Crossing the Rift
Writer: Joseph Bathanti
When David Potorti and I initially sent out our call to submit to Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets 0n 9/11 & Its aftermath, the anthology we’ve co-edited, we salted in the following: “As you contemplate your poem, consider this: 20 years later, no matter how you were touched by 9/11, that moment continues to resonate. There are so many lenses through which to view it, and such vast associated collateral fallout to consider. It was a day that seemed to set the agenda for the 21st Century, seeding Islamophobia, the vilification of immigrants and undocumented aliens, ramped-up xenophobia, nationalism and isolationism. It unleashed war and supercharged military budgets that continue to impoverish our nation, with accompanying losses of community, health and hope, and concurrent rises in homophobia, transphobia, virulent racism and domestic terrorism.”
Those four sentences served as not only a precis of what we envisioned as the anthology’s eventual core, but also as a free-ranging prompt for those casting about for a point of entry into a poem about 9/11 and the centrifugal waves that still emanate from its center. We posed a kind of existential question (Where were you on 9/11and where are you now – physically and psychically?) and invited poets to think dimensionally, even impressionistically, about 911, to dig into the personal, but also the radiational and associational valence of 9/11 – how it has, in very palpable ways, metamorphosed our world and set the agenda of the 21st Century.
We challenged those poets to reimagine their relationships not only with the actual moment of 9/11 and the generational cataclysm it represents, but also how 9/11 changed their relationships with the world and their communities; and, perhaps most importantly, how it influenced their poetics, their central preoccupation as poets, and what the great poet Larry Levis termed the “crucial past.” David and I, in that original call, also invoked Carolyn Forche, and what she dubs “the poetry of witness,” poetry as activism, documentary testimony and the pledge to honor shared humanity and dignity, and social and restorative justice.
We knew we’d harvest dozens of poems of straight-up recollection, those Where I Was That Day occasional poems, akin to those written, say, about Pearl Harbor or the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King – splendid poems that issue from myriad vantages and temperaments. But we are also intrigued at the poems that take on 9/11 peripherally, rather than head-on.
We fielded poems from an Iraq War veteran; from a student at Appalachian State University (the volume’s youngest contributor), whose father has been deployed, as a result of 9/11, for 20 of the 22 years she’s been on earth. I was particularly gratified by the handful of extraordinary poems by teachers who recount what that day was like for them in a school classroom with their students, attempting in horrific disbelief to take it all in as everyone huddled around the nearest television. There are the near-miss but for the Grace of God poems, David’s stunningly understated prose poem about his brother Jim, who died in the North Tower. There are poems that grapple with virulent racism and White Nationalism, the insane underbelly so-called patriotism that continues to fuel suspicion, the growing polarization and division among Americans. There are poems about othering, hate crime, and the depredation of the planet. Powerful and crucial poems of witness that peer unflinchingly into the heart of darkness and insist that we never forget.
Each poem in Crossing the Rift champions the indomitability of the human spirit and its dogged instinct toward healing. How people have gone on and endured – hope and beauty and unity, and a rallying cry to allow our “better angels” to prevail, the relentless belief that love is the only antidote for heartache, that story is more important than recrimination, that language is a sacrament. There are so many breathtaking poems about simply staggering through that day and the days to come. At the literal end of that day, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, there were babies to nurse and bathe and bed, and elderly parents to tend. The following Wednesday was another working day into which many of us – diminished and confused, without any real notion of how we’d been changed for all time by the previous twenty-four hours – ventured. There are so many of those poems.
Thus – because of the diversity of poets and their respective acculturations, their lived lives, the colors of their skin, their ancestry, faith traditions, and sexual orientations, their often-complex relationships with America – the book organically took on an identity of its own. As Robert Frost declared: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” David and I were surprised at every turn, thoroughly astonished at the yield.
About the Writer
Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, is author of seventeen books. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. A new volume of poems, Light at the Seam, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2022. Crossing the Rift is published by Press 53 and is currently available.
Website: press53.com/joseph-bathanti