When Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness was published in 1993, it was controversial and elicited hostility from some corners of the American poetry scene. One attack of the anthology came from the poet Chard deNiord, who asserted in a review that the anthology had degraded poetry and betrayed the higher ideals of the art. It was a response that seemed to be symptomatic of one perspective at the time, a view that I would hear among some poets in various forums. I responded to deNiord’s attack of Against Forgetting, but I want to revisit the “poetry of witness” issue here, because I think there is misunderstanding and confusion surrounding the concept, idea, and rhetoric of what “witness” might mean, and what poets have achieved with their various lyric forms and language strategies in the realm of representing certain kinds of violent experiences.
I want to start with a summary of the exchange between deNiord and me in 1993 as a way into my continued thinking about poetry of witness that seems still to elicit controversial reactions. In revisiting that exchange, in no way do I mean to cast aspersions on deNiord, who is a serious poet with earnest views, but the exchange remains a context for my continued thinking about this issue in poetics and poetry, which has come to have an increasingly significant impact on literary history and on how we think about poetry in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In “The High Place of American Poetry: The Problem with Witness” (AGNI 39), deNiord presents Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness as a negative problem against which he wishes to demonstrate what he calls poetry’s “truer qualities.” At the outset, let me say that my relationship to Against Forgetting is not a distant one, for two of my collaborative translations appear in “The Armenian Genocide” section of the anthology, and I was involved in the shaping of that section.
A summary of my response to deNiord in 1993 goes like this. I find it difficult to understand why deNiord has attempted to define poetry’s “higher” and “truer” qualities in negative contrast to Forché’s anthology, because notions of “higher” and “truer” aesthetic performances seem hardly relevant to Forché’s anthology. This is a collection of international poems by many major poets and other poets of formidable gifts, including, for example, Zbigniew Herbert, W. H. Auden, Yannis Ritsos, Mahmoud Darwish, Wisława Szymborska, and Claribel Alegria.
DeNiord finds Forché’s idea of poetry of witness a wrong idea and claims that the anthology represents a view of poetry that is simplistic, ideological, narrow, polemical, and generally ill suited to the “true” idea of poetry. Furthermore, he attacks Forché for exploiting poetry written by poets from countries that have endured political oppression and violence. He asks: “shouldn’t this inclusive sounding term be prompting provocative discussions about the nature of poetry in general, and its inherent perspicacity specifically, as opposed simply to standing for a kind of poetry that so-called poets of witness, such as those included in Against Forgetting, would adamantly avoid themselves as a term to describe their work?” Just thumbing through the anthology one would note that Forché is indeed generating meaningful discussion about the nature of poetry.
DeNiord complains that poetry of witness is a “poetry of moral accounting,” which only “politicizes” poetry, and can reduce poetry to “a two dimensional academicism” (whatever that might mean); he accuses Forché of not appreciating “poetry as an intrinsically diverse genre.” “Strong poetry,” he claims, resists such labels, and then he goes on to show us what strong poetry is. I must say I had hoped that by 1993 oedipal notions about “strong poetry” had given way to more nuanced notions of aesthetic performance and cultural context. However, deNiord’s notions about “strong poetry” seem based on generic and romantic notions about poetic discovery, the imagination, and spiritual truth, and he often couches them in a rhetoric of clichés like “enduring poetry,” “memorable truths,” and “ageless answers.” His glosses of poems by James Wright and Gerald Stern and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s as counterforces have little to do with the issues raised by Forché and Against Forgetting and suggest something about his refusal to engage the various notions of poetry that the anthology embodies. To claim that “real witnessing” shows us that poetry “is based on the quality of writing,” or that “good writing makes experience meaningful whereas experience does not a poem make,” or that “true witnessing in poetry occurs whenever true writing occurs” is a non sequitur in relation to the poems in Against Forgetting; and such notions are so general to the craft and art of poetry that surely writers and literate readers need not be reminded that they are important. Forché, like any gifted poet, would agree that good writing (sustained, sophisticated, and successful transformations of language in the lyric form) is an assumption for poems that engage violence as well as for poems that engage personal love, nature, or God. Surely Guillaume Apollinaire, Eugenio Montale, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Czesław Miłosz, Giorgos Seferis, and the dozens of other poets in her anthology would agree as well.
