from the notebooks

Needless to say it: So much has happened in the last two weeks.  It feels the 21st century needed only eight months to find its personality.  It took the 20th Century some 14 years.  That may be premature but it seems a door has opened, one we didn't know existed, and we are taking the first glimpse into the dark.  Woolf said somewhere in -- what 1914? -- human nature changed.  Bullshit.  Human perspectives have changed along with our advancing technology.  So has the pace of life and the efficiency of our death machines.

How -- what -- are the changes to bear on poetry?  How are perspectives, and points-of-view, changed?  I saw an article on the attacks titled 'The End of Irony.'  So does that mean we as poets now should cultivate only somber expressions?  Again, I say bullshit.  But we need to be responsible to the times we live in.

I have never been so moved by such events before.

[excerpted from my notebooks, entry dated 9/26/01]