… and we go to poetry to make us feel and see it once more with its meanings intact.
It’s hard to write a poem about an atrocity. Many 9/11 poems are long personal narratives of the event: scenes witnessed in Lower Manhattan, the way the collapse looked from nearby windows. Some, like September Sonnet by Michael Salcman, are highly compressed lyrics in which physical descriptions also appear, but where the point is less to produce a verse record of one’s impressions than to capture, with small but heavily weighted lines, the larger fact of all of us having been immediately overwhelmed, and then permanently haunted, by the incommensurability and mystery of the battering.
Salcman begins by folding his poem into Auden’s 1st September 1939, which has emerged as the pre-9/11 poem, with its coincidence of month and theme as Auden assumes the full dread of war having broken out again in Europe.
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September Sonnet
Auden was right – our buildings grope
the sky for certainty but are dumb
and blind. In the fierce limbus of my eye
the plummeting birds burn still,
asbestos rains and twisted steel
falls in a broth of jet fuel,
cable wrap and mineral dust;
it bathes the snouts of corpse-hunting
dogs and spatters our helmeted Nimrods.
Who stoked these fires while we slept?
Who blew on the embers
Filling September with regret,
and who will be consoled if irony dies
a thousand deaths? Not you or I.
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Buildings grope the sky, wrote Auden, and Salcman, struck by the same wretched irony of our high bright-edged monuments suddenly cringing as the sky goes blank and the world senseless, echoes the earlier poet. More broadly, importing Auden lends this poem historical resonance; and Salcman’s use throughout of simple beautifully balanced lyrical lines (Who stoked these fires while we slept?), lines that read like translations from Greek tragedies, sharpens our sense of the infinite profundity of events that can never be fully assimilated.
In the fierce limbus of my eye
the plummeting birds burn still,
asbestos rains and twisted steel
falls in a broth of jet fuel,
cable wrap and mineral dust;
Beautiful stuff here, conveying our inability to make memories of 9/11 stop. The falling objects persist on the edge of vision. The mind’s eye keeps seeing the “broth” (such a well-chosen word, with rich, witchy associations) of jet fuel, and the “mineral dust” (a great phrase, conjuring with horrific concision the organic particles in the air) also stays with us.
These lines remind me of a passage in James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, when the poet talks about what he calls his “psychic incontinence,” his uncontrollable tendency to summon to his mind, and somehow to have to account for, image after image after image:
… churning down the optic sluice
… Faces young, old
… all random, ravenous images
… avid for inwardness
… The warm spate bears me on, helpless…
The event comes back to us unbidden, iconic elements of the awful day that want us to take them in, to do something with them.
And notice Salcman’s fantastic use of a kind of loose assonance: limbus, plummeting; birds, burn; falls, broth. It gives the poem an elegance, a sheer verbal beauty, at obvious odds with its subject matter, and this you could say conveys a sly sort of human triumph over the deathliness of the event. We are still to be found on the edge of the scene, generating beauty and even meaning out of it.
The dust
bathes the snouts of corpse-hunting
dogs and spatters our helmeted Nimrods.
Nothing of the horror is avoided here; and yet once again the combination of sheer verbal beauty (bathes) and ancient reference (Nimrod – the Biblical precursor of the New York City Fire Department) heightens – aestheticizes – the horror in a way that lets us retain the horror and at the same time somewhat transcend it.
who will be consoled if irony dies
a thousand deaths?
These lines bring us back to Auden:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages…
Ironic because almost comically at odds with, resistant to, the powerful darkness everywhere, our various points of light, our places of rebellion and affirmation in the face of atrocity, include things like poetry. Poetry brings harmony and form and powerful subjective utterance to a stuporous world.
Some university systems – Alaska’s, Hawaii’s, Nevada’s – are hopelessly mired in go-nowhereism and that’s for a lot of reasons and that’s not going to change.
The University of Nebraska system is like this, even though its chancellor insists the place trembles on the brink of being “a leading urban metropolitan institution.”
They don’t much cotton to academics in those parts, infinitely preferring sports. Sports gets gobs of money that other universities would use for instructors and classrooms and all.
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Consider the new cost-overrun and firmly in the red arena on the Omaha campus.
Although there’s a very nice, almost brand new, arena just down the road, and although wee Omaha already has too many arenas hemorrhaging money (one of them’s well on its way to bankrupting a town), UNO announced that building another new arena was imperative and we swear it’ll pay for itself right off the bat! Won’t need to use university funds, or soak students, or anything.
But stupid is as stupid does, and they’re covering their big losses on the thing with university funds, and that’s going to continue indefinitely. So you see how the sludge happens: Stupid sports-obsessed schools never get out from under their sports obsession.
But they don’t want to. Since they don’t see the point of intellectuality, what else would they do with their money?
