SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

assemblage” of cultural beliefs to capture a moment of fragmentation in socially accepted ideas
of honor and heroism. 20
“After the Poet’s Encounter with Certain New York Apologists for the Terrorists” is dated
March 25, 2002 and set at LaGuardia airport. It features eight quatrains with alternating
rhymes, XAXA, and a closing couplet. There are three pentameter lines followed by one
tetrameter line per stanza, giving a distinctive form to offset the tension of the ideas of the
poem. Like Auden, Turner adjusts the form to present the best sounding expression of the
content. As vers collage, Turner’s speaker uses artifacts of material culture — the fallen World
Trade Center Towers, the experience of being search by airport screeners before boarding a
plane, the apologists for the terrorists he hears, and the inspirational words of Hungarian poet
Miklos Radnoti, a victim of the Nazis, as his tools for “investigating [the world] similar to the
[cultural anthropologist]. 21
As the speaker listens to those who want to “understand” and “forgive” a “space is cut open or
reopened” in the speaker’s mind which makes room for the exact words of Radnoti calling on
him to “find a renewed source of energy for resisting” the “magic rituals . . . of explanation.”
[that] promise to bring order out of chaos. 22 Radnoti’s poem, “Just Walk On, Condemned to
Die” is italicized at the key moments and used whole in the vers collage, pasted in for
counterpoint. Applying Radnoti’s invocation to the collage of reality, emotions, and
interpretations of history, creates a new causality built through the textual metaphors in the
poem. After detailing the current situation with the collapsed towers, the military planes flying
overhead, and the sense of loss, the speaker reflects and then hears the voice of Radnoti, in
these final four stanzas:
And can this city, with its million shops,
Its vital eyes, its fertile trade,
Outlive the abstract treason of its clerks,
The dead black of their masquerade? —
O poet, may you live as clean as those
Hill-dwellers in their windblown snows,
As free from sin as baby Jesus in
An ikon where the candle glows;
Speak to your city, poet, comfort her wounds,
Drink up the poison they prepare,
Transform their gall to milk, forgive, forgive
The pale-faced ones in their despair;
O live as hard as the great wolf that goes
Wounded and bleeding through the snow. 23
The speaker, after the manner of the Berlin Dadaists, Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield
“[mixes] the language which noticeably demands real social change with a mode of artistic
investigation” 24 manifested here through Radnoti’s cautionary voice. As Auden had in the
1930s and 1940s, the speaker of Turner’s poem “[is] struggling with the question of the poet’s
function in a world consumed by war and political and social injustice” as he attempts “to
26