Hum (Criticism)

Criticism

Kathy Wilson Peacock

Wilson Peacock is a writer and editor of articles about literature. In this essay, she discusses the role of the poet in times of national crises, focusing on Lauterbach's "Hum" and Robert Pinsky's "9/11."

One of the poet's main responsibilities is to deliver us from clichés in moments when words threaten to fail us. "It is so hard to know what to say" is what so many do say when confronted with grieving friends or loved ones. Rare is the eulogy that does not include the words of a poet, be that poet contemporary or biblical, as part of ritual's salve. This phenomenon was writ large after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the United States cohered as a single community united by grief. The nation's poets, masters and novices alike, moved to the forefront during this time, their collectivity of words creating a liturgy like none other. Lauterbach's "Hum" stands out as one of the least literal yet most effective of these poems. Its power is derived from the use of ordinary means — simple words and images — to express extraordinary thoughts.

As in so much minimalist art, "Hum" is as notable for what it says as for what it does not say. It does not even "say" its title; a "hum" is in essence the opposite of spoken words. Beginning with the title and the repetition of the first verse, "The days are beautiful," the poem appears at first glance as innocuous as that bright September morning in 2001. In a series of twenty-seven fleeting stanzas, many only seven or eight words in their entirety, Lauterbach launches into a deceptively breezy lamentation that cycles through the concepts of shifting time, the beauty of weather, a shower of ash and dust, and a catalog of material objects that have nothing to do with airplanes, terrorists, heroism, freedom, or any of the other knee-jerk signifiers that permeate so many 9/11 — inspired poems. In direct reference to the tragedy at hand, she says only, "The towers are incidental" and "The towers are yesterday." Hers is a poem that expresses the unbearable lightness of being in a moment of incomprehensible madness.

"Hum" is different from other 9/11 — inspired poems because it is not what we might expect. "The days are beautiful" is repeated again and again, nine times total, in a poem essentially about mass bloodshed. The statement is too important to be taken as an example of irony and perhaps too opaque to be taken literally. A contrasting poem is the one that the Washington Post commissioned the U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky to write in commemoration of the first anniversary of 9/11, which he titled, simply enough, "9/11." Pinsky's words are full of images that soothe rather than challenge; the work's three-line stanzas are a litany of easily grasped references to Emily Dickinson, Will Rogers, and Marianne Moore. It includes the occasional high-school vocabulary word ("expropriation"), pedestrian phrases such as "terrible spectacle" and "doomed firefighters," and the requisite splash of patriotism via references to the "Eagle's head" and the Statue of Liberty. Pinsky hits all the notes a poet laureate is expected to hit, corralling a population of nearly three hundred million people into a single-minded "collective we" that wrings its hands over a self-conscious desire for titillating televised disaster. In doing his job, Pinsky delivers a belated eulogy that stirs up just enough discomfort to be neatly swept away with phrases borrowed from "America the Beautiful."

Perhaps, however, a comparison is unfair. After all, the poems "Hum" and "9/11" were written for different reasons. Lauterbach's lamentation is a visceral reaction to a tragedy still under way, while Pinsky's poem is a reflection of events a year in the past. Lauterbach's narrator is concerned with the images at hand: images of dust, ash, a feeling that tomorrow is gone. She writes of a sky subsumed by sound and debris, of weather that is nothing, and of weeping, all of which serves to upset her sense of equilibrium, her sense that "the days are beautiful." Hers is the reaction of a camera's lens, unfiltered by politics, raw in its questions ("What is this dust?"). Moreover, she presents the voice of a single narrator, one of a million witnesses, whose experience is unique. Her narrator alone is the one who notices the robe "that smells of the night" and the stones "loosed from their settings."

Conversely, Pinsky's purpose is not to put forth a singular vision but to act as the spokesman of our collective response; hence the recitations regarding donated blood, box cutters, and Ray Charles. As a minimalist work, "Hum" does not need to focus on the images of crushed fire engines or the doctors and nurses who had nothing to do because there were no walking wounded to be saved. Lauterbach's intent as a poet is to create an unusually variegated collage based on snatches of thoughts, much as Picasso's painting Guernica achieved the power of a thousand-page manifesto through a single mural in black and white that starkly and simply depicted the devastation from the bombing of Guernica, Spain, and its civilian population during the Spanish Civil War.