Forché’s introduction, whatever its limitations, discloses a poet who has thought seriously and passionately about a relationship between poetry and history—a relationship that has led her to define or call attention to an orientation of twentieth-century poetry that is marked by or engaged with events of political extremity and catastrophe, and mass killing. In reading the introduction, I don’t find anything that suggests rigid, didactic, academic, or one-dimensional notions of poetry. Explicitly and implicitly, Forché rejects rigidities; any anthology that includes poets and poems as diverse as Vahan Tekeyan’s “Country of Dust,” Apollinaire’s “The Little Car,” Georg Trakl’s “A Romance to Night,” Boris Pasternak’s “Hamlet,” Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s “Sukhanovo,” Miguel Hernandez’s “Lullaby of the Onion,” Jacques Prevert’s “Barbara,” Nelly Sachs’s “But Look,” Pound’s “Pisan Canto LXXIV,” Zbigniew Herbert’s “Report from a Beseiged City,” Nicanor Parra’s “Letters from the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair,” Galway Kinnell’s “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s “After the Fall of Saigon,” and Bei Dao’s “The Answer”—to mention a few of the several hundred poems—could hardly be accused of presenting poetry that is didactic, polemical, or schematic.
Quite the opposite, Forché explores the range and variousness of poetry that has been defined by what she calls “political extremity.” In doing so, she offers a list of poetic features by which these poems of witness appear to be defined. The poets sometimes create epistolary modes; use religious language; resort to irony, paradox, and surrealism (a complex aesthetic that she does not define); and employ the poetic fragment. Although these notions are all common to the many strategies of poetry as well as being interpretive tools for poets and critics, I don’t think that Forché makes a well-defined case for their belonging to poems of witness solely. What she does demonstrate, deeply, is that there is a relationship between a poet’s life and the forces of history in which that life is lived, and which also can affect the nature of the poet’s art. Forché’s anthology demonstrates how poets whose lives have been in some way changed by what she calls political catastrophe force us to consider how those events may surface in the imagination and in the poem. And the relationship between those events and the imagination may be lyrically confrontational, as in Primo Levi’s “Shema,” or discursive and oblique, as in Pound’s “Pisan Canto LXXIV.” Or, she suggests, the facts of a life may be as politically and viscerally defined as the gruesome death of Hungarian poet Miklos Radnóti (Radnóti was executed by the Germans in 1944, and his wife had him exhumed from a mass grave after the war; she found in the back pocket of his trousers a small notebook “soaked in the fluids of the body and blackened by wet earth,” in which his last ten poems were written). Such an extraordinary death would force any serious reader to ask certain kinds of questions about those last ten poems, and then, surely, about the poet’s larger body of work.
Poets defined by the “impress of extremity” (the phrase is from Terrence Des Pres’s Praises and Dispraises), Forché argues, have made interesting use of various formal conventions, including fragmentary and epistolary strategies, which enable poets to embody crisis and allow us to see as well, perhaps, how modernist techniques were informed by political disaster—and, hence, how political disaster informed poets who wrote in that context. Forché points us to poets as different as Paul Celan, Ariel Dorfman, and Zbigniew Herbert. Furthermore, she notes how crucial the language of spiritual and religious experience has been to many poets who have been impacted by political violence. Poets who wrote as differently as Akhmatova, Wilfred Owen, and Edmond Jabès disclose the pull of religious sentiment. Jabès, for example, opens himself to the “paradox of God’s existence in the face of His apparent disappearance”—an idea that Forché reminds us has its origins in Kabbalah.
