WHEN SHELLEY JACKSON PUBLISHED an essay on Jenny Holzer's animated- text installation in the rebuilt tower of 7 World Trade Center—a reminder that more than two towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001—she framed it with a line from E. B. White's book Here Is New York: “The city is like poetry.” As she explores this simile, she considers the city as text, as a place of complexity, order, and fluidity:

This last idea is especially pertinent to the relation between this particular city and the poetry that has been written in the aftermath of the event that has most profoundly affected it in the twenty-first century, and this is the issue I will address in this final chapter: How does poetry on 9/11 make and mark beginnings? How does it deal with this problematic confluence of endings and beginnings, how does it—quite like Ginsberg's poetry—imagine a future where the present seems to only think of endings? How does it work in accordance with Alain Badiou's dictum that “it is essential to break with the omnipresent motif of finitude” (122), with which he opposes a philosophical as well as cultural and political tendency toward nihilism that, according to Badiou, manifested itself in discourses on 9/11 and especially on the “war on terrorism”? In the following analysis, I will show that poetry responds to 9/11 by strongly drawing on a future-founding mode, and that a Whitmanian future-founding poetics has become especially prevalent and significant after 9/11 to the point of actually invoking Whitman as a person as well as an intertextual reference.