The Second War and Postmodern Memory
| September 26, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 01, Number 2, January 1991 |
|
Charles Bernstein
State University of New York at Buffalo
Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, And you’re as right as rain. . . . Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . they’re so wise . . . .
–Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience” (1918)
We never discussed the Second World War much when I was growing up. I don’t feel much like discussing it now. It seems presumptuous to interpret, much less give literary interpretations of, the Systematic Extermination Process or the dropping of the H-Bomb, the two poles of the Second War.
When Stanley Diamond asked me to speak on “Poetry after the Holocaust”–to replace but also to respond to Jerome Rothenberg, who could not attend the symposium–my first reaction was to wonder what qualifications I had to speak– as if the topic of the war made me question my standing, made me wonder what I might say that could bear the weight of this subject matter. Diamond reassured me that the audience would be small: “For many the Holocaust is too far in the past to matter; for most of the rest, it’s too painful to bring to mind.”
My father-in-law, who left Berlin as a teenager on a youth aliyah and spent the war in Palestine, had a different reaction: all these Holocaust conferences are a fad. This reaction is as disturbing as it is right. The Holocaust has come to stand for a kind of Secular Satanism–everyone’s against it, anyone can work up a feverish moral fervor denouncing the Nazi Monster.
Yet I’ve been struck by just the opposite: that the psychological effects of the Second War are still largely repressed and that we are just beginning to come out of the shock enough to try to make sense of the experience.
We stormed the citadel under the banner of amnesia, Winning absolute victory over the Germans in 1943. Fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . . [Barrett Watten,Under Erasure]
Crysiles of cristle, piled
ankle high,
as wide as sound carries. Am I--
hearing it--algebras worth?
There is a wind
erases marks. I felt it on my cheek
Summers long
you can cross it
& still not approach time, de-
solidified, approaching mothish mists
felled, the way a price knocked down
puts purchase on its feet. Stammering
painful clamor by coincidents
appraised. Refuse
is a spilled constant.
Let it loose.
[Benjamin Friedlander, "Kristallnacht"]
I don’t remember when I first heard about the war, but I do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. It’s inconceivable to me now that I was born just five years after its end; each year, the Extermination Process seems nearer, more recent. Yet if the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the Bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future.
hear
hear, where the dry blood talks
where the old appetite walks . . .
where it hides, look
in the eye how it runs
in the flesh / chalk
but under these petals
in the emptiness
regard the light, contemplate
the flower
whence it arose
with what violence benevolence is bought
what cost in gesture justice brings
what wrongs domestic rights involve
what stalks
this silence
what pudor or perjorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below . . .
[Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" (1949)]
Fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for Western Civilization. It seems to me that the current controversies surrounding Paul De Man, and, more significantly, Martin Heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. In all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a Divine Mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the West, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations.
The Heidegger question merely personalizes the basic situation of the war: that European learning, the Enlightenment tradition, and the Ideals of Reason as embodied in the Nation State, were as much a cause of the war as a break to it. For to understand how Heidegger could be complicit in the Second War is to understand how the Second War is not an aberration but an extension of the Logos of Western Civilization. Jack Spicer’s dying words–“My vocabulary did this to me”–could be the epitaph of the Second War as well: Our vocabulary did this to us.
Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Paul Celan committed suicide; De Man and Heidegger went on to prosper. What did the former know that the latter never absorbed? To acknowledge the Second War means to risk suicide and in the process to politicize philosophy; and if we desire to avoid death and evade politics, repression is inevitable. Which is to say that the death an acknowledgement of this war brings on is not only the death of individuals but also of an Ideal–of reason unbounded to politics, of, that is, rationality as such.
fear smashes into
my double
out of nowhere
would shrink
flesh back in itself
before it vomits
a wet night from neck or forehead
passes
into the vague air
swallows
the liquid stays inside
my corneas extend
along the axis of
the flow
dries
[Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body]
I’d be reluctant to say any of my own poems was about the war or should be read within that frame–none would hold up to the scrutiny such a reading would promote. But I do want to make a broad, very provisional, claim that much of the innovative poetry of these soon to be fifty years following the war register the Twined events of Extermination in the West and Holocaust in East in ways that hardly have been accounted for.
