trivial. It was not an emotion that would last. It was a passing
emotion. It was the emotion commonly experiences around
brushes with disaster and the awareness of having been spared.
The after a hurricane, after a black out after a tornado, after
an earthquake emotion. All of this gave the small parts of their
lives the same intensity with which they listened to poetry.
One night, standing in the cold out on the sidewalk looking at
the towers-of-light while waiting for friends to come out of the
bar, they realized that while the collapsing buildings did not
cause them to fall in love, make babies, give rings to one anoth
er, settle down finally after years of having trouble with com-
mittments, it did change the way they read poetry, the way they
looked at art, the way they thought about ideas. Even before
the buildings fell down, they had gone to many poetry read-
ings. They went to poetry readings where poems that used frag-
mentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical
syntax, and so on were read. On the odd occasion where the
poets used complete sentences, they were usually used ironi-
cally. The fragmentation felt reassuring to them. Felt like a
trance-induced chant. Like a philosophy of connection. Like
a model of intimacy that was full of acquaintances and publics
that recognized not only points of contact and mixing, but also
relationship difficulties, cultural and linguistic difference. And so
they often wondered in this time if perhaps all those who
claimed that poetry was a comfort were right. Even those
who claimed this were usually talking about lyric poetry and
not poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, dis-
junction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. They had noticed
before that they felt writing in their body. That they felt those
certain sensations, those sensations of interested calmness that
happened when their mind and their breath were working
together, that pleasant boredom. And they began at this time
to think of the poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, dis-
ruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on not as a
radical avant-garde break but as the warm hand of someone
they loved stroking their head, helping them to relax the mus-
cles in their head and inviting them to just close their eyes and
relax for a second with the words of someone else. This feeling
somewhat answered that constant question of about the use of
the avant-garde in a time like this.
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