Poetry and Risk Part I

A friend wrote me recently and said, It’s amazing how someone can go to jail, even be killed just for what he or she wrote in a poem, but I guess I see that when I read these poems you’ve sent me.  Maybe back then poetry was more feared?

I had sent him “Stalin’s Epigram” by Osip Mandelstam, as well as some poems by a few others writers.

Mandelstam wrote the following sixteen line poem in response to the famine in Russia. He was arrested for speaking out against Stalin’s atrocities. He would spend the rest of his days paying for his courage, ultimately with his life.

The Stalin Epigram

By Osip Mandelstam

Translated by W.S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Mandelstam wrote this piece in the fall of 1933. Within six months he was arrested and exiled to Voronezh, a province of Russia. Mandelstam is known for saying, Only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

He died in 1938—his words could not have been more prophetic. On August 12, 1952 as per Stalin’s orders, thirteen Jewish scholars were executed. The Night of the Murdered Poets as it’s been named, was carried out because Stalin, a man who killed millions upon millions, tried to obliterate that which he feared.

Wislava Syzmborska used irony and humor as a cover for getting her poetry past the censors in Poland.  “An Opinion On The Question Of Pornography” deals with the corruption of ideas which makes using pornography an ingenious cover. She replaced free thought with pornography, and through her use of satire something far worse than pornography occurred. It’s interesting because this got past the censors in it’s disguise, yet the subject matter is quite serious. One must wonder how that was possible.

An Opinion On The Question Of Pornography

Wislava  Syzmborska

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

There’s nothing more debauched than thinking.

This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed

on a plot of laid out for daisies.

Nothing’s sacred for those who think.

Calling things brazenly by name,

risqué analyses, salacious syntheses,

frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,

the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,

discussion in heat—it’s music to their ears.

In broad daylight or under cover of night

they form circles, triangles, or pairs.

The partners’ age or sex are unimportant.

Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.

Friend leads friend astray.

Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.

A brother pimps for his little sister.

They prefer the fruits

from the forbidden tree of knowledge

to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines—

all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.

The books they relish have no pictures.

What a variety they have lies in certain phrases

marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.

It’s shocking, the positions,

the unchecked simplicity with which

one mind contrives to fertilize another!

Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn’t know.

During these trusts of theirs, the only things that’s steamy is

the tea.

People sit on their chairs and move their lips.

everyone crosses only his own legs

so that one foot is resting on the floor

while the other dangles freely in midair.

Only now and then does somebody get up,

go to the window,

and through a crack in the curtains,

take a  peep out at the street.

Syzmborska’s poetry is filled with hidden meanings. She published it because she disguised philosophical and moral ideas behind irony and humor. Her poems are strong on their own, but when one looks into the deeper meaning, they are provocative and compelling, as well as cunning.

Perhaps poetry was more feared than it is today. It’s important to remember that countless numbers of people remain voiceless still.   Times are changing, certainly. There was a symposium on the new generation of Polish poets a few weeks ago in New York City.  Polish poetry is becoming more diverse than ever before.  For the first time, writers do not need to fear what they write.  They are able at last, to write what they wish to write without looking over their shoulders.  It will be interesting to see where that freedom will take them, what poetry it will produce.

Without censorship and fear, where would poetry be today? I cannot answer that.  John Felstiner asks in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,

“Would we, if this were possible, trade Anne Frank’s diary for her life, give up those salvaged pages to let her survive unscathed in, in her seventies now?  And would we forgo Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater?, her 1941 autobiography in 760 watercolors, if in exchange she were not to perish in Auschwitz? Would we, in effect, do without such indispensable human documents, relinquish them so as to secure the undeflected lives their creators might have lived?

Why yes! it goes without saying.  But the question involves something more.” (Felstiner, xix)

This is the crux of poetry before there was freedom of language.  Those who were courageous enough to write, have left us with invaluable information.  In answer to my friends question, all I can say, is thank you to all those who wrote their truths.

Celan, Paul, Translated by Felstiner, John. Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan. W.W. Norton: New York, 2001

Erika  Lutzner

Fall Guest Writer’s Series #1 With Nin Andrews

PIonline’s Guest Writer’s Series is a new series, featuring great writers writing about, well, just about whatever they want.  We’ll feature two separate runs, one in the fall and one in the spring, and we’re proud to kick things off with Nin Andrews and her frank commentary on “American Optimism.”  We’ve had the great pleasure of publishing Nin’s poetry in various issues of Poetry International; you can find more about that here and more about the author here.

American Optimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about a phenomenon I can’t quite name. Sometimes I think of it as American amnesia. Other times I think it’s America’s selective memory.  Or maybe it’s American optimism. Let me give a few examples to explain . . .

1. A year ago, November of 2008, I was at the Miami Book Fair, and I had the opportunity to hear Andrei Codrescu read.  He was reading poetry and talking a lot about Hurricane Katrina.  He was also selling a CD of musicians who were responding to the Katrina experience.  At one point he talked about what he called American optimism.

What do you mean by optimism? a woman asked.

Codrescu responded that Americans don’t really want to think about Katrina anymore. They want to believe everything in this great country is always getting better.

He seemed to imply that other countries accept their problems, their crimes, shadows, more readily.

2. A few weeks ago a friend loaned me some audio-tapes of Jack Kornfield.  On one of the recordings Kornfield said that he asked an audience of Americans how many of them believed that one day they would die.

A few hands went up.

3. A recent article in Grist, the online environmental magazine, by Jonathan Hiskes states that a new Pew poll “finds a significant drop in the number of Americans who believe global warming is happening, is human-caused, and is a serious problem.”

No matter how much scientific evidence pours in, Americans prefer to believe in a happier future for the planet.

4. A few years ago I gave a poetry reading and a talk in which I referred to Anwar Sadat.  I told the story of how my family had only recently purchased their first television when Sadat was shot.  It was October, 1981. I remember watching in horror as Sadat was shot again and again.   (Of course they were simply showing the assassination repeatedly, but I wasn’t used to television).

I added how the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 brought back the memory of Sadat.  How these political assassinations, especially those that are played in front of our eyes on television and are splashed across every newspaper in the world, stay lodged in our mind for ages.

A woman in her 50s asked, Who was Anwar Sadat?  Who was Yitzhak Rabin?

I asked the audience to answer her question.

No one volunteered an answer.

5. Last weekend I was at a conference run by Phillip Brady, the editor and founder of Etruscan Press.  Dr. Brady talked about the Etruscan publication of a book of poems on 9/11.

He said the book came out in 2002.  Major book chains ordered many copies of the book, but the book didn’t sell well.

Why?

He didn’t know.

The anthology, American Writers Respond, included poems and essays by Lucille Clifton, Tess Gallagher, Stanley Plumly, John Updike, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others.

A man who had worked in the corporate world and who was in the audience said the book probably came out too late.  Books that are timely are also time-limited.

By 2002 we had moved on.

6. During his presidency George W Bush censored all photos of the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers.
His mother, Barbara Bush, defended her son’s decision.

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?” Barbara said on Good Morning American on March 18, 2003.  “ It’s not relevant.  So why should I waste my beautiful mind on a thing like that?”

Maybe that is the question.

7. Why?

Perhaps this poem by Lucille Lang Day from the Etruscan anthology is the beginning of just one answer to that question.

Strangers

I didn’t know the man in black pants
who plunged headfirst
from the top of the north tower

or the young woman trapped
behind a locked door
on the eighty-seventh floor.

I never met the couple
crushed in their final embrace
and stuffed in one body bag

or the fire chief quickly buried
under tons of concrete,
steel, glass, and ash.

Nor did I ever say hello
to the blond woman
who called her husband to ask

what she should tell the pilot
standing beside her
at the back of the plane.

I never shared coffee
with the six-foot-four executive
who said, “If we’re going
to crash into something,
let’s not let it happen.
Our best chance is to fight.”

Yet I have felt sun on their skin
and tasted wine on their lips.
I have run using the long muscles

of their legs and felt air
rush into their lungs, their hearts
pumping in my chest,

and they have combed my hair
each morning, tasted
cereal from my bowl,

and held my children in their arms.
At night they have watched
stars shimmer through my eyes.

Now they have all returned
to earth and air, but I still feel them
stirring inside me, walking

the long corridors of my brain,
searching for something
irretrievable, precious, still there.

(from American Writer’s Respond, Etruscan Press, 2002, pages 88-89)

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press and her chapbook, Accidental Seduction, is forthcoming from Obscure Publcations.

Official Poetry International Tote Bags

Is this a familiar scene? You’re at a Poetry International reading, and the featured reader offers his or her book at a rate that is too good to pass up. You also see current and past issues of PI for sale, and the temptation of palatable poetry is too strong to resist. But your purse is too small, or you don’t have one at all. How will you transport your newfound treasures home?

