example number one - an analysis of The Enemy by Rafael Campo (excerpted and pared down from a longer paper I wrote a few years ago)
Most of the witnesses to the attacks on September 11, 2001, watched at a distance, through the lenses of professional and amateur cameras on television, complete with music and graphics, pundits and eyewitness descriptions. The footage of the falling towers was replayed over and over as if history were a scratched record that kept skipping back. Within days, the hijackers were identified, and the Bush Administration was asking for an unprecedented expansion of surveillance powers.
Americans were witnessing a second historic event: the introduction and passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. The American Civil Liberties Unions immediately voiced concern over the PATRIOT Act’s proposed powers in the pamphlet Insatiable Appetite: The Government’s Demand for New and Unnecessary Powers After 9-11:
It expands the authority of the government in both terrorism and non-terror investigations to conduct so-called “sneak and peek” or “black bag” secret searches, which do not require notification of the subject of the search.
It grants the FBI – and under new information sharing provisions, many other law enforcement and intelligence agencies – broad access to highly personal medical, financial, mental health and student records with only the most minimal judicial oversight.
It permits law enforcement agents to investigate American citizens for criminal matters without establishing probable cause based on an assertion that the investigation is for “intelligence purposes.”
It puts the CIA firmly back in the historically abusive business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence broad authority to target intelligence surveillance in the United States.
It contains an overbroad definition of “domestic terrorism.” The new definition is so vague that the government could designate lawful advocacy groups – such as Operation Rescue or Greenpeace – as terrorists and subject them to invasive surveillance, wire-tapping, and harassment and then criminally penalize them for what had been constitutionally protected political advocacy. (ACLU 8)
Rafael Campo watched the attacks on television and - with our rapidly changing political landscape in mind - wrote a poem about the process of witnessing. The Enemy was published in The Nation several months after the attacks:
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget; though nothing could absorb my sense of loss, I stared into their blackness, what was not
supposed to be there, billowing of soot
and ragged maw of splintered steel, glass.
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget,the people dropping past them, fleeting spots
approaching death as if concerned with grace.
I stared into the blackness, what was notinhuman, since by men's hands they were wrought;
reflected on the TV's screen, my face
upon the building's wounds. I can't forgetthis rage, I don't know what to do with it--
it's in my nightmares, towers, plumes of dust,
a staring in the blackness. What was notconceivable is now our every thought:
We fear the enemy is all of us.
The building's wounds are what I can't forget.
I stared into their blackness, what was not.
(Campo 45)
Campo’s villanelle is set up as a kind of internal argument, with the first line – “The buildings wounds are what I can’t forget” – defining his problem. He cannot forget the image of the buildings, and he cannot find an image to “absorb his sense of loss.” The third line deepens the dilemma because it ends the stanza with a negation, an anti-image: “what was not.” This could be read as denial or just an overwhelming sense of loss, but it also engages with the creative process. As an anti-image, “what was not” implies that there is no image that can move the poet past those gaping holes in the towers. And indeed, the poem turns to the towers again in the beginning of the second stanza.
The second stanza affirms the struggle of the first. Campo has not moved past the image of the burning towers. But even as he evokes the towers, he does not attempt to depict or describe them. Rather, he gives us the “billowing of soot/ and ragged maw of splintered steel, glass.” In other words, he is not attempting direct aestheticization.
He is also aware that he has witnessed this event at a distance. Missing are the ambulance sirens, shattered windows, dust handprints on jacket and briefcase, soot and smoke staining the fibers of a wool suit, the sense of immediate danger. So he stays with the materials of the building, evoking just enough to flash the images in our minds. He then reaffirms his inability to forget the wounds, with the repetition of the first line - a particularly powerful image when one realizes that the poet is also a doctor. He seems to humanize the towers as patients he can heal. And this time, the line is not contained with a period. It ends with a comma, and the poem begins to move into the human dimension of the tragedy.
In the fourth stanza, he mentions the television screen for the first time – the screen upon which his face is “reflected.” Is he now seeing himself in the tragedy? Possibly, but there are many layers of meaning here. He has created a meta-image, or an image of the poet as he watches. More specifically, he reminds us that he is watching television, thus provoking questions about his distance, and more importantly, about the filters though which he has witnessed. It is also an image of Campo as he applies an aesthetic form to the burning towers, his face (his poetic voice) superimposed on the images. He is not speaking from within this tragedy, but from outside it.
Campo then moves into a more emotional landscape, admitting his rage: “this rage. I don’t know what to do with it -- / it’s in my nightmares . . .” It is no longer the towers he cannot forget, but rather, his rage. Campo also connects himself to the larger culture when he invokes we for the first time: “We fear the enemy is all of us.” The implication is significant, given the political climate in the aftermath of the attacks. At a September 26, 2001, press briefing, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was confronted with the question of domestic dissent:
Q As Commander-In-Chief, what was the President's reaction to television's Bill Maher, in his announcement that members of our Armed Forces who deal with missiles are cowards, while the armed terrorists who killed 6,000 unarmed are not cowards, for which Maher was briefly moved off a Washington television station? [ . . . ]
MR. FLEISCHER: I'm aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it's a terrible thing to say, and it unfortunate. And that's why -- there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party -- they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is. (White House Press Secretary)
Campo succeeds in capturing all of these complex processes by doing the very thing he says he cannot: containing them inside a form. Free or open verse could not have contained them the way the villanelle does, with its repetition and rhyme. The poem is not so much about the images, or the media, or the political climate, as it is about the process of witnessing – or more specifically, witnessing as an artist. The repetition of lines and images recalls the relentless media footage of jets speeding toward and crashing into the towers, while the resolution of the form implies a certain inevitability and vertical movement – a fateful fall. It manages to evoke September 11th without being merely mimetic or representational. The poetic form is not used as a metaphor for the towers, but is actually subject to the same structural “defects” and “weaknesses” – the poem’s support beams break and burn. And just as the structural defects of the towers allowed them to stand at all – the lighter beams, the use of gypsum instead of concrete in the escape stairwells, the skeletal ribs used as support – so do the “imperfect” lines of Campo’s poem give it power and force. [ ... ]
this section of the paper continues with a discussion of form and structure - you get the idea ...