Quite opposite to diNord’s claims, Forché’s introduction reveals that the catholicity of her perspectives is also defined by her willingness to see how both New Critical concepts of paradox and irony, for example, and Frankfurt School cultural criticism inform our understanding of poems of witness. Quoting Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia, she notes something about the terrain of harsh complexities with which the reader of the anthology will be forced to wrestle: “There is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.”1
Any fruitful dialogue with Against Forgetting should begin with an understanding of the basic premise of the anthology, which is a literary-historical one, with a geopolitical layer that Forché has added. In the geohistorical grouping of poets in the anthology, Forché asks the reader to engage in a relationship between poetry and culture-specific histories of political events, to which she refers as “extremity”: genocide, war, torture, political exile, and so on. Thus, the anthology does not proceed to present poets by a chronology of birth dates and or literary-aesthetic movements (romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, etc.) as most anthologies do, but rather by culture, geopolitical situation, and history. The anthology opens with the following sections: “The Armenian Genocide,” “World War I,” “Revolution and Repression in the Soviet Union,” “World War II,” “The Holocaust,” and on through various historically defined epochs, events, and periods down through “Repression in Africa,” and “The Struggle for Democracy in China.”
For traditional literary historical thinking about poetry, this comes as a strange and, I think, somewhat edgy idea, perhaps more so in the early 1990s than today. Forché urges the reader to think about the poem and the poet as having emerged from historical contexts and political events. In looking at her table of contents, the reader sees works of sophisticated imagination as more than just works evolving along a chronology of birth dates and brief biographies or literary and aesthetic movements (though these are, of course, vital to understanding the poet and her or his work). Forché asks her readers to take it a little further. She suggests that, at the end of a century in which about 150 million lives were lost in war, genocide, and human rights atrocities, it might be worth our while to conceptualize literary history in an augmented way. However, in this augmented literary-cultural view, the relationship between poetry and extremity, she makes clear, is fluid, open-ended, and multifarious. But she insists that if we refuse to historicize poetry in this more expansive way, we lose some of its essential significance, and we ignore some of what is most profound about some of the most compelling and large-visioned poetry of our time or any time.
When deNiord asserts that “whether the effects of contemporary poets endure as both topical and ageless answers is the mystery of legacy and not the poet’s business,” he seems to be suggesting that literary history is not made by human minds. Surely this anthology—and most anthologies, for that matter—reminds us that literary history and its legacy is made by editors, writers, and anthologists who live and write in historical time. There is no mystery about it, only choices made in accord, most often, within a complex cultural value system. In this case, the anthology is a presentation of poets whose lives have been shaped by political events and geographical locations that are significant enough to articulate as an important context for poems that are rich and complex.
Finally, I would add that the sheer cosmopolitanism of Against Forgetting—its global and international breadth—allows the reader in English to gain some insight into how similar episodes of mass violence and disaster have been absorbed by poets in cultures as different as Pakistan and China, Vietnam and South Africa, Poland and Great Britain. The cosmopolitanism of Against Forgetting is as impressive as anything I know in print today, and I suspect the anthology may offer us more translations of high quality in more languages than any anthology now in print. It seems true, as well, that Against Forgetting has brought together in an unusual way various kinds of anthologies that we have seen in the past two decades: the Faber Book of Political Verse, the numerous anthologies of the poetry of national literatures in translation (Armenian, Hungarian, Korean, Mexican, Polish, Russian, etc.), and certain anthologies defined by catastrophic events, such as John Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry, or Catherine Reilly’s Chaos of the Night: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the Second World War. Of the 144 poets in the anthology, many—like Auden, Pound, Miłosz, Mandelstam, and Yeats, for example—are major figures, while many others are less well known, and still others virtual discoveries for the reader in the United States. In this sense, it is broad reaching and seems to me to be a groundbreaking book, and certainly one that is never simply topical. Throughout, Forché brings us poems of complex, rich, accomplished transformations, but she is never totalizing in her aesthetic choices. Conceptual, open-ended, abrasive, antipoetic, traditional, formal, sensual, lyrical, private, civic, graphic, abstract—are all aspects of form and sensibility that define the poetry of Against Forgetting.