Your troubles are over! Official Poetry International Tote Bags are now available at our bookstore for the reasonable price of $8 (add $3 for shipping and handling). Or get one FREE with a three year subscription! And you don’t have to use them only for poetry. These beauties accommodate fiction and nonfiction, function and non-function. Take them to work. Take them to the grocery store. Show them off as your friends throw jealous glances in your direction. When Halloween rolls around next year, dress as your favorite poet and take the bag trick-or-treating!

 

PI's Attractive New Tote

By Lisa Grove

 

National Writers?

For the last month,  I’ve been teaching classes in contemporary American and Romanian poetry in the American Studies program of the University of Bucharest, and that time has been well spent indeed, providing me access to new voices and perspectives on poetry and its place in both modern American and Romanian cultures.  We’ve had a number of lively class discussions, and I was especially interested in my students’ reactions to the news that Herta Müller had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009. representing the first time (and long overdue at that) a Romanian writer had won the award.  Not so fast, though.  Müller writes (mostly) in German, the students reminded me, and she’d left Romania for Germany in 1987.  But hadn’t she been forced to leave, I countered, emigrating only suffering censorship and worse under Romanian communism (Müller recounts some of that vividly here)? Besides, while she writes in German, doesn’t that speak mostly to her having grown up in a German speaking town in Romania, and at a time when the country’s German minority lived under considerable duress?  In fact, doesn’t writing about those ethnic tensions, and almost exclusively about life in communist Romania, mark her clearly as a Romanian writer and a vital one?

The discussion led beyond Müller to the idea of writers and their national identity and whether these kinds of designations–”German writer” or “Romanian writer–” carried any real weight.  Many of the students concluded that Müller’s value resided in the bleak realities of communist reality that she portrayed in her novels and stories not in her nationality, and on a certain level this seems reasonable.  Something about it gives me pause, though.  Are there nothing more than bragging rights at stake in labeling Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson an American writer?  Are these terms only relevant when dealing with overtly political writers, like Victor Jara or Amiri Barka, and meaningless when dealing with the likes of Wordsworth or F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Is Herta Müller a German writer or a Romanian writer (or can she be both)?  Does it matter at all?  I have to think it does matter, though, as of now, I’m at a loss when it comes to explaining why.

by Martin Woodside

Martin Woodside

Cesar Vallejo Ahead Of His Time

César Vallejo, one of the greatest South American poets of the 20^th century, wrote about politics as well as spirituality and sexuality, and though he wrote just three books in his lifetime, he was a radical thinker, ahead of his time. He wrote about subjects such as love and death with intelligence and wit.  He made his own death seem somehow sensuous. “The Eternal Nuptial Bed” is a poem full of eroticism and surrealism, which becomes both absurd and calamitous.

The Eternal Nuptial Bed

Only when it ceases to be, is Love strong!
And the tomb will be a huge eyeball,
in whose depths the anguish of love
survives and weeps, as in a chalice
sweet eternity and black dawn.

And lips curl up for the kiss,
as when something full overflow and dies;
and, in convulsed conjunction,
each mouth renounces for the other
a life of moribund life.

And when I think this way, sweet is the tomb
where everybody finally interpenetrates
in a single roar;
sweet is the shadow, where everybody unites
in a universal assignation of love.

This poem mocks marriage to the point of saying that the only time love exists is in death. That’s morbid.  The poem is scathing too. A tomb as an eyeball in whose depths love survives is quite a commentary on matrimony.  The last stanza is cruel but funny.  Everybody interpenetrates in a single roar.  I can hear it now. Everybody unites in a universal assignation of love.  What kind of love would this be?  I think of lions, of masturbation, of not being in love with your partner, of narcissism—this poem gives the reader much to think about.  It’s a clever take on love, lust, and joining as one.   This next poem highlights Vallejo’s ability to write  about grim subjects in an alluring way.

Black Stone On A White Stone

I will die in Paris in a downpour
a day which I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t budge—
Maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,
as I prose these lines, I have forced on
my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my journey, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died, they beat him,
all of them, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard

Likewise with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

This poem reminds me in ways of “A Song At The End Of The World” by Czeslaw Milosz because while it too, is a death song, it’s clearly hopeful and alive.  Vallejo is chronicling his own  death in this poem, yet, I want to dance in the rain.  It’s a poem about desperation and loneliness.  Elegies should be beautiful, celebratory even.  This piece goes beyond that though.  Vallejo succeeds in writing an elegy about himself that while obviously serious, is also seductive, almost like a lover, and quite appealing and musical.  This is what I want when I die, and I didn’t know it until Vallejo told me so. As I peruse these lines I have forced on my humeri and, never like today, have I turned, with all my journey, to see myself alone. He writes his elegy as he sits alone, forcing himself to put on his body, as we put on clothes.  A creepy yet erotic moment. Likewise with a rope; witnesses arethe Thursdays and the humerus bones,  the loneliness, the rain, the roads…The last stanza is powerful:

Witnesses are the Thursdays.
His humerus bones and the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

Such charged language, it hardly makes me think of death rather, of truly living.  As William Faulkner said,“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” The last line, “the loneliness, the rain, the roads…” makes me want to do a pirouette with my umbrella in the rain. It’s lovely, spinning round so musically and physically. Vallejo has made death become a friend rather than a black cloak of fear.

For more, see: Vallejo, César, Eshleman, Clayton. The Complete Poetry César Vallejo. University Of California Press: Berkley, 2007

Erika Lutzner

I Was Not Among Them

by Jill Frischhertz

Requiem (the first two sections)

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]

Instead of a Preface

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

***

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem speaks to the victims of Stalin’s Terror and her own agony as a mother waiting for the release of her son from prison.  She also speaks to me.  I cannot help but focus on the final words of the poem’s first stanza; “Where misfortune had abandoned us.”  In this line, there is a sense of darkness, a separation from grace; but Akhamotova, like any poet, does not find solace in silence; she finds it in words.  In “Instead of a Preface,” Akhamotova describes the push that led to this poem: the scene of her calling, a calling to capture the Russian misfortune, a calling that led to the creation of this poem; “‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’”  In my mind, Akhamtova’s response to tragedy represents the poet’s response to tragedy.

This understanding adds clarity to my desire to put on paper a lesser tragedy, but one that still sits heavy on the southeast, a place where water replaced hope.  I remember front porches with swings and rocking chairs filled with people in search of a breeze.  I remember the hottest days, when we would stand in shade, anticipating the chilled syrup of a snowball.  I remember New Orleans when her people celebrated a storm the way they do a baptism, a birthday, or a Friday afternoon— with music and beer.

***

I was not among them, the people of New Orleans, when lake water commandeered houses, floorboard by floorboard, or when families climbed from attics onto roofs, or when  hospitals ran out of hope, clean sheets, and working generators.  I did not witness the city fill with water; I was not among them.  I was in the Astrodome, waiting.  In preparation, I helped others place cots in measured rows, rope off a play area for children, stock concession stands with Doritos and water, check bathrooms for toilet paper, sanitizer.  We thought we were prepared for the recent residents of the Superdome.

The first buses arrive, but they are not occupied with any of the expected 25,000.  The three drivers are no older than sixteen, and their passengers are all children, some babies.  Still, they managed the 350 miles.  One boy explains, “The older ones carried the little ones above water to abandoned buses on an empty lot.”  They siphoned gas from forsaken cars and followed the radio’s evacuation route to Houston.  He tells me, “I stopped waiting for my ma after two days. We had to leave cuz the younger ones were scared of all the water.”

Outside a line of buses unloads the desperate: those who suffer from feeding tubes, oxygen tanks, dialysis, and the effects of days without treatment.  A few come with medical histories, prescriptions, and emergency numbers. We are ill prepared; there is a three hour wait to see the doctors.  Have you ever taken a crippled man’s wheelchair? We have to all day long because wasted frames cannot walk down a ramp or lower themselves into a cot.  Each time I return to the drop-off area, there are more, leaning against trees, walls, propped on benches. Now, I understand the meaning of war a little better. I do not distribute the carton of water because there is a woman half breathing who was sitting, now slouching.  I shake her and wake her with a sip of water.  She is 76, the age of my grandmother; and she is lost.  She asks me, “Have you seen my daughter?”  Do you tell her the truth or comfort her? “I am sure she is close. Let’s move you inside where it is cooler.”

Trip after trip after trip, and finally I stop because an elderly man has my elbow, begging me to take him to the bathroom.  He doesn’t have the muscle to manage the stairs to the first level. I have no wheelchair.  I search and I plead, but, despite my success, I am late, too late: maybe by seconds, maybe 3 minutes. I do not notice the puddle or the smell of soiled clothes only the face, no longer urgent.  A young mother stops me.  All she wants is her newborn baby who was evacuated without her. Remember, no one was prepared even though we all knew Katrina was coming.

