Opinion: 9/11: Using poetry to cope with tragedy

The U.S. sometimes seems proud of being anti-intellectual, and yet even people who’ve never read a poem by choice will, under emotional stress -- a family death, or 9/11 -- sit down and try to write a poem. What is happening there? We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who’s just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain -- that’s the beginning of language. Trying to express that, it’s inexpressible, and poetry is really [there] to say what can’t be said. And that’s why people turn to it in these moments. They don’t know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won’t say it, but it’ll come closer to saying it than anything else will. [Interviewers asked, after 9/11,] what poems I was reading. I said I remembered that Dylan Thomas poem, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.’ Oh, it’s a great poem. Shall I recite it to you? [He does, and lingers on the last line:] ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ He was 25 when he wrote that.