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D I S P A T C H E S
Lack of Words
10.29.01 | "Thanks, because, you know, I don’t know how to work these things “” snapped the ever-sunny Lou Reed at a well-meaning woman fixing his mic stand, just before launching into an impassioned reading of a selection from the Edgar Allen Poe play Poetry. The latest outpouring of Reed’s storied short temper occurred at a benefit poetry reading called "Words to Comfort" held Oct. 17 at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium in Manhattan’s West Village. Literary heavyweights such as Rick Moody, Sharon Olds, Richard Price and Oscar Hijuelos were there, along with Giandomenico Picco of the United Nations, filmmaker Ric Burns, actress Claire Danes and assorted poets, musicians, schoolchildren and NYPD and NYFD officers. Proceeds went to the New York State World Trade Center Relief Fund. On one of the first truly cool and windy fall nights, New Yorkers made another attempt to try to come to grips with the enormity of what has happened over the past six weeks. Though F-15’s no longer swoop low around the perimeter of Manhattan, and the pleading hole left in the southern skyline seeps deeper into the city’s vision of itself, there’s no question that this is still a shaken city, trying in equal measures to brace for the next attack while convincing itself that nothing else can happen. Or at least nothing that can compare in any way with what has already happened. While stuck on a subway train crossing the Manhattan Bridge that deceptively peaceful and bright September morning, watching the towers burn, and later, standing on a rooftop tracing the endless plume of smoke as it snaked it’s way over the Brooklyn sky, making desperate calls to find out if friends were alive, it would have seemed inconceivable to me that I could ever sit peacefully for three hours listening to poetry. But there I was, 36 days later, doing just that. The reading took place just two blocks south of Union Square, the site of one of the biggest spontaneous public memorials to the fallen towers and missing neighbors. I visited the memorial just two days after the attacks, standing dumbly amongst hundreds of others lighting candles, laying flowers in front of a makeshift plaster candle, and reading and writing comments on slabs of construction paper taped to the ground. I stood there for about half an hour before I realized how eerily quiet the scene was. Though the Square was packed with people, many crying or silently praying, no one spoke much above a church whisper.
Just across the street from Union Square, the National Guard and the NYPD stood watch over lower Manhattan, not allowing anyone without proper I.D. south of 14th street. The realization that This Really Happened sucker punched us again and again, stubbornly refusing to become fact even as we smelled the burning concrete and watched the smoke rise days after the attack. In my Brooklyn neighborhood that week, people came across charred office papers in their backyards that had drifted over in the breeze like artifacts unearthed from a dead civilization. But now, listening to poetry just a few short miles from the disaster and two blocks from the candle wax-stained ground of Union Square, we tried to reclaim bits of the easy humanity we thought we had lost. It was Lou Reed’s surliness, however, which at first was so surprising, that later struck me as a perfect expression of an attempt to return to normalcy. Of course things are very different now than they were a few weeks ago, and New Yorkers have been extremely civil to one another the last few weeks, but in the end, how can we be expected to change the very nature of who we are? His little temper tantrum was one of the more honest things I had seen in awhile: If Lou Reed has always been a childish jerk, why shouldn’t he continue to be a childish jerk? I almost wondered if he did it on purpose to break the self-conscious solemnity of the moment and loosen everyone up a bit. If he did, good for him, and if he didn’t, good for him anyway. Throughout the night, many of the better-known writers simply recited pieces written by others that dealt with heroism, loss and death. Oscar Hijuelos read a passage from Borges while poet Lawrence Joseph read from Whitman’s Death of a Hero. Writings by Robert Frost and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the epic of Gilgamesh, were well represented. Lou Reed, as mentioned, read from Poe, and Claire Danes (no, I’m not including her among the class of better-known writers) read the lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” Early on, novelist Richard Price distinguished himself as the only literary heavyweight to write something new for the occasion: an essay about his teenage daughter and a bomb scare at her lower-Manhattan school in the days following the attack. During a very funny part, he began to choke up, most likely from a parent’s supreme relief that his child is still alive, still capable of being confounding and so unconsciously funny. There were a few other tender moments, like when a young girl nervously took the stage to play a halting version of "God Bless America" on her flute between readers, or when grade school students of PS 321 and 51 in Brooklyn read poems about what they remembered from Sept. 11, including some surprisingly mature poems about children who had lost a parent in the attack.
Unfortunately, few of the more famous participants reached this level of emotional honesty. Reading pieces from other writers, though a relevant and thoughtful gesture in its own way, failed to capture the passion and the immediacy of this historical moment. There is no question that great art — art we would call ‘timeless’ — manages to transcend the temporal gap between its creation and its discovery by each successive generation. But what I wanted, and I suspect much of the audience wanted, was not a reading of a passage from Gilgamesh — what we wanted, what we needed, were our contemporaries to stake out a claim for the present that just might withstand the rigors of time. And if it doesn’t, so be it. At its worst, a less-than-perfect attempt to define our pain in fresh language is far better than grabbing a dusty volume off a shelf and punching the time clock for a two-minute reading. In general, the literary set has been disappointingly quiet over the last few weeks. Rick Moody wrote a very brief piece in Salon that didn’t really go anywhere, and Arthur Miller recently spoke up in the New York Times about the racial divisions in New York City during WWII that hinted at the present crisis and the current mood of the city. Still, there have been few insights offered or firm positions staked out. In her essay "Believing in Literature," Dorothy Allison wrote that literature provides "a reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined." The writers at the poetry reading were given the opportunity to do just this, and the fact that they passed can only be described as something of an intellectual tragedy. And so it fell to the non-professionals who shared the stage to read from the present, to deliver works dripping with shock, anger, disbelief and black humor. A Palestinian woman born and raised in New York read a piece written in a conversational yet demanding tone, asking what will happen to her brother in the Navy, who, though Brooklyn-born, is afraid to pray around his shipmates. Another poet performed a hilarious riff on a street book vendor who is trying to sell his memories of the towers for spare change. These pieces were sharp and biting, making no apologies for being unedited and written on the fly while emotions are still raw. It is just disappointing that the professional set didn’t find the time to give us more of the same. Walking back out into the cold blasts of October wind following the reading, the crowd, though emotionally and somewhat physically spent after such an event, seemed buoyed by what they had just witnessed. Art is a wonderful healer; it helps steady a rocking boat, and there was much in the evening to reflect on. While it was good to see famous writers donate their time, one can’t help but wonder what has happened to some our more profound cultural barometers when we need them the most. If we can’t rely on our writers to inform, order and question our humanity at this moment, and in ways the rest of us cannot, then where do we turn? Toward the end of the night, after reading his own esoteric selection, the novelist Rick Moody eyed the crowd silently for a moment before raising both fists in the air and shouting: "God bless New York City!" At any other time, this might have seemed a strange thing for Moody to do, but on this night it was in fact touching, and it captured his anger better than any tired passage read from a worn page. I only wish Moody, and the other writers, had read less and said more. Paul McLeary is a writer living in Brooklyn. Related Sites |