An Interview with Ellen Hinsey (2009)

by Susan Wheatley

This summer, I met with Ellen Hinsey in Paris to discuss her new book, Update on the Descent, just published with The University of Notre Dame Press and Bloodaxe Books (2009). Ellen Hinsey has taught writing and literature at Skidmore College’s Paris program and the French graduate school, the Ecole Polytechnique. Her other books include The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002/Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and Cities of Memory, which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, as well as several books in translation. In 2001 she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; she has also been the recipient of a number of awards and honors, including a Lannan Foundation Award.

Q. Over the last twenty years you have witnessed a number of significant European events firsthand. What impact have these events had on your work?

A. Since 1987, I have lived and traveled extensively in Europe, based mostly in Paris. My first book of poetry came out of my experiences following the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. I was in Berlin on the weekend of November 9, 1989 when the wall came down and in Prague during the Velvet Revolution a few weeks before Havel’s election. In the years following this, it was with great sorrow that we witnessed the Yugoslav wars, some of the most painful conflicts in recent European history. This too had a significant impact on my work. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia was a reminder that we had not in fact escaped the temptations of nationalism, war and genocide. We would not benefit from the “peace dividend” that the end of the Cold War had supposedly brought. Whether in ex-Yugoslavia or elsewhere—and as we have seen in America over the last ten years—it has been war-business as usual.

Q.  History in your work is often described in its relationship to ethics.  What are the origins of your examining the two together as you do?

A. History and ethics are themes that run throughout my work.  That perhaps comes out of my own personal experiences. I am concerned with how we can respect “the other,” and how we can renew our belief in that most archaic idea, “thou shalt not kill.” This is an important issue for me, as a number of years ago there was a murder in my family. This personal event led me write two interconnected volumes. The first of these two books, The White Fire of Time, came out of a struggle for renewal. However, when I finished that book, I was still deeply unsettled about questions of violence, in particular how individuals can carry out acts of ultimate violence against each other, whether this is against people they have known intimately, those they consider to be neighbors, or people they don’t know, but whom they come to understand as “the enemy.” These questions were very much in my mind when I was working on this new book.

Q.  You attended The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Tell me about that.

A. I have often found that poetry has an odd way of drawing us into strange synchronicities. A year after I had begun work on Update on the Descent, the Milosevic trial opened in February 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. After attending the opening of the trial, over the next three years I traveled back and forth to the Netherlands to listen to witness sessions and hear how violence had been carried out across a whole society. These sessions in the Hague were some of the most difficult, but moving experiences I have ever had. It is almost impossible, or “obscene” as one witness put it, to describe such human acts. However, while I was there, it was clear that the stories being told were not limited in any way to the Balkan experience. They had happened—as in Rwanda—or would soon be happening in other parts of the world.

Q. In fact, you don’t mention any specific places or people in the new book. In what way is this omission a reflection of your concept for the work?

A. Update on the Descent is not limited to any specific conflict, but rather it is about the structure of violence and our common human nature—a nature capable of extreme acts, but one that also has the potential for compassion and forbearance in the presence of “the other.” During the seven years I was working on the book, the revelations of what occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were made public as were, more recently, details about the CIA “black sites” and the torture carried out at those sites. The fact of torture is important to Update on the Descent, not because it is sensational, but because it touches on a question that I think we are extremely afraid to confront. The last few years have brought us perilously close to an unspoken fear that we are losing the battle against violence, and that the climate of relative decency we have known is no longer holding firm. Or even that, if we do not do our best to battle against it, we may be facing the start of an unlawful age.

Q.  The structure of Update on the Descent is striking. How did you arrive at it? What sources influenced you?

A.  The book is composed in three sections—I won’t say too much about the overall structure, because I think it is more interesting for a reader to discover certain things for himself or herself. But as regards the individual poems, there are “lyrical” as well as “non-lyrical” forms in the volume. The book’s sequence includes introductory lyrical poems followed by prose poems, aphorisms and philosophical notebooks. It was written this way because I wanted to avoid aestheticizing the violence I had heard about or experienced. The music of the book resides at the opposite end of the spectrum from what we often associate with the affirming rhythms of poetry. But the book is also inhabited by the possibility of forgiveness and renewal. In general, the influences on the book are more philosophical than poetic, though poetry also plays a role. But I am a bit wary of poetry—or rather excessive aestheticizing—if poetry exempts itself from fundamental dialogues, where it is also needed.

Q.  It seems that the question of evil – whether it exists, what it is – is central to your work, particularly Update on the Descent.