So why the attack? I’m forced to wonder if Forché’s anthology has become a scapegoat for some American poets who feel a growing anxiety about their place in the current landscape of contemporary poetry. Is the idea of poetry grounded in cultural locale and perhaps at times in events of political mass violence or human rights disasters offensive to a certain American sensibility? Is there still an academically driven genteel sensibility that demands that poetry be only attentive to the self’s inner life, to the freshness of the natural world, the domestic space, or to a metaphysical sublime? These are all important dimensions of human experience, and they are always part of poetry’s reach. But surely not the only part of poetry’s reach. I wonder if the impulse to eschew poetry’s relationship to history and to mass and historical violence is a lingering vestige of American intellectual life of the early twentieth century, a late Victorianism in which American anxiety about cultural sophistication led poets and their critics to embrace the sublime, the self-consciously aesthetic, and the romantically personal—what David Perkins once called “an earnest pursuit of culture and a quasi-religious pursuit of spiritual idealism.”2 In many nations, societies, and cultures, the political and the aesthetic are at home with one another; the engagement with collective violence and an immersion in personal love or domestic life exist in balance. Avant-garde aesthetic performance is enmeshed with political turmoil; inventive language and social facts create each other. Why is American poetry culture different? Or is it different?
I also wonder if Forché’s attentiveness to poets of foreign cultures who have emerged with sometimes epic insights into life on the planet, and often with rich and powerful and urgent language, is threatening to some American poets. Is there some xenophobic resentment toward poets from embattled cultures, often poor and many miles from the United States? When deNiord asserts that American poets should sit at home and envision their audiences as Whitman and Dickinson once did, with “a kind of mystical presence in the quiet of [their] work place,” I’m wondering which Whitman and Dickinson he’s thinking about. Among dozens of Whitman’s poems, “The Wound Dresser,” for one, reminds us of how brilliantly Whitman engaged the impact of war, the gruesome and the real, with an unflinching language that demanded the poem ingest the harsh world in an age when the vapid rhetoric of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” was the more popular response to war and mass killing. And, Whitman like most of the poets in this anthology also wrote about love, death, and intimate and domestic experience.
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In thinking about Against Forgetting and Forché’s notion of poetry of witness over the years, I want to revisit the term or rubric—poetry of witness—and ask how useful it is. It has become a phrase or term that suggests a certain orientation of the poem and the poet, but perhaps it’s both too narrow and too general to encompass the claims that are made in its name. It’s worth noting that witness in its biblical etymology points to the idea of truth telling; hence, to bear false witness is to belie the truth, to lie, to not witness honestly. The ninth commandment in Exodus reminds us that “bearing false witness” is an ethical violation; false reports are bad. Witness suggests the importance of what is being told, the importance of the facts, the event, the circumstance that the one witnessing conveys. The poet who can be said to witness an event of historic violence is not a historian or journalist, but his or her poem does aspire to convey something of truth about the event, something that is urgent and perhaps with ethical implications. One can be a witness to a wedding, a baptism, a funeral; intimate love with another; one can witness spiritual truth in God, transcendent feeling, divine truth; and one can witness a violent event or a civic or collective catastrophic event—war, genocide, the terrorism of totalitarian regimes. If one means that to witness is to signify the telling of something truthful about collective, historical events of violence, then the witnessing of such human experience needs more exploration, consideration, and, finally, a clarification that might allow us to see what poetry’s relationship to violent, collective-historical events might be.
Poems that engage a notion of witness are most often tied to an event that is defined by mass violence (war, genocide, massacre, state torture, etc.), and it is an event that happens to more than an individual because it happens to a culture group, nation, or community. Thus, the event accrues the breadth of a collective history and experience, and the memory of the event can accrue a collective sense of identity. But the notion of witness, while useful, is, I think, too general. The idea of such a poetic orientation becomes clearer and deeper if we see the poem as lyric language that is capable of ingesting violence and registering, somewhere in its complex and layered structure, some tremors of trauma or manifestations of traumatic memory.
Even if Elaine Scarry, in her groundbreaking book The Body in Pain, has suggested that pain and torture undo language and that torture is “anterior to language” and “speech,”3 I would argue that the poem is able to ingest in inventive ways some dimensions of pain, no matter how transmuted and metamade or metaphorized. The poem is able to embody both the pain of the body and the pain of the mind and soul in relation to an encounter with or a memory of collective violence. But here some awareness of trauma is necessary to make sense of poetry’s ambitious reach in the realm of witness.
