Tuesday, September 13, 2011

TUESDAY POEM for 9/11

Tuesday Poem: New York poems by Deborah Garrison for the tenth anniversary of 9/11

I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash....
                                               [extract from 'I Saw You Walking', Deborah Garrison]

The editor of Tuesday Poem this week is the curator, Mary McCallum. She says, "In recognition of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 this week, I am posting a 2008 film of New Jersey poet Deborah Garrison reading four poems related to the attacks, from her second collection The Second Child (Random House, USA, 2007; Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

The first poem in the film is 'Goodbye, New York' - a pretty enough if familiar sort of ditty about a beloved city, but if you're in a hurry skip to 'I Saw You Walking' at the 1'30 mark on the timer - a poem written from the appalling events of 9/11, followed by 'September Poem', written a year later, after the birth of a child. Lastly, 'Into the Lincoln Tunnel' describes how a daily commute is still shadowed by thoughts of what happened in New York in 2001."

The post also links to other poems that Americans held onto in the time that followed the September 11 attacks including one by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. In the TP sidebar are posts by the up to 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the US and UK of poems they have written or poems written by those they admire. They include 'An Ode to the World Cup while doing the washing' by Wellingtonian Alicia Ponder, John Masefield's Cargoes, a poem about a taxi driver (Zireaux), US poet Eileen Moeller's 'The Grove in the Eye of Light' series, Sarah Jane Barnett's 'Sharks' and more....

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