September Suite

Clifton is the speaker in these poems, looking back from the not-so-far future and attempting to make sense of what has happened. The manuscript follows the speaker’s journey as she questions the role of the artist and wrestles with collective grief. Clifton’s poetry plumbs the depths of human emotion, reflecting the despair of the firemen’s ascent into hell and the ecstasy of a new granddaughter’s birth, never shying away from intensity in her lean, powerful diction. Enjambment functions as a form of punctuation, emphasizing and reframing words and phrases to create new meaning through form. Guided by W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, she questions how this tragedy relates to the tragedies African Americans have faced in this country. These injustices loom, hard-to-ignore cracks in the façade of American nationalism used to galvanize the American people in the wake of the tragedies.

Clifton typed these poems on a typewriter before sending them off, and they first appeared in their typewritten form. The use of a typewriter is not novel in the year 2001; Clifton was typewriting her poems for decades prior, and only half of American households had a personal computer. When it comes to enjambment, it is impossible to know whether Clifton would have end-stopped the lines she did if she were writing with a smaller typeface. However, it is certain that the lack of title case for words like “america” and “i” is intentional and not a limitation of her technology. The intimate, jotted-down effect is purposeful, as is the attention it draws to words that do get capital first letters, like “God.”

It is significant and intentional on Clifton’s part to group “September Suite” as a manuscript rather than one long poem. Each poem exists as a distinct artifact as well as part of a whole, like entries in a diary or chapters in a book. In addition, the forward progression of time creates a linear journey for the reader to follow. Read in order, the poems in “September Suite” create a narrative journey through Clifton’s subjective experience of September 11, 2001 as an African American, a grandmother, a poet, and a human being.

“Tuesday 9/11/01”

In the first stanza, the metaphorical storm has turned everything the speaker and her community knows upside down: “our world / is another place” (Lines 1-2). As a result of the attacks, something has been lost, and things will not be the same ever again; not even blood can escape this foreign violence “untouched” (Line 4). Caesuras perform the role of punctuation, separating “place” from “no” in the second line and “same” from “no” in the third in much the same way a period would.

The second stanza introduces a new group of people: “they” (Line 5). This group is different from the speaker and her kind because they are familiar with this kind of violence: “they know this storm in otherwheres / israel  ireland  palestine” (Lines 5-6). Note the order of countries listed in Line 6. Along with more caesuras to create distance, the speaker buffers a particularly hostile relationship, separating Israel from Palestine with Ireland, a European interloper. All three of these countries have been subjected to violence from within and without as a result of land disputes. America, Clifton says, is supposed to be different. She evokes the Irving Berlin song and often repeated phrase, “God bless America.” In the third stanza, Clifton repeats that “God has blessed America” (Line 9) with the lesson that no country, not even the United States, is protected from violence by an all-powerful divine shield: “all life  all death / all one” (Lines 12-13).

The reverent, mournful tone of the beginning of the poem has been wildly complicated by the end. Already the speaker is questioning assumptions about what God’s blessing for America means, who gets blessed and who does not, and who is with or against the speaker.

“Wednesday 9/12/01”

Only one day has passed since the tragedies, and so the speaker insists that she must resist the urge to complicate the categories of “we” and “they” established in the previous poem. Still, by insisting that she mustn’t note these things, she can’t help herself but to state them. This clever move of not-saying allows the poet to acknowledge that many would consider these thoughts inappropriate, and yet the speaker still gives voice to them. These thoughts are softened by the qualifying phrase, “i think” (Line 2), but the Islamophobic terrorist and the innocent Arab children have entered the conversation.

The speaker utilizes anaphora to divide the poem into three separate thoughts by repeating “this is not the time” (Lines 1, 7, 14). The addition of “and” in Line 14 before the third invocation lends a finality, drawing attention to this note, which is actually a question. Rather than implying with inclusive and exclusive language, the speaker outright asks: “who is allowed to be / american  america” (Lines 16-17), openly questioning who exactly gets sorted into the “all of us” under the “one flag” (Line 18). Nationalist unity is felt in the “single love” (Line 20), but the “many tongued God” (Line 21) reminds the reader that there are plenty of voices in the crowd. Although there is no hyphen between “many” and “tongued,” the image of a demonic God with an abundance of tongues in one mouth is loosely conjured.