For some poets who have engaged violence and who are tied to the event by visceral experience, the poem of witness can take on what Lawrence Langer calls “deep memory,” “anguished memory,” or “humiliated memory”—three layers in the cambium of the mind’s groping after threads and shreds and filaments of the event. Of this kind of traumatic memory, Langer notes: “If anguished memory may be seen as discontent in search of a form, humiliated memory recalls an utter distress that shatters all molds designed to contain a unified and irreproachable image of the self.”4 Poems of witness are often shaped by this kind of interior movement; they are propelled by a restless search for adequate or inadequate ways of shattering the mold in seeking ways to embody the trace of the event, and this can happen in more formal poems or in self-consciously open forms. Paul Celan’s open-formed modernism in “Death Fugue,” for example, is no more of an authentic trauma witness mode than Primo Levi’s plain-style homily “Shema.”
“Because the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time,” writes Cathy Caruth, “but only belatedly, only in aftermath in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it . . . to be traumatized is to be possessed by an image or event.”5 The poet possessed by some dimension of trauma is also oriented to thinking in images and thus being possessed by them. Caruth continues by noting that post-traumatic stress disorder “is not so much a symptom of the unconscious as it is a symptom of history,” and I think this idea intersects with the reach of poetry. “The traumatized,” Caruth continues, “carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”6 Whether this is true for all traumatized people I can’t say, but for the poet it seems more fully to the point that imagination is a manifestation of both history and the unconscious, and, of course, the conscious manipulation of language under pressure in either formal or more open forms.
Caruth and others have noted that traumatic memory returns in images, dreams, hallucinations, and fragmentary moments, and this, too, is, of course, organic to poetic imagination, although I don’t want to make any simplistic correlations between the traumatized individual and the poet at work in his or her strange web of linguistic inventions. Nevertheless, the point is: The poem that witnesses, the poem that ingests violence can move along the frequencies of traumatized memory in the skin of its own craft and make new and/or arresting waves of language—bald, graphic, plain, clear, encoded, elliptical, symbolic, and so on. There are no formulaic, co-opting forms or strategies for ingesting violence or witnessing collective traumatic events. Thus, any effort to make sense of something like “the poem of witness”—or, better, I think, the poem that ingests an event of collective violence—needs to engage some notion of trauma and traumatic memory. With this perspective, we can understand the poem’s aesthetic transformations, in part at least, in relation to the traumatic dimensions of memory.
There are no formulas for traumatic memory in poetry; the poem can open itself to violence in various ways and forms—in part, the poet’s willingness to contemplate the event defines the poem’s relationship to witnessing and traumatic memory. And while there is the memory of the poet who lived through the event, there is also a witnessing and memory of the poet who has come along after the event, and this is, as Marianne Hirsch has called it, “post memory”—a remembering and imagining that emanates from a writer who may be born after the event but is compelled to be connected to the event.7 Perhaps Homer and the Trojan War, and Shakespeare and the history of English kings from the late thirteenth century to the early sixteenth century are the most celebrated literary records of postmemory. Clearly, the willingness simply to take on the event does not mean the poem will be greeted with critical interest, nor is there is any aesthetic virtue in the poet’s taking on the event. The poet’s ability to transform the experience with her or his form and language, the poem’s ability to render something fresh, arresting, sustained, is as necessary for this kind of poem as for any kind of poem.
There is a broad range of poetry in Against Forgetting, sometimes so broad that many of the poems are responses—sometimes too general, broad, personal—to events of collective violence, mostly to war and to regimes of political repression whether in the former Soviet Union, China, or South Africa. Not all of these poems are defined by traumatic memory or intrusions of violence, but in the most traumatized and aesthetically successful imaginations among the poets in Against Forgetting one finds remarkable transformations and language force—in short, poems of unusual depth and significance.
