Okay, I fail basic English. But here’s the poet who wrote “The Curse,” explaining what he meant:
The poem is a curse on those who flew into the World Trade Towers. When I wrote it I didn’t imagine that it could be read in any other way. The poem springs from the ancient moral idea (the idea of Dante’s Divine Comedy) that what you suffer for your actions should correspond to the nature of your actions. Shelley in his Defense of Poetry says that “the great secret of morals is love”-and by love he means not affection or erotic feeling, but sympathetic identification, identification with others. If you perceive the world as perceived by another, if you enter into his skin, there are certain terrible things that you cannot do to him. The poem condemns the high-jackers to enact again and again precisely what they lacked in life: identification with what their victims experienced. The poem imagines that this would burn away the “bubble of rectitude” that allowed them to think their action “moral.” Identification is here called down as punishment, the great secret of morals reduced to a curse. The reader who responded to you with the statement that begins “In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers” explores the poem’s intentions more eloquently than I can do myself.
Another credit to my amazingly smart readers. But also a credit to this new medium, huh? You don’t only get corrections at lightning speed, you even get line readings from poets! I feel like Woody Allen introducing Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Only I’m the one humiliated.
The Dish 