Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets
Published by Melville House Books, 2002 (First Edition) and 2011 (Tenth Anniversary Edition)
Poems included: “The Old Neighborhood” and “Ash Wednesday, 2002”
About the poems:
“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some artists and writers were able to respond right away. I was not one of them. For months I wrote nothing at all. Not a word. Indeed, the very idea of writing was anathema to me. What could one say? What words could I possibly find to express my feelings, to record what I had seen? I lived a block away, was there that morning and escaped on foot; my life was changed and health compromised that day. Yet, when the “Call for Poems” for this anthology was forwarded to me by a friend six months later, I immediately set down to write. These two poems are the result. They are the only poems I wrote until a year later, when I started writing my eyewitness memoir in verse, a project which continues to grow to this day. For further information about that body of work, please see the page “September 12th” under Current Projects.
Writing these first two poems unleashed in me a delayed flood of work in response to 9/11. I am grateful to Editors Valerie Merians and Dennis Loy Johnson for their inspired idea, one which released the writer in me, and for their visually handsome volumes. Out of so much grief, beauty.” —Andrea Carter Brown
From the Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Edition:
“Ten years later, lots of little but significant things are different about life in New York due to the 9/11 attacks . . . . But meanwhile, the big thing that this book represents, we believe, is unchanged, and perhaps deepened. That thing . . . is the spirit of New York that existed in the immediate aftermath of the horror that struck that day like lightning, and that seemed equally unexplainable.”
—Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, Editors
From the Introduction to the First Edition:
“How did it feel and what did it mean to be there, at Ground Zero? Or ambling nearby? These poems give some answers. What does it mean to be an American? I suspect that many poets have mixed feelings about America, not just now [in 2002] but permanently. I do myself . . . . But then again I am proud of my country too . . . . Our freedom as artists is staggering. Our ability to pull together as a community is fabled. How lucky we are, and we know it. As Rachel Hadas declares, “We mourn and rejoice at once.” So many ways of mourning, so many of rejoicing. The poems in this book are part of what makes me proud.” —Alicia Ostriker