Notes to our producers:
I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.
THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING
“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”
“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”
“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”
9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.
As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.†A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,â€
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
And “After great pain.†As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling†the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulyssesâ€), Rumi, and Hafiz.
Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2â€, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all, as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,†and it seems a better world already.
c Barbara Mossberg 2011
Notes to our producers:
I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.
THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING
“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”
“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”
“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”
9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.
As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.†A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,â€
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
And “After great pain.†As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling†the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulyssesâ€), Rumi, and Hafiz.
Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2â€, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all, as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,†and it seems a better world already.
© Barbara Mossberg 2011