A.  Of late, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the question of evil. I have come to feel that it is an entirely human affair, and is more of an ethical than a theological question. If we, as human beings, choose to carry out atrocities, then these acts are a reflection of our own nature. I find it hard to understand how we can expect a divine power to come and clean up our mess. Further, I’m not convinced that the terrifying events of the last century—or this new one—prove the death of the Spirit. Rather, to my mind, they only underscore the fact that the human animal has a murderous potential, beyond our previous imaginings. In fact, this issue may be one of the most urgent legacies that poets of my generation face. The challenge of how we can, despite everything, contemplate the possibility of affirmation—while at the same time knowing that genocide has happened and can happen at any time. That poetry is not only possible after Auschwitz, but imperative, an integral part of our survival.

Q. There are a number of references to Hannah Arendt in your last two books, which explore, respectively, the contemplative life, the vita contemplativa, and the vita activa, the life of society. What impact has her work had on your approach to poetry?

A.  I think that the last eight years have shown us how fragile our democracy is, and how we must remain alert to the very real dangers of illegality, rhetoric and demagoguery. This is not about adhering to any particular political standpoint, but rather, in a meticulous way, about sorting through the immense amount of data that is always coming towards us. Some years ago I mentioned that I was interested in the possibility of a “poetics of radical reflection.” For me this means, as Hannah Arendt wrote in the Life of the Mind, the idea that perhaps thought itself can help us to maneuver and survive the dangers around us—the dangers of our own making. With the end of the 20th century we found out that, incredibly enough, we did not arrive at the end of History. History and terror—as well as the possibility of meaning—are still with us. We didn’t escape their noose: they are, and will always be, things with which we must wrestle.

Q.  In the last poem in your book, “Update on the Last Judgment,” there is no “Judgment,” but only an “abyss.” What, then, is “judgment” and who is passing that judgment?

A.  This was a complex poem for me. When you begin to write a poem, you don’t always know exactly what you think about your subject. Regarding the topic in general, I tend to agree with what the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova wrote in his poem “Verses for a Child’s Birth”: “it’s best to keep silent/ because we don’t know yet if God hovers/ above the empty featureless waters.” However, it seems fair to say that until we arrive at that unknowable moment, we are entirely responsible for our actions here on earth and it is to our peril that we look for recourse or justification for those actions in any kind of afterlife. For the foreseeable future, we only have judgment with a small “j”, which is to say the mortal, imperfect and fallible judgment that we possess as human beings and with which we have to attempt to make sense of our world. Despite how terribly fragile it is, it is all that we possess. But it is still immense.

Susan Wheatley is a probate lawyer, poet and a founder of the Walnut Street Poetry Society at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati.

The Poetry of Food: a Call to Sensuality

My doctor put me on a cleanse recently. He stipulated I remove sugar, dairy, alcohol, breads and vinegar for two weeks from my diet. It has been two years since my last cleanse which happened during the Christmas holiday. Was it hard to pass up all the holiday potlucks complete with homemade cakes slathered in buttercream frosting or the cheesy casseroles in favor of a handful of celery- yes. A million times yes, but it was do-able. This go round I mentioned my cleanse on facebook and received 11 comments, some dubious and some intrigued. This time I decided to chart my daily consumption believing that in spite of the removal of these key food categories, I could still eat deliciously and perhaps pave a road for others that want to give it a go.

Some of us live to eat and others eat to live. This cleanse reminds me of the food as fuel approach and anyone that knows me, knows this is not enough. The texture and complexity of flavors, the aromas and commingling of ingredients, the act of masticating and swallowing- food is a sensual act, not mere science.
Poetry does not seem to have a natural correlation to food, but it intrigues me how both entreat the senses to take part. Fingers typing on a keyboard or pushing pen to paper, active and subconscious visualization of how the words might fit best, background sounds to create the white noise in favor of the white page- these are some images that come to mind of the space in which a poem comes into being. For some, their ritual of creating that sacred space includes sipping a glass of wine, a cup of tea, a large cup of coffee late into the night. All of the senses participate in breathing a poem into life. And we can appreciate how much brighter life becomes because of the poetry. Is poetry just a fuel that keeps our creative wick burning? Do we write the poems to stay nourished and balance the world around us? Does the need for poetry seem immediate like a growling stomach beckoning for a morsel?

