Taking (A)Part: Poetic Counternarratives for Troubled Times

Abstract

How do we "read the world" after September 11th? As the event was mediatized into abstraction, this article provides a framework from which poetry as counternarrative may be used to challenge the media monologue on what emerged as standardized September 11th discourse. In the aftermath of the event, the media constructed an acceptable, sensible-sounding lexicon that may also have foreclosed on social critique in the form of vernacular expressions. And if the media set the terms of acceptable language, what happened to the non-mediatized experience of September 11th? Does such an experience even exist? What is the role of schools in fostering student critique? Based on a narrative approach that includes examples of the author's own experience and writing, this piece takes a poetic look at a different kind of literate meaning: the sense of empowerment rooted in the language of everyday experience.