Pub Crawl #6—Unspeakable 1

“Unspeakable 1" (The Capilano Review, 2002)

The Perelman Performing Arts Center now stands on the site of the Twin Towers. Photo by Iwan Baan

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Every Pub Crawl post includes a journal publication of mine—in chronological order from earliest to most recent—with notes about context, craft, autobiography, or close reading. This week’s Pub Crawl features “Twilight in the City.” It appeared in The Capilano Review (Winter 2002), a Canadian literary magazine out of Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Unspeakable 1

I see ugliness making a comeback
in the unwashed heads, unrazored cheeks
of people on subway cars or aimlessly
wandering streets still acrid with the dust
of a whole burnt offering offered up
in the squint of an unbelieving eye,
not to propitiate but terrify,
not a god but a nation deemed corrupt.
Impeccable the purity of lust
with which they dove into eternity,
the pleasure they must have felt for weeks
knowing that Allah would soon take them back.
Just beyond a steel and glass curtain
lay heaven and salvation certain.

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Notes

“Unspeakable 1” appeared in The Capilano Review in the winter of 2002, just a few months after the destruction of the Twin Towers. I wrote the poem within a few weeks of the event. I also wrote an “Unspeakable 2” which was published in the same issue and which will be featured in next week’s Pub Crawl.

☞☞☞The craft stuff☞☞☞

I had this boyfriend at the time who was an up-and-coming young poet and strongly associated in the poetry community with the sonnet form. Maybe that’s why I started writing more sonnets? Maybe, maybe not. I really don’t remember. But there you have it. It is also said by smart people that poetic form in general, and perhaps the sonnet form in particular, allows the poet to contain runaway emotions. Maybe that impetus was somewhat at work here.

In terms of the prosody, I like the way this poems kind of slides in and out of strict iambic pentameter. I began with the intention of writing a pretty regular more or less Shakespearean sonnet, but then I let the voice of the poem take me where it would. So if you look closely, there are indeed some lines in nice, regular sonnet rhythm. Other lines are not strictly iambic, but contain ten syllables. Others, not even that.

There’s a similar sliding in and out of rhyme. The first two lines are promising in that regard, but it soon becomes clear than assonance more than rhyme is the name of the game, and that is going to wander around pleasantly if unpredictably. Then, in true Michael Broder fashion, the final couplet hits you hard, in this instance with a sort of megarhyme—“certain” and “curtain” being the same word but for one letter.

Oh, and there’s a nice properly sonnet-like turn that runs through lines 7 and 8, where the speaker’s focus shifts from to what he experienced as a New Yorker, to trying—probably unwisely—to get into the heads of, maybe even on some level identify with, the men who executed the attack.

And then—not sure I ever really thought of it this way before—both perspectives are brought together in the final couplet: the “steel and glass curtain” representing, in a sense, New York and its citizens under attack, and “heaven and salvation” representing the attackers.

☞☞☞The inevitable political stuff☞☞☞

Now, of course I did not plan on my two 9/11 sonnets in Pub Crawl coming right in the middle of the war in Gaza. As I so often emoji: 🤷🏻‍♂️. But again, there you have it. So. What to say? “Everything old is new again”?

I might characterize my views on the current situation as nonbinary: It isn’t either/or, black/white, right/wrong, good/evil, Arab/Jew, Palestine/Israel. I do fear, however, that in the eyes, minds, and hearts of many good people, it is just that binary.

Beyond what I just said above, I am not going to engage in political analysis here. I will just note that poetry, like any form in which we monumentalize human experience, offers a window onto a time, a place, and a reality, and that sometimes, it is a window that the poet not only never intended, but never even could imagine, onto a reality that, similarly, could never have been foreseen. Which is not to say that what is happening now was not always lying there in wait, as a possible, maybe even a probable unfolding of what was already curled up inside the always wounded pit of human stomach. But rather to say we never really know what form our suffering will take, although we can always pretty much count on suffering.

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