I cracked open Ginsberg’s Kaddish to imagine how it might respond to a cleanse of the senses. His imagery of Naomi, of his surroundings employs all of his senses, captivating the reader. When he speaks of “Ray Charles blues shout blind on the / phonograph”, I can hear it. Or his description of “hand- / churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor”, I can taste this. His depictions of Naomi particularly bring out an ultra-sensory frame. He envisions her young, recently arrived from Russia, “frightened on the dock – / then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street” and the reader finds him/herself enveloped by the crush of touch in a foreign place. This foreignness takes on new meaning and heights for Naomi as her descent into madness reveals itself to 13 year old Ginsberg. In part II, they are walking in Paterson and he writes of her, “you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, / gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere,” and the reader can smell the fur collar, smell her fear. It’s hard to imagine Ginsberg without his senses telling part of his story for him. They are part of what we love about his poetry.

To strip poetry of the senses is to find a poetry beautiful on the page but missing something necessary. The senses provide different points of entry into a poem that elevate its meaning.

I’m going to explore the poetics of food in my postings and look forward to this tasting menu, one blog bite at a time. The food of poetry calls us to a higher nutrition that feeds the mind and the soul. If we let it, we not only consume poetry, but it consumes us, one sense at a time.

–Annelies Zijderveld

Barnes and Noble Poetry Series

September 16 @ 7:30 – 9:00 p.m. the Barnes and Noble Poetry Series is hosting a reading with Kathleen Tyler.  There will be an Open Mic before the feature poet, and more afterwards. The reading is taking place at the Barnes and Noble Store in the Grossmont Shopping Center, 5500 Grossmont Ctr Dr Suite 331, La Mesa, CA 91942.

Kathleen Tyler lives in Los Angeles where she teaches English at a local high school. Her publications include The Secret Box from Mayapple Press, and My Florida from The Backwaters Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including VisionsInternational, Runes, Solo, Poetry Motel, Margie, Seems, Cider Press Review, and others. She has been the featured reader at many Southern California venues such as Beyond Baroque, Skylight Books, Coffee Cartel, World Stage, Venice Grind, and the Church in Ocean Park. A poem from My Florida was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most recently, a poem of hers was a finalist in the 2009 dA Center for the Arts Poetry Prize.

Translating Paul Celan

How can one translate something that is untranslatable?  Paul Celan has often been accused of being hermetic in his poetry.  He himself said that was not the case.  His writing is pregnant with incomprehensible grief and longing.  One who reads Celan is left feeling the pain of Celan’s experience living through the Holocaust, his survivor’s guilt, and his anger toward Germany for her silence over the atrocities that occurred during the war.

Many people have translated Celan’s poetry successfully; some more so than others.  He is one of the most influential poets of the second half of the twentieth century. How can that be when his work is nearly impenetrable? His writing is cryptic, full of idioms and manipulations of the German language.  Celan’s poetry reflects his ambivalence toward Germany because of her impotence in dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Almost impenetrable yes, but not quite.  His writing is filled with his desire to find a way out of his pain, which one gets on a visceral level immediately. The next step, however, is more difficult.  Celan alludes to his experiences in every poem he writes, but one must carefully read his work to understand it.

In Celan’s speech when he won the Breman literature prize, he said, “A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the––surely not always strong––hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.” This statement reflects Celan’s belief that his poetry was universal and that everyone reading his work could, in fact, break through that seal and find that message in the bottle.

Michael Hamburger’s translations are by far my favorite because he gets to the meaning while keeping the language beautiful; he also keeps the structure whole.  I especially like the beginnings and endings of his translations. However, John Felstiner is remarkable as well. I don’t however; find his translations quite as good, though Poet Survivor Jew is a remarkable book.

Such a small thing as;
“Count the almonds,
“…count what was bitter and kept you awake,
count me in:”

Felstiner’s translation;
“Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:”

The ending of each––

Hamburger’s version;
“Make me bitter.
Count me among the almonds.” (77)

Felstiner’s:
“Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.” (49)

Hamburger’s translation brings pain to the surface in the first three lines.  Also the use of the universal “I” comes across clearly.

Felstiner’s translation doesn’t have the same impact in the beginning because waking and awake have such different meanings. Awake gives the connotation of being alive.  Since this poem is filled with death, this is an important word.

The endings are similar but the Hamburger’s repetition of the word count gives an entirely different meaning than Felstiner’s usage of render. By repeating count, Hamburger hammers in the force of death and responsibility.  Yet, render is a word that hones in the atrocity of war. It’s nauseating, to think about.

“Alchemical” is another good example of understanding different translations.