Several generations ago, Wilfred Owen, a soldier who ultimately died in battle, alerted the world to the first killing fields of the modern age in his poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est," which presented the indelible image of a soldier suffocating in the "thick green light" of a mustard gas attack. His words were graphic; they needed to be, in order to convey the horror of World War I to those who still espoused outdated romantic notions of warfare from the insulated confines of their Edwardian-era parlors. Almost a century later, on 9/11, there was no insulated parlor; millions upon millions saw the horror firsthand. Television collapsed the physical distance between the site of the World Trade Center and the places where the nation's people stood and sat, whether Manhattan or Montana.

Thus, the twenty-first-century poet's language of tragedy need not be gruesome to be effective. Whereas Owen described blood "gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs" of the dying soldier, Lauterbach wrote, "The sound is falling," and both achieved much the same effect. The horror of 9/11 was already seared into the nation's collective mind. Owen, in a world not yet saturated with mass media, served as a literary war correspondent with literal images. His was a poem of admonition; his way of saying, "Tomorrow was yesterday," was to call the battle cry "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country" ("Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori") a lie. Both Owen and Lauterbach bore witness to the greatest horrors of their generations and responded with eulogies that burst free from the clichés of their respective days.

The narrator of "Hum," in the midst of horror's confusion, seeks to reassure herself of what she knows. She knows the days are (supposed to be) beautiful; she knows what is (supposed to be) incidental; she knows that the ash falling from the sky is not weather. She knows the towers are gone; she knows tomorrow is gone — at least the tomorrow that she had imagined yesterday. These are the unfiltered, unedited thoughts that occur in the suspended moment of time between perception and understanding.

Conversely, Pinsky's narrator has had a year to consider the tragedy. Instead of focusing on the action in slow motion, he gathers together images of popular culture in order to create touch points that soothe. Who is more effective, one then asks, Lauterbach or Pinsky? The answer depends on what one seeks from poems. With more universal words (everyone knows of yesterday, tomorrow, dust, and weather, but not everyone knows of social security numbers, Frederick Douglass, and Ray Charles's charity recording), Lauterbach's "Hum" comes closer to evoking the primal aspects of sorrow aroused by 9/11 than Pinsky's poem. Pinsky writes for the part of the popular consciousness that is American; Lauterbach writes for the part of the American consciousness that is human. With respect to the universal need for words to ameliorate tragedy, and with respect to finding the "right thing to say" without descending into standard funereal clichés, "Hum" demonstrates that less can be more. With its musical attributes of repetition and refrain, Lauterbach's poem is a stirring dirge that is elegant in its universality and unprocessed rawness of feeling.

Source: Kathy Wilson Peacock, Critical Essay on "Hum," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

What Do I Read Next?

• Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (2002), edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, presents forty-five poems written in response to the terrorist tragedies. Featured poets include Stephen Dunn, Hal Sirowitz, Molly Peacock, and Alicia Ostriker.
• The poem "9/11," by Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. poet laureate, was commissioned by the Washington Post for the first anniversary of the attacks and was published on September 12, 2002. It is available at http://www.pbs.org/news hour/bb/poems/july-dec02/9-11_9-11.html from Online Newshour.
• Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter," from his 1965 collection Lunch Poems, is a breezy response to all of his admirers who wondered why he became a poet. As a founding member of the New York School of poets, O'Hara was greatly influenced by the contemporary art scene of the 1950s.
• W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," published in his Selected Poems (1940), was written to commemorate the day the Nazis invaded Poland at the beginning of World War II. Written in the first person, it recounts Auden's reaction to hearing the news as he sat in a Manhattan diner.
• John Ashbery, considered one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, was a leading voice of the New York School of poets. His 1986 collection Selected Poems offers an overview of his work.
• Jorie Graham's Overlord (2005) tackles many of the same themes that interest Lauterbach with a style that is also influenced by abstract art. While Graham's work is infused with more religious imagery than Lauterbach's, this collection, like Hum, is a post-9/11 meditation.
• Lauterbach's If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975 – 2000 (2001) offers readers an overview of the poet's career.
• The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2005) is a collection of essays written by Lauterbach for the American Poetry Review between 1996 and 1999. Subjects include the impact of her father's early death on her work and ruminations about poetry's role in popular culture.
• The comic novel A Nest of Ninnies, written by the New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler and originally published in 1969, is a satirical look at the follies of middle-class and upper-class suburbanites. The work was written in a slightly experimental "dialogue" format.