[North Korean] authorities have reportedly been holding mass meetings in various parts of the country to warn people against making sarcastic remarks about the regime and its supreme leader. … Officials pointed to the phrase “this is all America’s fault” as an example of sarcasm it doesn’t want uttered. It’s common for North Koreans to use the phrase ironically to criticize the country’s leadership.
[P]rosecutors showed graduate students in [Yujie] Ding’s lab at Lehigh University did all of the work to develop an atmospheric sensor for NASA, while Ding and Zotova pocketed most of the $700,000 through a shell company to which the contract had been awarded.
Of the myriad thieving engineering professor stories UD has covered over the years, this one has it all: romance (Ding’s co-fraudster was his loving wife), slavery (what are graduate students for?), endless, fun, court machinations by the accused (“You have one of the best attorneys in the city,” [the judge] told Ding. “It appears you are attempting to delay this matter.”), and just, you know, even by the standards of thieving engineering professors, one of the most comprehensively sucky human beings that the human comedy, la condition humaine, the human animal, has to offer.
No one at Lehigh’s bothered to take his faculty page down. Could be they’re waiting until after sentencing. Ding “faces a statutory maximum of 120 years in prison,” and maybe Lehigh wants to add this impressively high number to his profile, but is waiting for it to be official.
… our scholar/athletes, wildly honored by their schools, go on to complete remarkable tackles in the NFL:
[Dallas Cowboy Greg Hardy] allegedly threw Nicole Holder, his then girlfriend, on a couch covered in loaded rifles and shotguns after tossing her into a shower, where she fell into the bathtub, and he drug her out by her hair and then strangled her with both hands.
The football hero with loaded guns on the couch and a girlfriend dragged by the hair and strangled … Nothing to see here. We Americans reserve our rage for Colin Kaepernick failing to salute the flag.
Aldon Smith
was arrested five times in three years with charges including DUI on three different occasions, vandalism, hit-and-run, and felony weapons charges, which were later reduced to misdemeanors. Smith was also taken into custody at LAX and charged with a false report of a bomb threat.
Chicago Bear Ray McDonald
was arrested three times between 2010 and 2015 and was named in a sexual assault investigation in 2014. His arrests were for drunken driving in 2010; assaulting his ex-fiancee, who was pregnant with his child; and once again for misdemeanor domestic violence and child endangerment. The latest instance involved McDonald assaulting a woman while she was holding his son, who was born six months prior.
Bruce Miller
has been arrested twice in the past 17 months, both for some form of assault. He was arrested in March 2015 for assaulting his girlfriend and breaking her phone. The initial report stated that Miller shoved his girlfriend and broke her phone after a verbal argument. Later, he stated he never shoved her, and she changed her story to coincide with his.
Then, this past Sunday, Miller was arrested for assaulting a 70-year-old man and his son at the Marriott, where he was told he was at the wrong room.
Before tackling the 70-year-old, Miller got thrown out of a restaurant:
Miller stared at the buffet line for about 20 minutes, then approached the queue and started arguing with guests over a sandwich…
“I believe he wanted their sandwiches,” said [a restaurant employee].
Giants kicker Josh Brown is every bit as great a tackler as these other guys.
His now ex-wife has accused him of domestic violence on over 20 occasions, and yet, even with his latest arrest, the Giants re-signed the 37-year-old kicker. Meanwhile, the NFL suspended him for just one game…
In olden days, a glimpse of woman
Was looked on as quite inhuman
But now God knows
Anything goes!
Good womenfolk who once faced jailing
Now all find themselves unveiling
Their long black clothes.
Anything goes!
… and Indiana State University is reaching that potential! Desperate for good players and arrantly disregarding anything else, it keeps recruiting people it eventually – under pressure – has to let go.
The latest one was kicked out of the University of Kansas and then some assistant coach who knew him there and now works at ISU recruited him cuz you know he knows the guy and though two women are suing Kansas because they say he sexually assaulted them he’s a good player and that’s no reason – in today’s who cares about sexual assault on campus climate – to keep him off the field… I mean, ISU can issue warnings to its female students: Accused sexual predator on campus LOOK OUT. Something like that. Then they couldn’t say they didn’t see it coming.
Missouri legislators are furious: Football players at the University of Missouri can’t carry handguns. Coach says so.
Rep. Joe Don McGaugh, R-Carrollton, called the policy “unbelievable.”
McGaugh is clearly shaken. He will need time to himself before he’s able to focus on countermeasures. I’m sure his fellow legislators are in the same boat.
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Once McGaugh and other lawmakers feel able to act, UD can guarantee that the kids will get all the handguns they want. Relax.
Caleb Helsley threw a touchdown pass to Taylor Armbristor to make it 14-0 after a missed two-point attempt with 7:36 remaining. He then ran for another with under a minute left as the Indians (1-0) led 20-0 at the break. In the fourth quarter, Helsley found Armbristor again to make the lead 33-6.
Gunfire on the McLain side of the stadium forced the game to be called with 2:30 remaining in the fourth quarter.