Hamburger’s beginning is powerful:
“Silence, cooked like gold, in
charred
hands.” (183)

One cannot miss the meaning here of those in the Holocaust being shoved into ovens, yet the beauty of the words is overwhelming.

Pierre Joris’ version:
“Silence, cooked like gold, in
carbonized
hands” (81)

Carbonized and charred are synonyms but their meanings are subtly different. Carbonized has a direct relation is charcoal which refers to ash; nothing left while charred connotes being set on fire. Charred is not as harsh a word in this case because Celan is referring to those stuffed into ovens during the Holocaust.

“Corona” is a poem worth examining because Celan borrows from Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day” by making extreme and quiet changes.

Rilke’s “Autumn Day” translated by Edward Snow

Autumn Day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your long shadows on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go free.
Command the last fruits to be full;
give them just two more southern days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will never build one.
Who is alone now, will long remain so,
will stay awake, read, write long letters
and will wander restlessly up and down
the tree-lines streets, when the leaves are drifting.

Hamburger’s translation of the first lines of “Corona”;
“Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.”

In the mirror it’s Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.” (61)

And Felstiner’s version:

“Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns into its shell.

In the mirror is Sunday,
in dream comes sleeping,
the mouth speaks the truth.” (29)

The first stanza is similar while the second is not.  Hamburger’s translation says “our,” while Felstiner’s uses “the.”  I would argue that Celan meant the universal not the singular, thus, Hamburger’s translation works better.  Also in dream there is room for sleeping connotes our place to escape. While in dream comes sleeping presents the idea that sleeping approaches the singular. The idea of the time returning to it’s shell could be seen as summer turning into autumn; life into death.  Summer reflects growth whereas autumn refers to harvesting which means (death).

Hamburger’s translation of the ending of “Corona:”

“We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from
the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.”

And Felstiner’s version:

“We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street:
it’s time people knew!
It’s time the stone consented to bloom,
a heart beat for the unrest.
It time it came time.

It is time.”

The words effort and consent again imply different meaning.  Effort gives forth the idea of application and accomplishment, while consent means give permission to.  Hamburger, therefore is saying that the collective our, is working toward, while Felstiner’s version gives forth the notion that we are acquiescing.
I would argue with those that say his work is hermetic because his poetry though difficult and seemingly written for himself, I see it as written for humankind.  That is what makes him a unique, powerful and influential writer.  He writes for the dead who have no voice, he writes of the horror of the death camps, he writes about a universal experience.  His, is poetry of witness.

The mistake some translators make, is that because they see his work about the I and not the You, they don’t take into account Celan’s reaching out toward others.  Celan was a lonely man.  Poetry was his way of communicating with others. Even those who have been successful at translating Celan have said that some of the poems were too difficult to attempt.  John Felstiner says in preface of Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan,“Several poems that I’d bypassed as too enigmatic or elusive for discussion, such as “Streak”, “Dew”, “Black”, and “King’s rage,” I’ve now translated anyway.” (xxxi)  He goes on to say that he is willing to translate what he felt he could not before because he trusts the reader to decipher Celan.

The silence in Celan’s poetry is important to note.  Perhaps he uses silence as a device to make one stop and think, perhaps it’s because the work is so intense, one needs a moment of pause.  Or perhaps, Celan, entangled with his own words, needed the silence.  It can be seen throughout his poetry; the hyphens, the awkward structure of wording, the music of the words themselves.  This is another reason his work is difficult to translate.

As I fell in love with Celan, I wished that I knew German––that I had listened to my grandparents as a child.  I become entranced in his words more each time I read them. I’ve read several translations of his work, and of course, I have my favorites, though I have begun a journal in which I combine translations together.

Yes, some translations are better than others, but for one to take on the task, the hope is that one does so because of a devotion to the work.  Then it is up to the reader to decode the meaning.

–Erika Lutzner

For more:

Rainier, Rilke, Marie, Translated by Snow, Edward (1994).  The Book of Images: Poems/Revised Bilingual Edition. North Point Press 1994

Celan, Paul, Translated by Felstiner, John. (2001). Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan. W.W. Norton New York 2001

Felstiner, John (1995). Paul Celan Poet Survivor Jew. Yale University Press, New Haven 1995

Celan, Paul Translated by Hamburger, Michael (1988). Paul Celan Selected Poems. Penguin Book Group, London (1988)

Celan, Paul Translated by Joris, Pierre (2005). Paul Celan Selections.University of California Press, Berkley 2005

In addition:

Please note David Young’s recent translations of Paul Celan can be found in Poetry International 13/14.