ABSTRACT
The widely circulated view of September 11, 2001, as a watershed moment for American society poses problems for an understanding of both geopolitical events and their representations. What is in doubt is not only what the date divides (by some literary-critical accounts, as I note below, a trivial, ludic, or aestheticized postmodernist poetry on one side, and an engaged, collectively-based poetry, animated by casstastrophe, on the other) but also the location and stability of the watershed itself, which, on inspection, appears far less determinate in time and space than it may have appeared in 2001. In what sense, for example, could the assault on 9/11 be “the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of all events,” as Jean Baudrillard claims in The Spirit of Terrorism? (4). In what sense was it “The Day America Changed,” to use the headline of newspaper accounts across the country echoed in poem titles such as Stanley Plumly's “The Morning America Changed” and Joy Harjo's “When the World As We Knew It Ended”?
