From “The Falling Man” to Girly Man: American Poetry after 9/11 and the Logic of Mourning

Abstract

In what sense did 9/11 become the day when American changed? How does the poetic landscape of 9/11reflect the political and cultural crisis of America? This paper, beginning with the shocking image of “The Falling Man,” invites readers to rethink of the ‘possible impossibility’ of poetic representation. How did the poets respond to the binary antagonistic discourses around 9/11 that the mass media and the political parties produced? While briefly mapping out the literary scenes in the post-9/11 era, this paper attempts to rescue 9/11 discourse from those illogical cultural and political discourses ornamented with such words as sacred ground, our heroes, axis of evil, etc. Many poems produced shortly after 9/11 reflects the shock, sadness, and anger of the American psyche as a whole. Some joined in the festival of marking the dead in the ‘pornography’ of grief and some fell in clear-cut binaries of traditional politics proposing the war against terror. Trying to answer the questions embedded in the issue of poetic representation and see the prompt responses of poets to the unprecedented trauma of modern America in the post-9/11 era, this paper explores how the contemporary American poets have approached ethics through writing and rethinks poetry’s capacity to bring about social, political, and cultural change. Especially focusing on Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man, this paper sees how his poems became an exceptional literary achievement of post-9/11 America. Vividly portraying the disoriented people and landscape of New York on that day and inviting readers to rethink ways of interpreting 9/11, Bernstein constructs his poetic language as a public forum seeking to jostle readers out of their personal grief and private emotional sphere. Bernstein’s prompt responses to what happened to America are meaningful not as therapy or commemoration, but as the song of an ethical, political troubadour questioning the logic of mourning. As a form of manipulating and re-conceptualizing American political discourse, his poetry constructs an alternate path where a new real is explored.