I want to look at a few poems from among the several hundred in the anthology as a way to suggest the range of lyric and imaginative strategies and sensibilities of poets who have written about mass violence and historical disruption, trauma and traumatic memory. Czesław Miłosz’s “Dedication” is a meditation on aftermath, and the coda, “Warsaw, 1945,” situates us in time and place—at the end of World War II; after enormous ruin, Miłosz wrestles with what poetry might be or mean. The poem moves in its sober, calm syntax as an address to the dead. Miłosz does what few poets can: He makes ideas, often complex ones, into lyrical language, with elegant rhythms; and here he engages history’s paradoxes: “What strengthened me, for you was lethal. / You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one.” In the ruins of aftermath, traumatic memory is like a clear aerial-like view over a landscape: “Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge / Going into white fog. Here is a broken city; / And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave.” Having built his context, he raises the issue of poetry:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
For Miłosz, the possibility of “good poetry” is salvational, and in the face of great violence—after Nazi and Soviet invasion and occupation, war, and genocide—he situates poetry as a force of aesthetic and moral significance, at least for himself. As for his big, rhetorical question about “Nations or people?” he claims that poetry can, at least, demand that language have integrity and not be a “connivance with official lies.” And from that premise, the poem addresses destructive power and mass violence.
From another perspective, the French poet Robert Desnos, who worked in a surrealist mode with its freer associations and more ribald, grotesque language creates his “Ars Poetica” as, in part, a response to a world dominated by violence and torture. While the poem was part of Desnos’s final book, completed just before his arrest by the Nazis in 1944, it seems prescient. He spent time in several concentration camps before he ended up in Terezin, where he died of dysentery two days after the liberation in 1945. For all the assertions that critics have made about this poem’s surrealist automatism and unconscious manifestations, it’s also a poem of radical inclusivity, one that takes Whitman, Pound, and Neruda to a place of contemporary witness. As the poem witnesses the self making its art, it also insists on ingesting the awful world, and it makes an insignia for poetic imagination in a new era of mass violence.
Across the snout
Picked up in the mud and slime
Spit out, vomited, rejected—
I am the verse witness of my master’s breath—
Left over, cast off, garbage
Like the diamond, the flame, and the blue of sky
Not pure, not virgin, but fucked to the core
Fucked, pricked, sucked, ass fucked, raped
I am the verse witness of my master’s breath.
For the poem to ingest the violence and domination of “master,” Desnos has created an ars poetica that rejects any notion of the genteel imagination. It’s a Dada poem in its subversion of convention and its appeal to an antiaesthetic, an anticonvention in its drive for a new language to take on an age of brutality. If death is a “master from Germany” in Celan’s “Death Fugue,” “death in life” is Desnos’s witness, the poet’s “master’s breath.” Desnos’s ars poetica is an appeal for a new age in which the language of poetry must ingest the full range of the real—with its violence and the abuses of power. In the avalanche of images and associations that make up the one long stanza of the poem, “Ars Poetica” is another version of a breathless encounter with extremity. Like Celan’s “Death Fugue,” Desnos’s “Ars Poetica” expands the poem’s reach so that the master’s breath of the self witnesses extreme realities in which violence and beauty are not separable: “Good muddy earth where I set my foot,” he says,
I ride the wind, the great wind and the sea
I am the verse witness of my master’s breath
That cracks farts sings snores
Great storm-wind heart of the world
there is no longer a foul weather
I love all the weather I love the time
I love the high wind
Desnos’s poem wants to swallow the whole, big, bloody mess: “Let it break your teeth and make your gums bleed.”
Georg Trakl’s poems of trench war experience are transmuted by a German expressionist sensibility that finds in nature a correlative for the emotional. In his “In the East,” nature is an evocative source of pathos and irony, landscapes of war are rendered with painterly emotion, and death infuses the world, as the violence-shaded world hunts down the innocent: “From bloody doorsteps the moon / hunts terrified women.”
The dark wrath of people
Is the wild organ music of a winter storm,
A purple wave of battled,
Leafless stars.
With broken eyebrows and silver arms,
The night beckons to dying soldiers.
Ghosts of those killed moan
In the shade of the autumn ash tree.
A thorny wilderness surrounds the city.
From bloody doorsteps the moon
Hunts terrified women.
Wild wolves have broken through the gates.
