“ALL COME TO LOOK FOR AMERICA”

a review by Jim Clark

Joseph

Having tried, unsuccessfully, some years ago to put together an anthology of Appalachian poetry for a respected university press, I have nothing but admiration for editors of anthologies. The reasons for my lack of success were many, but one was certainly the fact that I seriously underestimated the complexity of such a project and its demands on an editor’s time and energy. And when the anthology’s focus is as potentially fraught as that of Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, it’s a tribute to the skill, perseverance, and even-handedness of editors Joseph Bathanti and David Potorti that we have this valuable document at all. Bathanti and Potorti are each particularly suitable for this work as both have spent much of their lives working for social justice and fostering understanding and community. Bathanti’s tireless work with prisoners and veterans is exemplary and oft noted, while Potorti has served as an effective ambassador for and champion of North Carolina writers and writing in his various roles with the North Carolina Arts Council, and he is co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, having lost his brother, Jim, when the North Tower fell on 9/11.

The book is a medium-sized, handsome grayscale production featuring one poem each by 116 different poets. The cover design features a photograph of French aerialist Philippe Petit literally “crossing the rift” on a tightrope strung between the two towers on August 7, 1974.

In his Preface, Bathanti provides some insight into both the book’s title and its cover illustration: “The great Samuel Beckett reminds us that ‘Words are all we have.’ The aspiration of this volume is to brave the rift, the breach, that only words can begin, however precariously, to mend” (xii). Bathanti also gives an account of the book’s genesis, and, importantly, touches on the real value, the raison d’etre, of such an anthology of occasional poems focusing on a historical event. Speaking of “the vast collateral fallout associated with 9/11,” Bathanti writes: “These poems give moving and powerful testimony to what Carolyn Forché calls ‘the poetry of witness’ – a ritual act of reconciliation through language; a renewed sense of shared humanity and righteous resistance; and, perhaps most importantly, a sacred vow to never forget” (xii). Speaking of the poets whose works are included, Potorti writes in his warm and personal Introduction: “Most of all, I hope their words make it safe to remember: to remember my brother and all those who perished; to remember who we were, and aspire to be; and to remember the world we lived in, not through some sentimental filter, but with a renewed sense of our connectedness and shared future” (xiv).

As for the poems, free verse unsurprisingly predominates. Some, like Cathy Smith Bowers’s “For Okra,” are classic, simple, imagistic poems. In four spare quatrains, elegant and personal, the poem describes that moment when, after fearing for the safety of someone, one receives the good news the person is all right, and one can seemingly breathe again and the world seems vivid, refreshed. The okra of the title (“I’d never seen so green a green / before”) is an offering of thanks for the safety of a loved one: “I’ve dredged and / fried it. Just the / way you like it.”

At the other end of the free verse spectrum one finds “Before and After the AfterMATH: 9x11=23,” by Earl S. Braggs, a multi-page experimental poem that uses mathematics as its organizational principle. Featuring an epigraph by Walt Whitman – “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” – the poem juxtaposes major events of American history (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King), with ordinary people going about their daily routines on the morning of September 11, 2001. The use of mathematics gives the poem’s focus on the 9/11 attack an awful sense of inevitability: “AK47 + 1 = AK 48 + 2 = 50 United States of confusion lower at half-mast or mass greater than and/or equal to the sum of static in the pockets of 19 boys.”

Whitmanic in its own way, with its many apostrophes and allusions and its long lines continuing beyond the right-hand margins, Irene Blair Honeycutt’s “Song for the Hours” begins with images of ruin, sadness, death, and mourning – “O railroad spike . . . next to the splintered tracks . . . / O train whistle of woe . . . / Opossum – cold by the roadside . . . / O mourning stars . . . “ – then quotes from John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island” – “Any man’s death diminishes me” – to make the point of our human interconnectedness. The poem ends with the biblical Abraham’s statement of witness: “I am here.” Finally, just as some have criticized Whitman’s verse as too prosaic, several of the pieces included here take the form of what one might call prose poems.

Robert Morgan’s brief “A Sickness in the Air” looks back on a business flight to New York City on September 10, 2001 from the vantage point of twenty years. That day “There seemed to be a sickness in the air . . . a dread and menace” presaging the next day’s cataclysm, which set in motion “two wars abroad that never end, and one at home to rip the fabric of our nation apart.”

Somewhat similarly, Alan Shapiro’s slightly longer “Manhood” examines the toxic fallout from 9/11 that often set neighbor against neighbor, “as if what tumbled down with the towers were the civic Babels of our separate lives, as if we had been blown by the explosions backward to a pre-Babel nearly

Edenic understanding, speaking the same tongue inside the same body politic that flexed its outraged muscle through the words we spoke, no matter who we spoke them to.”

Co-editor David Potorti’s piece, “Jim,” takes the form of a segmented essay consisting of seven numbered paragraphs. The focus is Potorti’s brother, Jim, who died when the North Tower fell on 9/11. References to the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi, which his brother took him to see, and to Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki evoke the tragedy and malaise of a contemporary “life out of balance.” When Potorti rings the New York Fire Department bell “for the person you lost,” “The big sound swelled and went off among the buildings, returning empty-handed.”

