Hey Friends,

Its crazy to think that in just over two months my first year of university is going to come to an end! I can’t help but imagine how fast it will go by however with that, I’ll have a bunch of assignments creeping up and due before out of no where!

For the past two weeks we’ve been analyzing poetry in our ASTU class and initially I was nervous going in because I’ve never really liked poetry as I don’t really consider myself a really analytical, creative reader of poetry. Throughout high school, I’ve dreaded poetry the most and I feel like I struggle with it so much because its so ambiguous and can have multiple interpretations.

Continuing our second term theme of post-9/11 literary works, we have been analyzing poetry pertaining to post-9/11 trauma felt by many during the aftermath of the horrific September 11th attacks.

To begin with, it has been really fascinating analyzing post-9/11 poetry. It was amazing discussing how much poetry sprung up after 9/11 and how so many grievers used poetry as an outlet to heal, especially in America. What I found particularly interesting was how poems of no relevance we regarded as 9/11 poetry, however, poems which were categorized 9/11 poetry didn’t appear to coincide with the event.

For example, W.H Auden’s poem ‘“September 1, 1939”’ has nothing to do with 9/11 however has chilling similarities to the trauma experience after 9/11. How could a poem written more than 50 years before 9/11 resonate so well with grievers? Do they connect to the emotion felt after the trauma? Does this imply that all sufferers of trauma can seek solace in one another? On the contrary, how is it that a poem which appears to have no relevance to 9/11 (at least to my interpretation) like Billy Collin’s ‘“The Names”’. The poem seems so ambiguous that it could relate to any trauma that anyone across the globe could interpret and relate to. If I had read reading his ‘dedicated audience’ I would have never known that this is supposed to be a poem for 9/11.

At the end I feel like I am more confused than from where I started coming into poetry studies. Is poetry truly meant to be interpreted freely or is it supposed to be read through a contextualized lens? I’m struggling read poetry because of a simple question…

-Kaveel