In a similar way, Russian futurism inflects Velimir Khlebnikov’s “It has the unassuming face of a burnt-out candle.” Khlebnikov fought both for the Bolshevik and czar’s army during the Russian Revolution, and his ingestion of violence is rendered in a viscid and sensual language as it embodies the political and natural landscape, in lines and images that fuse and infuse violence with the natural world. The wild intersection of visceral images creates a sense of dynamism, not of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s excited modernity, but of the apocalyptic and the devouring of the war-infused landscape. Khlebnikov gives us big swaths with painterly brushstrokes:
It has the unassuming face of a burnt-out candle
Fire-eye, lacking its lashes
of downpour and rain.
It burned our fields, our land,
whole populations of stalks and grain
shaken like straw.
The fields grew smokey and the grain turned
yellow as death and fell.
The grain shriveled and mice ate it.
Is the sky sick? Does the sky hurt?
Where are its watery lashes?
Of the many poems that ingest the violence of Nazi concentration camps, Edith Bruck’s “Father” and Primo Levi’s “Shema” offer modalities and strategies that are austere in rhythm and rhetoric. Levi turns the idea of a homily into severe, plain-style (as New England Puritans of the seventeenth century might have put it) language in which the harshness of the image intersects with a moral voice that finds a tenor of outrage in its skillful rhetorical appeal to an uninitiated audience. For a poem that emerges through traumatic memory, Levi appeals to memory as a necessary response to cruelty that, even for a secularist like Levi, is tantamount to evil. In “Shema,” the austere voice, while preaching, manages to situate images of traumatic memory with a rhetoric of urgency that makes its ironic play off its title (Shema is the Hebrew prayer of invocation). In the new Shema, the post-Auschwitz Shema, the poet’s traumatic memory is a will to posterity, a new dictum for the meaning of memory.
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold.
As a frog in winter.
Levi’s appeal to historical memory is a command that purports to appropriate the central Hebrew prayer—in which God and Israel are inseparable—with a prayer for the memory of the Shoah.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Other poems ingest violence through more oblique strategies, such as Dylan Thomas’s lyrically turgid “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Thomas wrote the poem from some distance in Wales in 1945, reflecting on having been a fire watchman during the Nazi firebombings of London. His approach to the killing of civilians, especially children, emanates from intensified rhythmic formations and a mythic language. In opening the poem, Thomas invokes a version of a cosmic creation myth that is biblical in its metaphoric girth, and in two stanzas he attempts to sacralize the death of the child and to praise the holiness of life; the death of the child must be savored so both “majesty” and “burning” are synonymous with the “child’s death.”
Thomas presents us with an anti-elegy in an effort to approach the mass killing of innocence, that same crime that ended Ivan Karamazov’s belief in God in Dostoyevsky’s novel. The poem tests the responsibility of language to resist cliché in the wake of enormous violence. The traumatic is embodied in the tumultuous rhythms of the lines, the rage embodied in the energized colliding mythic images, and the outraged stance of the poet’s cosmic prayer:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
The poem’s final flourish, the assertion that “After the first death, there is no other,” suggests Thomas’s conviction that the one death is the embodiment of all the murdered, and in his prayer for the one, he prays for all the others. It’s a synecdochal vision and one poet’s way of offering a blessing that allows us to feel how an inventive lyricism can ingest the outrage of the poet witnessing the event.
In another zone of conflict in Against Forgetting, we find Mahmoud Darwish’s “Psalm 2,” and encounter an aesthetic that is freer with spoken rhetoric, a more open civic voice, an address to the Palestinian condition of repression and violence. The poem is defined by a strong sense of an exiled self as part of Darwish’s country’s predicament and loss. Country and self merge, and psychology and history merge. Self ingests history in a personal way, a mode of rhetoric that no doubt has Arabic sources, but also comes out of a post-Whitman idiom of expansive personal voice entangled with a historical moment.
Country, turning up in songs and massacres,
Why do I smuggle you from airport to airport
Like opium,
Invisible ink,
A radio transmitter?
I want to draw your shape,
You, scattered in files and surprises.
I want to draw your shape,
You, flying on shrapnel and birds’ wings.
