Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     On September 11th 2002 the front page of the New York Post, ran a photograph of the twin towers and the headline ‘Lest We Forget’. I found myself absolutely infuriated. We were being entreated to remember something that none of us could possibly have forgotten. Did they think September 11th 2001 might somehow have slipped our minds? Who’s had the chance to forget? Is there anyone alive in New York who hasn’t thought about 9/11 every single day for a year and more now? The American virtues of ‘seeking closure' and wanting to ‘move on’ don’t apply here. Certainly in New York we get on with things. We still eat Big Macs, we still swig our apple martinis. But forgetting is not an option.

*

     I wasn’t in New York on September 11th, 2001. I was three thousand miles away, in England. My girlfriend Dian was three thousand miles away in the opposite direction, visiting her family in Seattle. Consequently I wasn’t sure if I should consider myself fortunate, or if I should regret having been absent at such a crucial and calamitous moment in history. And I suppose there was some guilt, that the New Yorkers I knew had had to go through something that I’d avoided.

     Since I feel, at least some of the time, like a proper New Yorker, it seemed only right that I should have had to go through what other New Yorkers went through. I feared that I’d got off too lightly.

     I don’t think this had anything to do with survivor guilt. That would have been a ridiculous self-indulgence. Besides, I knew that even if I had been in New York on 9/11, I’d have been nowhere near the World Trade Center. I would have been in our apartment in Brooklyn, at the top of Park Slope, up on the fifth floor, from where I’d have had a very good, and suitably distant view of the disaster.

     Until that day you could go to our living room window and look out at the twin towers away in the near distance, jutting up over roof tops and chimneys, across the river in Manhattan. Every morning a sighting of the towers, their clarity or otherwise, told us what kind of day it was going to be. I don’t think they ever appeared quite so clear as they do in the media images from the day of the attack. Even on the brightest, sunniest day they’d be smeared with haze. Sometimes the tops of them would disappear into clouds. And sometimes there’d be so much mist and fog, and no doubt pollution, that they’d be invisible.

     Looking out of the apartment window now, it’s surprisingly difficult to tell precisely where the towers used to be, but as it happens, I have some photographs of my own to refer to. When I first moved into the apartment I began taking pictures of the skyline. I have no serious pretensions as a photographer, but photographing the towers in the changing light and weather conditions, and eventually in different seasons, seemed like something worth doing. I now know that throughout the eighties and nineties the great photographer Joel Meyerowitz was doing much the same from his studio in Manhattan, with rather more spectacular results. Perhaps many of my neighbours were doing it too.

     I had always thought about buying one of those picture frames that holds six or nine photographs, and using it to display some of my photographs of the towers. I think the reason I’d never got round to it was because it seemed slightly absurd to put half a dozen photographs up on the wall when you could look out the window and see the real thing. And eventually I’d pretty much stopped taking these pictures altogether. It had come to seem a bit pointless.

     After all, the towers would always be there.

*

     It’s hard to think of New York as a place of absences. We prefer to think of it as a city where everything is present, where everything is constantly available; a city of sights and attractions, a place where the action is. And perhaps that’s why Ground Zero immediately became a must-see destination, a place you had to visit to check out what remained and what had gone; and as soon as I got back to New York, a couple of weeks after 9/11, I joined the crowds marching downtown, along lower Broadway, to see the non-existent twin towers.

     I’m told that in the early days people weren’t allowed to take photographs in the area, and that anyone seen using a camera had it confiscated. It had never even occurred to me to take my own camera with me, but by the time I got there, the era of confiscation had evidently passed and it seemed that a good half of the crowd was taking pictures, still and video, to capture some image of destruction and absence.

     You had to assume that these pictures wouldn’t be up to much. We were kept at bay, behind barriers. The viewpoint we were allowed was a distant one, and even the most powerful telephoto lens wouldn’t have got you in very close. We could see rubble, a spout of water being hosed from a great height, blackened masonry, and we could just about make out that famous twisted, perforated facade; but the sight was not nearly so clear, so vivid or dramatic as the ones we’d already absorbed from television and newspapers.

