"Into the Fire" and "Empty Sky": 9/11 after 9/11

Listening to the Boss in the year after 9/11, I'd be all chills and fever every time I heard these songs. I'm not crazy about these photo images, which always feel coldly distant from the feelings and alarm of those hours. Springsteen remains one of our greatest poet for the masses, poet of hope and grief, poet of memory and desire.

Our poetic responses, while not absent, felt smaller, more localized, though William Heyen's anthology "Making Sense of September 11th" is an excellent memorial to the thinking of that moment; how even then, writers strained against the narrowing constraints in public discourse.