The Liberation from Narrative: Poetry and 9/11

This essay is based on the premise that the discourse on literature and 9/11 is mostly a discourse on fiction and 9/11. The debate on 9/11 as the end of postmodernism, relativism, or irony centers mainly around novels, and critical responses to these texts often address what they perceive as problems of representation, narrative, and character. Yet this critical framework unduly limits the debate on literature and 9/11 since it offers only a narrow view of what literary texts can or should do. To counter this limitation, this analysis considers texts that are not bound to such expectations of representation. Since poetry as a form of expression and imagination operates according to a different set of conventions than fiction, and especially since it is liberated from narrative constraints, it can offer very different approaches to 9/11 than fiction. In doing so, it raises questions about how it relates the word to the world. Is poetry either the manipulation of signifiers or the imitation of reality? Will we have to choose between seeing poetry either as an abstract language game or as representational fiction that looks like poetry? This essay discusses a selection of poetic and theoretical responses with regard to issues such as the relation of formal or linguistic experiment and political statement, the imagination of terrorism and war in the context of (literary) history, and the negotiation between representation and imagination in general.