The year began with the Sept. 11 attack still aching and its consequences still unfolding; it existed as both a hole in the heart and a tragic fact of life. How was a popular entertainer supposed to respond to such devastation, let alone transform it into art?

An early clue came at the Super Bowl. There, fronting U2's halftime show, Bono presided over a solemn scroll of the names of Sept. 11 victims and closed his act by pulling back his jacket to show us its lining -- a flash of the red, white, and blue. The Feb. 3 spectacle set the tone for many a tribute, so much so that a full seven months later Bon Jovi's Times Square concert opening the fall's football season also made a point of cheering on both the NFL and the USA.

In between those two events, Bruce Springsteen became the de facto poet laureate of Sept. 11 by transforming interviews with widows into the elegies and anthems on The Rising. In promoting it, he showed up everywhere from Today to Nightline, at times making even the faithful uncomfortable with his prolific salesmanship, but the catharsis he provided quickly quieted the skeptics.

While the Boss provided a salve, country singer Steve Earle seemed to have torn off the Band-Aid. By writing ''John Walker's Blues'' from inside the mind of the California-raised Taliban fighter (''I'm just an American boy raised on MTV/And I've seen all those kids in the soda-pop ads, but none of 'em looked like me''), he elicited charges of anti-Americanism, as well as some praise.

The film world also made a cautious attempt to process the attack: An adaptation of The Guys, Anne Nelson's warmly received play about a fire chief struggling to memorialize his fallen men, made its Toronto International Film Festival debut with its original message intact. ''I think my worst fear has been averted -- that it would be corrupted and commercialized,'' said Nelson. ''Some people had the idea of turning it into a love story.''

Before the year is out, Spike Lee's drama 25th Hour (matter-of-factly set in post- Sept. 11 Manhattan) will hit theaters, and Neil LaBute's play The Mercy Seat (about a man who was at his lover's apartment rather than the World Trade Center that morning) will debut Off Broadway. Creators of cultural artifacts as disparate as a Law & Order episode (wherein a murderer covers his tracks by placing his victim's remains in the WTC rubble) and Nick Tosches' gangster novel In the Hand of Dante (in which the hero fakes his own death at the site) have casually built the disaster into their narratives.

How to respond? With minor plot points and full-blown tragic arcs, small gestures and grand statements, mundane reflections of the ''new normal'' and such sublime heights as the spirit-swelling chorus of Springsteen's title track. ''Come on up,'' he sang, and we did. -- Troy Patterson, with additional reporting by Karen Valby

You Might Also Like

• Between the Lines Why Johnny Depp put his friend's audiobook on hold | Matthew Flamm
• Between the Lines Johnny Depp gives voice to ''Dante'' audiobook | Matthew Flamm , Karen Valby
• Between the Lines Between the Lines | Matthew Flamm
• Pop Culture News Johnny Depp: Film's top money-maker in '07
• Pop Culture News Beyond the velvet rope, men in velvet pants | Joyce Caruso Corrigan