2001 in Poetry - Events

Events

• Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was read (with many lines omitted) on National Public Radio and was widely circulated and discussed for its relevance to recent events.
• December 9–10 — Professor John Basinger, 67, performed, from memory, John Milton's Paradise Lost at Three Rivers Community-Technical College in Norwich, Connecticut, a feat that took 18 hours.
• In The Best American Poetry 2001, poet and guest editor Robert Hass wrote, "There are roughly three traditions in American poetry at this point: a metrical tradition that can be very nervy and that is also basically classical in impulse; a strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two; and an experimental tradition that is usually more passionate about form than content, perception than emotion, restless with the conventions of the art, skeptical about the political underpinnings of current practice, and intent on inventing a new one, or at least undermining what seems repressive in the current formed style. At the moment there are poets doing good, bad, and indifferent work in all these ranges." Critic Maureen McLane said of Hass' description that "it's hard to imagine a more judicious account of major tendencies."
• The appointment of Billy Collins as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress generated a protest in which Anselm Hollo was elected "anti-laureate" in a contest run by Robert Archambeau (the influential online POETICS list at the University of Buffalo served as the main forum).