I want to draw your shape
But heaven snatches my hand.
I want to draw your shape
You, trapped between the dagger and the wind.
I want to draw your shape
To find my shape in yours
And get blamed for being abstract,
For forging documents and photos,
You, trapped between the dagger and the wind.
Darwish internalizes his grief about his lost country and turns his exile into a lens through which to imagine the lost place; self and imagined nation dovetail in an inventive catalog of images that allows us to experience a lost country through metaphor in which the surreal and real hold a balance—“dagger” and “wind,” “shrapnel and birds’ wings.” The idea of exile is embodied in images of trauma rendered in a moment of being smuggled “from airport to airport”: “opium,” “invisible ink,” “a radio transmitter.” And the phrase “country turning up in songs and massacres” is the refrain, though it risks large rhetoric that anchors the poet’s consciousness, brings the big meaning into the orchestrations of flying images. Thus, self is enmeshed in the violence of history so that the leaps in metaphor have an anchor, and the trauma of exile is wrapped in rhetorical questions.
In one of those zones of history we seldom encounter in modern poetry, Teresa de Jesu’s “Proverbs, Chile, 1973 On,” we encounter a gnomic list of violent images spliced by gestures that evoke state-sponsored terror.
1) It’s altogether something else with shrapnel
2) In closed mouth no bullets enter
3) In the house of the worker: knife & bullet
4) See not, hear not, speak not
5) The mummy, though dressed as a worker, is a mummy still
6) When a mummy sounds off, the shit carries
7) One hand betrays the other & both betray the face
8) One alone shuts up well, but two shut up better
9) The undercover agent who falls asleep gets carried off to Tres Alamos
10) Better one airplane on the ground than a hundred flying
11) Breed soldiers and they’ll kill your sons
12) When one cell is shut, two hundred open up
13) By your mouth you die
14) Don’t look a gift Mercedes in the teeth
The lines move between aphoristic witticisms and evocations of brutality. The numbered list compresses the poet’s sense of traumatic moment in a minimalist way as to suggest life under pressure, the covert act of testifying to what is happening in her nation. The accretion of the list sustains a particular tension so that one comes to feel that even in times of state-sponsored violence—torture, arbitrary imprisonments, mass killing—oracular truths allow us a deeper understanding about arbitrary political power and terror. In their pithy images, de Jesu’s lines ingest violence in their terse phrases, and the images upend the unexpected. The poet’s approach to the traumatic slides along an axis of aphoristic assertions, but it is the absence of self, the egolessness of the poem that allows the ubiquity of the violence to be felt, the state of the state to assume its presence in that proverb list.
In taking in violent events and traumatic aftermaths, poetry offers no answers, but it does offer meaning and insight—and that can be redemptive or, even as Miłosz suggests, salvational. A poem allows clarity and imaginative depth in the face of forces that have sought to destroy natural and human order and, perhaps, what one might call the guideposts or ethics of civilized social order.
After Auschwitz, Adorno sensed that there should be a new kind of poetry, as the violence of Auschwitz would have to prompt the human imagination to reconsider and reflect more deeply on human experience and the meaning of history, to change its relationship to the world. I believe that the kind of poems that ingest violence, as these poems do, can have their sacramental meanings. No matter how horrible the realities they embody, these poems give us an aftermath of consciousness that allows us to understand something—personal, intimate, social, collective—about the impact episodes of mass violence leave on the landscapes we inhabit.
In this way, the poem that ingests violence also provides us with a form for memory that captures something of the traumatic event that has passed. Poetry’s appeal to chant and prayer, song and psalm, whether in traumatic memory or postmemory, whether oblique and symbolistic or plain and homily-like, continues to return us to the ancient, primary human voice that poems embody. And the poem, of course, catches the event of violence in its own music, in its peculiar qualities of rhythm, in the web of language-sound that syntax creates, so that a peculiar kind of language might get stuck in the ear as it gets spun in the brain. In the lyric memory that poetry can provide, the speech-tongue-voice of the poem leaves its imprint on a historical aftermath, and it becomes one of our truest records of history, as well as an enduring embodiment of knowledge.