Of the handful of formal poems included in the collection, Anthony S. Abbott’s finely crafted pantoum “This Innocent Sky” does a marvelous job of juxtaposing the aerialist Phillipe Petit as he “floats beyond time, here in this innocent sky” of “a beautiful summer morning” in 1974, with a later “beautiful autumn morning, sky clear” in which “bodies hurtle through the air between the towers.” It’s a bravura performance.

Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell contributes “The Attending,” a somber but uplifting celebration of “the ancestral choir / Of prophets, sages, founders of the state, / Who lend us strength and solace when the world is rent / And everywhere besieged with fire.” The poem consists of four sestets with lines roughly iambic pentameter rhyming abcbac. Chappell is a master of many styles, including the lofty, highminded public voice on display here, which doubtless owes much to his master’s degree studies in eighteenth-century literature at Duke.

Sarah Lindsay’s “Nachtmusik,” a portrait of an old German couple who are preparing to play classical music for their own enjoyment, is interesting, formally, in that the middle three quatrains rhyme (either abab or abba, mostly slant), but the first and last quatrains do not. As they tune their instruments, the hair of the woman’s violin bow “falls loose from the frog” prompting her to observe, “How we play such fragile things, I don’t know, / they could fall apart in our hands.” The man, meanwhile, remembers a night in Berlin when “a bomb / buried the bridegroom and all but one of his friends,” and, huddled outside his own home, he “heard the grand piano fall five floors – / heard its last five monstrous chords / that blot- ted out for years all the Bach he knew.” And yet, the concluding line of the poem suggests their resiliency, and the strength and solace they find in their music, “‘Mozart, then,’ he says, and so they play.”

Diana Pinckney’s “Fallen Gardens” is another poem containing formal elements. The poem is composed of quatrains with each line roughly the same length, but only the first and the fifth quatrains can be said to feature rhyme, which is mostly slant. Perhaps the imperfect form mirrors the Edenic notion of “the fall” in the poem’s title. The poem features a father during wartime, who is apparently being forced to execute his own son, “a young informer broken / to the ground at his father’s feet.” The father “pleads for Allah, for any god / to grant him Abraham’s deliverance,” but the sky is “Bereft of angels” and the “stinging wind” offers no answer to his plea.

My own memories and impressions of 9/11 consist mostly of the familiar terrible images from that morning – an airliner, flying much too low, seemingly disappearing into the tower, gleaming in the sun, followed by an orange ball of fire (watching it on my office mate’s computer screen, I first thought it was imagery from a video game), and well-dressed people appearing to take flight from impossibly high windows. About a month later, though, I was watching the television broadcast of The Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden. The audience was clearly emotional, and the musicians, many of them British, seemed genuine in their empathy and consolation. Good will abounded, and it seemed possible that something positive might ultimately come from such a horrific tragedy. David Bowie, wearing a gray overcoat on the dark stage, illuminated by a single spotlight, began playing a simple waltz-time figure on a tiny keyboard. The words to Paul Simon’s “America” eventually swelled into the vast arena, to the rising and falling cheering of the crowd: “They’ve all come to look for America,” Bowie sang. “All come to look for America.” Sadly, it was not to be. Within a year the US Congress would grant President George W. Bush authority to decide whether to launch a military attack on Iraq, and the Iraq War would begin on March 20, 2003. And yet, reading these poems of witness to 9/11 and its aftermath, I can still hear an echo of that voice, ringing out in one of the great civic spaces of one of the greatest cities on earth, “They’ve all come to look for America.” n

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Semifinalist

BY MORROW DOWDLE

Brow

“I am my own muse, the subject I know best.”—Frida Kahlo simplistic image on a bookmark the artist’s head a quote beneath meant to inspire freedom then why is she not free face stripped of its integrity eyebrows divided by a clean gap edited without her consent reviewed against her preference she alone has rights to the dream of herself emblazoned with that long brush of black talisman against convention so much lost she would not give one hair more goddess-creator of your own conception i vindicate you with this pen aim between your eyes and stroke stroke stroke you back into place

MORROW DOWDLE has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2018 and 2020, as well as a Best of the Net nominee in 2020. She edits and critiques poetry for Sunspot Literary Review and is an organizer of the Living Poetry collective based in the North Carolina Triangle. She works as a physician assistant in mental health and lives in Hillsborough, NC.

PETER MARIN was born and raised in Mexico City. He received a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Hunter College. His work has been exhibited throughout the world and appears in public and private collections and foundations including Boys and Girls Club, The City of Raleigh, and SAS. He received the 2019 Latino Diamante Inc. Award for Arts and Culture given by North Carolina’s first Latino arts organization. He is an adjunct Assistant Professor with Wake Tech Community College and Living Arts College. He also works with the North Carolina Museum of Art, Arts Together, Pullen Arts Center, and Seratoma Arts Center. He is the owner and founder of

Marin created this 30-foot ofrenda placed at the entrance to the NC Museum of Art’s 2020 exhibit Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism. The altarlike structure refers to the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, which occurs in late fall, in memory of those who have died. Such ofrendas appear in public places, as well as in homes, as a way for Mexicans to celebrate the dead and invite them into the Land of the Living by placing offerings on the altar. Artists Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, celebrated Dia de los Muertos to honor their loved ones and this ancient Mexican tradition.