The wake of 9/11 saw an influx of novels that tried to order the chaos of a nation grieving and reconciling trauma through exceptionalist means. The glorification and absence of responsible historical context has been the subject of many scholarly conversations and publications. Moreover, since then, many scholars have also addressed this dizzying number of fiction works that seek to answer the question of why, how, and what now. This is, of course, not to say that all literature from the Global North following the attacks lionizes the nation for its militaristic imperial invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq; indeed, writers of color significantly resisted this rosy vision of the United States. Nevertheless, we remain in the realm of fiction. Literary scholars have tended to privilege fiction rather than poetry. A simple MLA International Bibliography search of “9/11 and poetry” evidences the marginalizing of the poetic form from scholarly discourse about the attacks, the war, and their literary implications. Yet another telling example, scholars and critics discuss the “9/11 novel” yet few ever discuss the merits and the innovations of the “9/11 poem.” This panel seeks to span this gap in literary criticism.

Simply put, a panel centered on 9/11-related or War on Terror poetry affords a reading of how contemporary politics shape contemporary poetics. By discussing both lauded and understudied poets about the inaugural events of the 21^st century, the panelists aim to underscore how poetry, both in its formal qualities and in its thematic concerns, resist state-sanctioned tactics of violence, especially against Brown and Black people. Or, to quote Solmaz Sharif, whose poetry some of these papers analyze, “Where weapons try to limit the possibilities of speech and thereby the possibilities of desire, of recognition, poetry exists in speech. Where one has no song, the other is only.” For the poet who sings, the working conditions of the every day are forever war and insidious forms of white supremacy that undergird ideological principles of the state.

The first two papers consider poetic form and its larger political implications after 9/11 and the domestic War on Terror—that is, the rampant acts of white supremacist domestic terrorism targeting Brown people in the United States. Misha Choudhry argues how the post-9/11 poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Solmaz Sharif’s “Look” understand the poets’ proximity to the so-called Muslim World language through a critique of imperial war. Specifically, she examines how lyric poetry betrays the neoliberal imperative to represent Muslims post-9/11 and instead becomes a space of rupture/disruption against what Sunaina Maria refers to as “imperial statecraft.” In his examination of many well-known and unknown contemporary poets, William Fogarty considers how doubt is embedded within the forms of poems responding to 9/11; the poems Fogarty studies often express blunt outrage aimed in different directions, yet each poem’s formal operations also convey apprehension rather than definitiveness. Ultimately, formal renderings of doubt are animating forces in 9/11 poems.

The next two papers go beyond the purview of form and consider the larger political themes and ramifications of post-9/11 poetry, namely how poetry is a literary method through which writers and scholars reveal the dangerous ideologies of American exception and how poetry is often weaponized by the state to sponsor imperial warfare. Kirat Hothi close reads Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric to argue that the poet represents 9/11 as an event mediated by the politics of fear and positions the attacks within a larger critique of the racializing biopolitics structuring the social, cultural, and political sphere of the late 20th/early 21st century US. Hoti consequently elucidates how Rankine fractures the hegemonic narrative of American exceptionalism that shapes perceptions of 9/11. In his paper, Amish Trivedi compellingly asks us, how have organizations and institutions also used poetry in furthering the goals of the nation-state as they existed post-9/11? In other words, what role does poetry play in the lead up to war, in the years of a long war during which many of the other areas of society suffer? In so doing, this final paper considers how poetry’s absorption into the narrative of the nation-state at times of war, in the age of the Forever War, has been one of critiquing those institutions. Through these diverse perspectives and methodologies, this panel reflects not only the persistent literary engagement with 9/11 but also an enduring politics and poetics of warfare in the twenty-first century.