*

     I didn’t go back to Ground Zero until about a week before the first anniversary. There were very few people there and the site felt like some bleak tourist attraction out of season. There was very little to see but now you could get right up to the wire fence and peer down into the vast, excavated pit, six stories deep, which was all that was left. You couldn’t fail to be astounded by the sheer industry and grim determination that had so obviously been necessary to clear away all that chaos and debris. Simply by perseverance, by having teams of men doing the most horrible work day after day, it seemed you could accomplish just about anything.

     I knew that I’d go there again on the anniversary itself, and I knew it would be very different, as indeed it was. The crowds had returned and only families and VIPs were allowed anywhere near the pit. The rest of us just milled about the surrounding streets.

     On both these second two visits I had my camera with me, but I didn’t take any photographs. I suppose I couldn’t see anything that I wanted a picture of. A lot of the people around me obviously felt very differently. You wouldn’t believe, or perhaps you would, how many folks want a photograph of where the twin towers no longer are. Indeed some people - out of towners I’d have guessed - wanted to have their picture taken there, as though they were posing in front of Mount Rushmore or the Niagara Falls. I could only imagine how these photographs might be explained later as they were handed round back home. ‘This is me in New York. You see that big space behind me where there isn’t anything ....?’

*

     Now that they’re gone, the twin towers are ubiquitous all over New York City in the form of images and replicas. They can be seen on tee-shirts and baseball caps and lapel badges, as paperweights and key-rings and jigsaws; all of which are on sale around Ground Zero. And if that sounds tacky to people in England, I can only say that, for reasons I can’t completely explain, it somehow feels far less tacky when you’re on the spot. The desire to have something instead of nothing is hard to argue with. I did, for instance, eventually frame my photographs and put them up on the wall.

     At Ground Zero, on the railings of St. Paul’s Chapel, people have hung their own caps, tee-shirts, flags, toys, pieces of art, usually with some handwritten message scrawled in marker pen; a riot of names, slogans and prayers, some of them almost illegible. Once again your first impression might be that scrawling a message on an ‘I Love New York’ tee-shirt isn’t the most fitting way of expressing your grief or support, but when you’re there confronted with such a massive outpouring of feeling, notions of what’s fitting, of what’s tacky and what’s tasteful, just seem beside the point and wankerish.

     On my visit to St. Paul’s Chapel a week before the anniversary, the most bizarre, and bizarrely moving, thing I saw was a brick somebody had left there. It was a simple house brick painted, not all that skillfully, with an approximation of the American flag; just fourteen stars and ten stripes. I counted. There was no message on it, no name, no indication of where it came from, or if it had some special meaning, and this quiet inscrutability gave it an enormous power.

     When I went back on the anniversary itself, it felt very important to me that I locate that brick again. I searched and searched, even sneaked through a police line in the process, and the brick just wasn’t there. Could somebody really have stolen it? Nicking somebody’s offering from a chapel at Ground Zero seemed a pretty scummy thing to do, but I couldn’t really think of any other explanation, and the truth was I could entirely understand why somebody might do it. In fact it occurred to me that perhaps I’d actually wanted to do it myself, and was annoyed that somebody else with more nerve and fewer scruples than me had got there first.

*

     When the towers went down, vast quantities of paper from the offices inside was sent airborne, and days later it was still landing in Brooklyn, often looking incomprehensibly undamaged. Many people picked up these ordinary, banal documents and kept them as, I’m not quite sure what - souvenirs, relics, memento mori - but it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do.

     With this is mind I saw that around Ground Zero on the day of the anniversary there were lots of people handing out pamphlets and leaflets, and I decided to accept everything I was offered - a thing you don’t normally do in New York. I became the recipient of a selection of rather glossily produced Christian religious pamphlets with titles like ‘Why?’ ‘Fallen But Not Forgotten’ and ‘Does God Love You?’

     God does love me, apparently, but I’m going to have to pull my socks up if I’m to meet his high standards. And he’d like me to think about what happened in ancient Nineveh. I was also given a free CD of a musical setting of Psalm 23, and someone handed me a flyer from a restaurant called the Original Fresco Tortillas, ‘the best Tex-Mexican Express at 98 Chambers St’. As yet I haven’t been able to throw any of these things away.