“Thursday 9/13/01”

This poem about the firemen is one of the most observational, the clearest action taking place outside the speaker’s consciousness. The speaker uses vocabulary associated with Christian notions of the afterlife to elevate what were literal flames in burning buildings to a new metaphorical level, as seen in the “blaze of courage” (Line 2). The firemen are angelic, benevolent figures. They rise like a biblical patriarch’s ladder in Line 4, not just into wreckage but into “history” (Line 6). The speaker doesn’t know what the firemen call what they’re looking for. She takes a guess: “heaven / or whatever” (Lines 9-10). Regardless of the name they use for it, the speaker assures us it is a term for the Jordan River—a holy, purifying place in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature.

“Friday 9/14/01”

The group divides further in this poem, as the “us” becomes “some of us” in Line 1. A sub-group of Americans, including Clifton, are not new to this mourning; they “have wept / before” (Lines 5-6). Clifton breaks from her pattern of couplets to ask a piercing question: “is it treason to remember” (Line 7). The imagined crime here is not fabrication but simply stating a fact, much like the noting the speaker did in Tuesday’s poem. Something about a mere mention of this truth is threatening to the “we” (Line 2).

The united American “we” is falling apart in this middle poem of the series. The “we” breaks down in sorrow and pain, asking what caused this pain. “Nothing” is what the “we” tells themselves, and they repeat it to make doubly sure (Line 10, 11). At the same time, the line break between Lines 10 and 11 creates some additional meaning. “Nothing” might be the reassuring answer, but it might also be the problem. “Nothing” could represent the absence of a reassuring answer, denial, or the group’s failure to intercede on others’ behalf.

“Saturday 9/15/01”

The wide, short shape of this stanza is reminiscent of a prose paragraph, which suites the anecdotal nature of this poem. The unnamed persecuted man is almost certainly Jesus Christ, as Line 5 tells the reader that “people forgot he was a jew” and then began to love him. This poem draws a comparison between hypocritical actors in different religions, the extreme few who are driven by their supposedly peaceful faith to commit violence. The lowercase “gods” in Line 7 is not referencing the one God of previous poems but condemning these violent people as small gods who abuse their power.

With this story, all Abrahamic faiths have been implicated by the speaker. The end goal of the others who persecuted this man and then loved him is incomprehensible to the speaker. The purpose of such violence is not something the speaker can understand, nor is it something she seems terribly concerned with. This speaker has demonstrated an ability to answer her own questions in previous poems, so the reader must assume that the answer is not the point here. The tragedy of terrorism is made evident in the speaker’s disgust and confusion at their violent actions. The speaker is confident in her confusion; her questions have a biting quality, as if they are only rhetorical moves to point out that there was no end goal justifying such terrible acts. If the others had a point, an end to justify the means, the message has been entirely lost.

“Sunday Morning 9/16/01”

The bewildered spirit of the speaker in the previous poem pervades this penultimate poem. One of the most formally ordered poems in the series, lines of roughly even length are grouped together in neat couplets. The speaker looks out on the river, reflecting with an ordinary morning coffee in her hand, and realizes that she is surrounded by paradoxes. The whole world is different, and yet the St. Mary’s River flows on like always. The speaker is “afraid and sad” (Line 4), and she knows whom she should hate, and yet she can’t bring herself to feel that anger. These paradoxes appear in sequence: “death and birth and hope” (Line 16) all grouped together, opposites butting up against one another but failing to destroy each other. Love emerges as the clear victor with the addition of “especially” in Line 19. The poem has already been dedicated to the poet’s granddaughter, but the poet doesn’t care; she indulges in another dedication, using her granddaughter’s full name.

“Monday Sundown 9/17/01”

For the last poem, the note of love and birth carries over from the previous poem. This is the only poem in the series that maintains consistent couplets without breaking form. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a time for celebration as well as making amends. The repeated syntax of “i bear witness to no thing / more human than” holds both “hate” and “love” in equal measure, although love does get the last word (Lines 1-4). “Apples and honey / apples and honey” (Lines 5-6) preserves the poem’s form by creating a couplet, but the double gesture seems to refer to both love and hate. No matter which, the answer is the same. It is a balanced, sweet answer. After so much talk of absences and loss, there is an affirmative statement, perhaps a prayer for “paradise” (Line 8), to close out the last poem.