commemorating the first anniversary of the event and featuring many of the most important poets of our day.

Amongst the 45 poets featured are current Pulitzer Prize for Poetry-winner Stephen Dunn, the editor of the Best American Poetry series David Lehman, National Book Award finalist Alicia Ostriker, Jean Valentine and the poets laureate of Brooklyn and Queens.

Their poems—most of which have never been published before—cover an extraordinary variety of responses to the challenging experience of writing and living in the aftermath of tragedy. Some are eyewitness accounts by poets who were on the scene. Others more indirectly touch upon the events, and reflect the somber resonance of the tragedy's impact upon life in the city.

Coming on the first anniversary of the attacks, the book is meant to both examine the state of the art in America's poetry scene, and provide a revealing cross-section of a particular cultural moment.

But it will also speak to a greater need on an occasion that will surely be one of the most sensitive and difficult in our nation's history. The editors, in their foreword, cite the remarkable gravitation toward poetry that was visible everywhere in the days after the attacks—on the walls of firehouses, in letters-to-the-editor at local newspapers, even scrawled in the dusty ash covering lower Manhattan.

Residents across the nation then were drawn to poetry. This book will be of interest to both general and academic audiences, and will speak to that widely expressed impulse toward poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Dennis Loy Johnson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his stories and essays, which have appeared in Ploughshares and the Georgia Review. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Valerie Merians is the cofounding editor of Luna Tack, a literary arts magazine. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Alicia Ostriker was awarded the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for her collection The Imaginary Lover, and both The Crack in Everything and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 were National Book Award finalists. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ms., the Nation, and the New Yorker. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

From Library Journal:

9/11 After last year's tragic attack on the World Trade Center, Americans turned to poetry both to find expression for their grief and to assuage it. Not surprisingly, poets themselves turned to the blank page (or computer screen) to sum up the nation's sense of loss. Some of the best efforts are captured in this fine anthology, which represents the work of 45 poets from New York City. Included here are award winners like Stephen Dunn, Jean Valentine, Molly Peacock, Alicia Ostriker, David Lehmann, Rachel Hadas, and Geoffrey O'Brien, but many lesser-known poets appear as well. The tone ranges from shocked to angry to mournful, but overall the effect is one of meditation and of slowly gathering one's forces to conquer fear. In general, the best poems are those that skirt images of flaming skies and falling towers to recount a depth of mourning, as in Valentine's lines: "She would long/ to dig herself into the graveyard, her only/ daughter's ashes/ in her nose-in her mouth." But there is hope here, too: "Yes her daughter will be an orchard/ Yes the orchard will be a forest." An excellent addition to most collections.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Melville House
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0971865914
• ISBN 13: 9780971865914
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112
• Editor: Dennis Loy Johnson, Valerie Merians