TRAGEDY to a poet is nothing new. Neither are destruction, horror and grief. Homer chronicled the Trojan War; W.B. Yeats dissected Ireland's Easter Rebellion. On a scale less grand but no less meaningful, Charles Bukowski lamented a dead swan floating in the pond at his neighborhood park.

But this World Trade Center thing is throwing the whole New York City poetry community for a loop. And, because for poets nothing is ordinary - it is a loop supplemented with a curve ball and punctuated with a double whammy.

On the day of the tragedy, I biked home pell-mell from work to write down my initial reaction to what I had just heard on the radio. Call it instinctual drive. I then accessed my e-mail to send my poem to a Web site that might publish it.

Much to my dismay, I already found my inbox peppered with thoughts regarding the disaster - one was a call for poetry submissions. I was somewhat taken aback by this online editor's zest at perhaps "exploiting" the tragedy, so I sent my poem somewhere else.

In the following weeks, my inbox became a giant catalogue of WTC essays, petitions, poems, poems and more poems. I began reading some of them but, by the end of the first week, I was so inundated with bin Laden mantras, down- with-the-Taliban rhymes and images of a burning sky that I just started hitting the delete key without even opening the entries.

One poetry Web site editor, who had obviously been bombarded with WTC poems himself, sent out a caustic, universal message that he was not, under any circumstances, going to accept them. He wrote, "At a time like this, New York doesn't need your - poetry."

I am not sure now I agree. After all, writing to purge is what my fellow poets and I do. It is what keeps us sane (if you can call it that). Perhaps New York, per se, does not need our poetry - but we sure do. It is the only way we can make sense of the many contradictions that seem to be streaming through our heads in the wake of such surrealism. These are not only conundrums that I face but, as I found, they are facing the poetry community at large.

Fellow poets I've spoken to feel the same way. We are all writing about it. We are all scathed. It shows. At the first reading I attended after the tragedy, we tried to lighten the mood, which worked to a degree. One poet prefaced her poems by saying, "I'll try to read something upbeat." Then she proceeded to recite a piece on dead relatives and war. I found myself at the mike, having specifically chosen works that had nothing to do with the disaster, reading two poems about suicide. It is apparent that poetry, like life itself, has an underlying sense of doom, a lurking angst that you just can't shake.

Then, there is this new patriotism. I am not the only poet who recently said at my poetry reading the following: "This is the first patriotic work I have ever done in my life." And mine is not patriotic in an "America the Beautiful" sense at all. No poets that I know have dyed their hair red, white and blue, and none has gotten an Old Glory tattoo, but there have been some poems containing stirring sentiments that are more effective in raising spirits than a pep rally.

There is also the blatant "freakiness" of it all. Although tragedy to a poet is nothing new, what is new is that usually the tragedies are contained in our own heads or they happen somewhere across the sea, as, say, in Afghanistan. Here we have a bleeding wound on American soil, gashed and infected. I must say I've heard some striking imagery and symbolism in several poignant pieces recently.

And then there are the solutions that the more politically minded poets are proposing. Some responses are drastic and ugly. The expressions of anger, which do not do any justice - poetic or otherwise - are a complete turn-off. There are poems riddled with such intense hatred and rage (which may simply function to mask fear) that I want to shut my ears or turn the page.

But others simply want to dedicate readings, Web sites or compiling anthologies for sale so the proceeds can go somewhere useful like the Red Cross. I am not about to visit a Web site dedicated solely to the tragedy. Frankly, it would be too depressing. How much can you saturate yourself with these thoughts? Enough is enough, already.

Where does it end? It probably doesn't. But, just as tragedy is not a foreign concept to poets, neither is faith. As the poem I wrote on the day of the disaster attests: "I only know enough to hope that the slumbering oaf we call a country stirs itself awake enough to rear its massive head in prayer."