With its long tradition of memorializing a person who has died, this poetic form attempts to make live in its lines someone or something that is not longer with us. While the forms of this type of poem vary greatly, it is an appropriate vehicle with which to convey the losses experienced on 9/11. Whatever perspective you take, and whatever individual, emotion or object you choose to elegize, this type of poem can be a therapeutic and authentic means of expressing the grief felt by so many when remembering this specific day.
Sometimes it can be useful to try to remember all of the specifics of a particular time or event, especially one as tragic and difficult as 9/11. To do this exercise, try to remember, using your senses, where you were and what precisely you say, felt, heard, touched and smelled when you first learned of the attacks. How old were you? What type of day was it? Did you see the crashes on the television, or hear about them second-hand? How did other people react? How did you react? By brainstorming in a sensory and contextual way your experience of the situation, you will then be better able to recognize the specific emotions you felt, and will be able to craft the material into a more polished form.
An old recommendation of what to do when you were upset about something, or needed to express in an articulate way your feelings, letter-writing can be another effective way to explore the emotions and significance of 9/11 on paper. Try composing a letter of thanks to one of the New York firefighters, or a letter to the editor expressing your experience of the events of that day, and in what other ways 9/11 has affected your life. Write a letter to your future self or your future son or daughter, explaining what happened and how it impacted your life in as much detail as possible.
While plays serve as an immediate, viewable performance of the written word, writing a scene requires an incredible amount of planning, and great intuition into human motivations and actions. Attempting to translate your experience of, or a story from, 9/11 into a dramatic scene is another written way to communicate the events of that day to an audience. Choose an nontraditional perspective, one that you think sheds new light on what happened. This form of writing will ask you to imagine how characters would really behave in the situation in which you have placed them.