This is America

Over the last few months, as the 20th anniversary of September 11th, 2001, has approached, I have imagined how I will mark the day. I have considered what I should say to my students, too young to have known a world before the events of 9/11, and how those events will enter into conversations with my family members, some of whom have since joined the armed forces. I have considered what effect this day will have upon my fellow citizens, particularly those for whom it was a coming-of-age moment, as it was for me.

As I have considered these things, I have had the privilege of having on my desk Michael Horan’s long poem, America, America, which, as I reflect on the events of 9/11, has become for me a helpful interlocutor. It is a poem that reflects deeply on this day and on our country, and which, over the next few days, Dappled Things will have the privilege of bringing to you.

America, America is a poem with a capacious voice. Because it is a lyric sequence comprising three parts and roughly fifteen sections, it is able to take on various voices, various poetic registers. Some sections give us what we might expect from a poem about such a day, recounting the plight of New Yorkers, how “the Pentagon smoked / like a votive for the many dead,” and the experience of being glued to the TV knowing little more than the fact that much had changed and was “too new to understand.” Other sections hint at the imperceptible changes that entered our classrooms, our offices, and our public discourse in the days and months that followed.

Yet these sections are shuffled in with unexpected elements that elevate this poem from lyric reflection to epic aspiration. Intimate dialogue between spouses gives way to Whitmanesque lists that delineate side by side those qualities of America that we love and those that we are ashamed of. A challenging hopefulness spoken in a philosophical key enters toward the end of the poem, which all in all amounts to a love song to America. The poem’s voice, capacious like the country it describes, struggles, again like our country, to contain more parts than can conceivably be held together.

Simultaneously, this capacious voice is undeniably personal. The environs in which the speaker grew up come to life, as does the Audubon preserve where he takes refuge. We overhear an intimate dialogue with an interlocutor known only as “you,” and this dialogue frames the whole poem, placing a world-historical event squarely within any American home.

Surprisingly, it is this “you” that does so much of the work of holding together the many registers of the speaker’s voice. As I read the poem, I couldn’t help but feel a constant ambiguity as to who this other presence was. At times, I was sure it was a spouse, sitting in the kitchen with our speaker, puzzling over the “riddles of existing.” At other times, I was certain it was the addressee of the poem’s title, America herself. At still other times, I couldn’t tell if it was one or the other or both. Nevertheless, she is a constant presence that draws the poem out of the speaker. “Just talk to me,” she says at the end of the first section, and repeatedly throughout the poem. This “you” is the catalyst of what we read.

So many of us, including myself, experienced 9/11 as a national tragedy far more than a personal one, but this speaker’s voice, engaged in intimate dialogue with whom he loves the most, admitting his sorrows and shortcomings, puzzling out how we thought of ourselves then and how we should think of ourselves now, and what it was that changed us—this voice, grounded by the ever-present “you,” I believe has made me feel how deeply the events of 9/11 may be impressed on each of us. And I believe it has made me feel a small something of the grief felt by those Americans for whom 9/11 was a personal tragedy far more than a national one, and for whom we should give due regard and due prayer.

I’m still not sure what I will say to my students in a couple of days, though I can expect the conversations with my family and friends, as we attempt to mark the past, will range from solemn commitments to unanswerable questions. No matter, I can say that from this poem I have gained something of great significance. It is a poem that attempts to bear the weight of who we are as a people, of what we have suffered and what we have become, and it is a poem that, from under this weight, attempts to direct our eyes toward something that is so often hard to see—that we as a people, though we may be shattered, are capable of

reaching

for the source of [our] form,

which does not come easily

because it is other

but will come eventually

because it is.