 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
One of my not-so-secret pleasures as an editor here in Times Opinion is editing and publishing the work of poets. This penchant may go back to Feb. 6, 1977, when a poem I wrote for my seventh-grade English class, a lament about the hardships of delivering The Daily News in my Staten Island neighborhood, appeared in that paper. The poem made me famous in school that week, and not in a good way. I spent parts of the following days hiding in the bathroom to avoid ridicule between classes. Yet I knew something special had happened: an alchemical reaction between poetry and the press. Since then, for me, at least, news and the art of verse have always been wedded. |
Now, many years later, I wear my devotion to poetry proudly, and as a journalist I've found it often enriches and deepens the work I am fortunate to do here. In Opinion, poets, like all engaged citizens, stake their claims in our pages for our readers. Of late, well-wrought guest essays by the poets Edward Hirsch (on his experience going blind) and Katie Farris (on dreaming her way through her cancer treatment) come to mind. Work like this is, as Ezra Pound famously said about poetry, "news that stays news." |
The poet Amanda Gorman is well known for speaking powerfully to the difficult coexistence of history with the here-and-now. Her recitation of her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the Inaugural ceremony of President-elect Joe Biden in 2021 established her as a young poet with a forceful public presence, whose voice would be heard for a long time to come. |
In a guest essay and a new poem, Gorman uses her gifts to draw our attention to a tragedy that seemed to fade quickly from public attention last month: the capsizing of the Adriana, a fishing boat overloaded with migrants off the coast of Greece, that killed more than 600 men, women and children. The reporting on it, she writes, "was barely a blip on many news websites. Not long after, the world eagerly turned its attention and resources to an ultimately unsuccessful rescue of five wealthy passengers aboard the faulty OceanGate submersible. Two tragedies, two responses, and one staggering contrast." |
Gorman sees the Adriana disaster in the context of a longer history of such traumatic and perilous journeys — in particular, the case of the Zong slave ship in 1781, in which more than 130 enslaved people were forced into the sea to perish. Inspired by the Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip's work on the same subject, Gorman offers readers an "erasure" poem using a historical document from the court case that followed the Zong massacre. |
In this, the poet's role as witness becomes our role, too, even if we might resist it. |
"The Western world often turns its back on refugees and migrants fleeing the flames of conflict we've fanned, claiming it's not our problem," Gorman writes. "Yet perhaps the real truth is unbearable: that we who watch others suffer and do nothing are responsible for the tragedies we witness. I write not to wash my hands clean of these crimes, but to honor those still in the water." |
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