Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "The Twin Towers Arcane" is a searing meditation on the violence and contradictions within American identity, using the September 11 attacks as both subject and metaphor. The poem does not focus on the immediate horror of the event but instead examines its deeper implications—America’s self-image, its historical complicity in global violence, and the ways in which its destruction was, in part, a consequence of its own actions.

Hirschman begins with a mourning that is paradoxically a potential awakening. The attack, in its sheer devastation, might serve as a moment of reckoning, an illumination that allows America to see itself honestly. But this awakening is immediately complicated by the assertion that we are now no more / and no less but we have been more than others / a violent land. This claim resists the notion that America is simply an innocent victim. Instead, Hirschman asserts that violence has been foundational to the country’s existence, shaping everything from its financial markets to its legal system to its media and even to its most intimate spaces—its beds. This repetition—a violent life in our money markets / in our “law and order” / in our daily “Dailies” / in our beds—emphasizes the omnipresence of this violence, suggesting that it permeates every aspect of American society.

The Twin Towers, then, are not just physical structures but symbols of this power, wealth, and assumed invulnerability. Their destruction is described in historical terms, linked to Hitler’s dream, as if their fall was not simply an act of terrorism but something anticipated in the darker currents of history. This passage draws a line from fascism to religious fanaticism, suggesting that extremisms—whether of the past or the present—are intertwined in a cycle of destruction. The poem refuses the comfort of simplistic narratives, instead placing America’s suffering within a broader historical and ideological framework.

Hirschman then delivers his most damning critique: we who had inherited so much of its violence and anti-communism, / we who ultimately even / financed the attack / on our supposed innocence. Here, he points to America’s own complicity—its history of supporting authoritarian regimes, its role in funding militant groups that later turned against it, and its economic and political entanglements that made such an attack possible. The phrase our supposed innocence drips with irony, challenging the notion that America was simply a passive victim rather than an active participant in the conditions that led to its own suffering.

The poem’s final section is an indictment of the American psyche—a country so comfortable with fascism (denied, of course) / with brutality (renegade, of course) / with freedom sentimentalized by a core of destructive emptiness. Hirschman suggests that America’s self-perception is built on denial, a refusal to acknowledge the extent to which violence, both at home and abroad, has been essential to its power. This destructive emptiness is not just political but spiritual, a kind of national nihilism that is naturally denied and disowned. The phrase star-spangled nihilism is especially cutting, as it juxtaposes patriotic imagery with existential void, implying that the American Dream is underpinned by a deep and corrosive despair.

"The Twin Towers Arcane" is not a lamentation in the traditional sense; it is an autopsy. Hirschman does not mourn the destruction as an inexplicable tragedy but as an inevitable consequence of America’s own actions. His refusal to offer solace or easy conclusions forces the reader to confront the uncomfortable reality that the attack was not merely an external assault but an event deeply entwined with the nation’s history, values, and contradictions. By stripping away the myth of innocence, Hirschman challenges the reader to recognize that the true tragedy is not just what happened on September 11, but what had been happening long before it—and what continues to happen in its wake.

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