Close Reading of “Poem Written After September 11, 2001” by Juliana Spahr
Juliana Spahr’s “Poem Written After September 11, 2001” is a reflection on the relationship between everyone and everything. The proximity and distance to an event mean very little when it comes to making a connection and association to such according to Spahr. People can be affected despite having nothing to do with it. During 9/11, thousands had died during the attack, and the families of victims and sympathizers mourned while becoming hateful towards the terrorist group that orchestrated the attack. Not long after, despite not having anything to do with the 9/11 attack, thousands of innocent people had become victims of hate crimes which came from the animosity towards the Middle East after the Al-Qaeda strikes. The poem is written in a way that forces you to read faster with every new line, with very little time to breathe in between. The constant reference to breath is ironic as 9/11 is remembered as a day where many breaths have been lost. One can feel the urgency and desperation rising as they go through the lines, which reflect the same feelings many have felt on that day. It feels like a blur, one thing happening after another, similar to how rising tensions and xenophobia started to surface in the U.S. Spahr neatly ends the long sprawl of words with a concise phrase. “How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs” (10). In this age of technology and rapid development, it is difficult to not to be aware of what is going on in the world. People are connected and are part of one another, distance does not matter. One life is connected to another, and impacts the other even without knowing it. Everyone shared the same air as the people who died during the 9/11 attack, the people who initiated the attack, the people who responded to the attack and thus are fated to be a part of it whether they had been there or not.