‘It seems that poetry is one vehicle that really fits’

Ellen Pickus has never returned to the World Trade Center site since the terrorist attacks eight years ago. She wants to remember it for the life it once exuded when she walked there with her husband and watched brides posing for wedding pictures and musicians putting on concerts beside the twin towers.

“I just can’t go back because it was so beautiful there,” said Pickus, a retired creative writing teacher at Long Beach High School and an award-winning poet, who last

November self-published her first book of poems, “Unbroken

Promises.”

In recent years on Sept. 11, Pickus has attended events at the Long Beach Library, where, this year, she hosted poetry workshops on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Because she thinks it is important to memorialize Sept. 11 as well, she accepted the library’s invitation to conduct a poetry and prose program, titled “Dealing with the Unthinkable,” on Friday afternoon.

“It seems that poetry is one vehicle that really fits 9/11,” said library programmer Edie Kalickstein, who noted that some attendees always read a poem at the library’s 9/11 events, which have included an art exhibit and a firefighter’s documentary.

Among the pieces Pickus will read, before asking participants to write their own 9/11-themed poems or prose pieces, is one a student of hers wrote the day after the attacks. “It had a very personal, emotional effect on her because it happened on her birthday,” Pickus said.

Pickus, too, had a personal experience on 9/11. Her husband, Philip, whose law firm was near the World Trade Center, frequented the twin towers for their coffee and book shops. Pickus got choked up as she remembered how frantic she was that day, and was unable to retell the worst of what he witnessed. “He said people were going toward the buildings and he went in the other direction,” she said. “And he just escaped the clouds of debris.”

The next day at school, Pickus said, she had to deal with the attacks, the mass death and wholesale destruction, and asked her students to write about it. “My students were very bright, sensitive young adults and wrote memorable pieces,” said Pickus, who was also an advisor for LBHS’s Literary Art Magazine and taught a talented writers program. Come Friday, Pickus will also read 9/11 poems that she culled from the Internet, including, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski, a piece she described as “quite beautiful and comforting.”

Asked if any of the poems she chose address the anger and outrage people felt after the attacks, Pickus said she definitely steers away from such themes. She believes that to truly heal, people must “get beyond the anger. I think that creative writing is very therapeutic,” she said.

Kalickstein said she and the library staff believe it is important to continue to hold some kind of 9/11-themed program each year. “Because we have a wound that is not healing, even if you haven’t been affected personally,” she said. “Some want to escape or do other things, but you know down deep that you have to look at it.”

At each annual 9/11 program, an Irish gentleman (whose name escapes Kalickstein) reads a poem, and a group from the Magnolia Senior Center always contributes a poem. One Long Beach resident, Eleanor Hamburg, will be unable to make this year’s program, but she contributed a prose piece written by LBHS students that was read at a 9/11 dedication at Congregation Beth Shalom in 2006.

Lending further credence to her claim that 9/11 brings out the poet in some people, Kalickstein recalled that the day after the attacks, a man from Atlantic Beach came into the library and gave her a poem he had written.

“He said he was so moved,” Kalickstein said, “he couldn’t do anything else but write a poem.”

Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.