Annie Finch’s Chant for 9/11

Annie Finch

Many poems have been written in response to the September 11 attacks and their toll since they occurred exactly twenty years ago today. But few have answered those events with the strength and rigor of the truest poetry.  “The Naming: A Chant,” by Annie Finch, is one of those.

Since I first heard Finch read the poem in 2012 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine a few blocks from my home on New York’s Upper West Side, I have been struck by the power of its tightly controlled, subtly modulated rhythms to inspire a sense of awe appropriate to the occasion. When I later read the poem, which had been commissioned for the church’s installation of Meredith Bergmann’s extraordinary 9-11 Memorial sculpture, I marveled at the poet’s craft in achieving the effect on the page.

Finch, I saw, achieves the drumbeat force in the sounds of the names she commemorates by arranging them in Sapphic stanzas, which tend to place the stress on the first syllable of a word. Thus, from the very first line, the rhythm of the poem makes us linger on the names of the lost: LOpez, JURgens, LozOWsky, O'CONnor, LOmax. The meter engraves the names of the lost in the heart and mind by way of the ear. In between these stanzas, and, later, woven into them, are repeating four-beat lines evoking the dread of that day while echoing a haunting sense of archaic chant from time immemorial.

Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names

Interspersed are indelible, snapshot-like images which capture the acute pain of that day: “Women running suddenly in their high heels,” “Spirals, dust and spiralling dust and hours[.]”

Today is the best possible day to read Finch’s lines aloud.

Annie Finch

The Naming: A Chant

Lopez, Jurgens, Lozowsky, O'Connor, Lomax
(Shoes, and spirals, dust and the falling flowers)
Diaz, Dingle, Galletti, DiPasquale,
Katsimatides

Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names:

 DiStefano, Eisenberg, Chung, Green, Dolan,
(Women running suddenly in their high heels)
Penny, York, Duarte, Elferis, Sliwak,
Yamamadala,

Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

 Wounds widen the remembering earth:
Weinstein, Villanueva, West, Sadaque,
(Spirals, dust and spiralling dust and hours)
Bowman, Burns, Kawauchi, Buchanan, Reilly,
Reese, Ognibene,

 Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

 Kushitani, Ueltzhoffer, Wong, Ferrugio,
(Breathed in only in or beyond the naming),
Inghilterra, Tzemis, Liangthanasam,
Coladonato—

 Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

 Sanchez, Talbot, Afflito, Siskopoulos
(Every question with a long sob of naming)
Tarantino, Zempoaltecatl, Thorpe, Koo,
Stergiopoulos,

 Zion, Zinzi, Song, Shahid, Santiago, Ortiz,
Pabon, Ou, O’Neill, Newton-Carter,
Miller, Mohammed,
Zakhary, Campbell,
Deming, DiFranco,
Chowdhury, Blackwell,
Zucker, McDowell,
Goldstein, Basmajian . . .

Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

First published in Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).