“Where were you when it all happened?” is the question people ask each other. I was up on a mountainside in my wife’s hometown in Nagasaki Prefecture, thinking. My favorite place to go when we return to visit my in-laws is the site of the old castle. I often stay up there with my thoughts. When I came back down the mountain Maya told me about the strange thing that was happening in America. I stood before the television set trying to decipher what the Japanese newscaster was saying while the first tower smoldered.

My friend Robert Lax had already passed on–but the question came back again and again: what would he have said/written about it? Eventually it was as if I were hearing his voice as I wrote the poem “down” about the horror of that day. The poem (which has since been revised) was posted on the internet by Bob Holman and has been used in an elementary school in Texas as a way to explain what happened. Still, how to talk about a horror that almost escapes the power of words to capture it?

I recently worked with a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb on a book of her mother’s stories. The woman herself was only five years old when it happened. She has next to no memories of those horrible days. Her mother, on the other hand, carried with her stories that could only be said to come from hell. The lady with whom I worked believes that the use of “ground zero” to describe the pit where the World Trade Center once stood is a mistake. She believes that those words should be used only when speaking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much in the same way as the names “Auschwitz” and “Belsen” should be used only in connection with the horrors of the German camps. I think she has a point. Why borrow the terminology of one hell to refer to another?

Still, how to begin to talk about this awful tragedy? All of these many terrible mistakes? These excuses to kill and maime and destroy? How to begin?

They say one develops a fever for all things Wikipedia after taking a close look at the process of Wikification and Wikifying elements, and it is indeed intoxicating! Since being introduced by Dan to the simplicities of working with the elements of the Wikipedia, I’ve constructed entries for Rod Summers, the late Leo Connellan, Sheila Murphy Judith Skillman and others, and will build a site for David Axelrod, once we get the material together. My latest Wikipedia page is the List of Concrete and Visual Poets. If you are involved in the creation of these kinds of texts, please look up this page at the Wikipedia and add your name to the list! Remember: The Wikipedia counts!