From the stately violence of the State
a classic war, World War Two, punctuated by Hiroshima
all the action classically taking place on one day
visible to one group in invisible terms
beside a fountain of imagefree water
"trees" with brown "trunks" and "leafy" green crowns
50s chipmunks sitting beneath, buck teeth representing
mental tranquility, they sit in rows
and read their book and the fountain gushes forth
all the letters at once, permanently
a playful excrescence, an erotic war against nature....
[Bob Perelman, "The Broken Mirror"]
Every cultural development I ascribe to the Second War can be just as readily traced to some other cause and can also be said to preexist the war. My argument is not deterministic; rather I want to suggest that the frame of the Second War, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, transforms the social meaning of these cultural developments. Racism and cultural supremacism do not begin or end with the Second War but they are the precise ideological instruments that mark the most unrecuperable aspects of the war–the Lagers and the mutilated survivors of the bomb. The war did not make racism and cultural supremacism intolerable, they always were, but it demonstrated, as if demonstration was necessary, their absolute corrosiveness.
The war made it apparent, if it wasn’t already, that racism and cultural supremacism are not correctable flaws of Western logocentrism but its nonbiodegradable byproduct. I don’t mean this as a thesis to be systematically argued. Rather, I am suggesting that the war undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the Enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way Eurosupremacist or hierarchic.
Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the
feed-back is
the law
Into the same river no man steps twice
When the fire dies air dies
No one remains, nor is, one . . .
To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility . . .
[Olson, "The Kingfishers"]
Racism and cultural supremacism contaminate everything that is associated with them; if this guilt-by-association is necessarily too far-reaching, that is because it sets loose a radical skepticism that knows no immediate place to stop.
The Second War undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the Father, of Law, of the Nation and National Spirit, of Technorationality, of Scientific Certainty, of Axiomatic Judgement, of Hierarchy, of Progress, of Tradition. It’s a chain reaction. No truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control.
“But it’s not reason but unreason that caused the war! It’s just a parody of the Enlightenment to associate it with Nazi dementia, or to see the telos of science in a mushroom cloud! The Enlightenment was a force fortoleration and consideration as opposed to mysticism, irrationality, and theological or state authority. Didn’t the Allies represent these Western values against the Nazis!” But the matter is altogether more complicated and my account risks swerving into something too grandiose: for this is not a matter of principle but of shock and grief. If the values associated with Enlightenment are undermined, this is not to remove the Romantic legacy from its undoing. For if the Second War casts doubt on systematicity, it is no less destructive to the vatic, the occult, the charismatic, the emotional solidarity of communion.
There are new difficulties. It’s difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value or domination by one group of another as justifiable, hard not to associate systematic operations with the systematicity of the Extermination Process or preemptory Authority with Fascism. These associations overgeneralize: but the pairs are subliminally linked, the one stigmatized by the other. Benjamin said it best and the Second War made it ineradicable (roughly): Every act of Civilization is at the same time an act of Barbarism.
When the attentions change / the jungle
leaps in
even the stones are split
they rive . . .
[Olson, "The Kingfishers"]
The vehemence of the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement can be seen in this context: the shadow of the Second War, growing darker as the immediate compensatory shock of the first postwar decades wore off, spurred the pace of demands for change and contributed to a sometimes millenarian we-can’t-go-on-the-old-way-anymore zeal. In the U.S., the war on the war in Vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the Second War–the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war.
The realization that white, heterosexual Christian men of the West have no exclusive franchise on articulating the “highest” values of humankind was certainly around prior to the Second War, but the war added a nauseating repulsiveness to such “canonical” views; as if they were not just something to dispute but could no longer be stomached at all. The depth and breadth of the challenge to the Western canon may be a measure of the effect of the war, though few of the parties to the controversy choose to frame it this way. It’s now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the Great War in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm; just as we better understand the Romantics when we keep in mind the context of the French Revolution. The effects of the Second War are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited.
I don’t mean “War Poetry” in the sense of poems about the war; they are notoriously scarce and beside the point I want to make here. Of course, there are many accounts of the war–documentary, personal, theoretical–and many visualizations of the war in film, photography, painting. But the scope or core of the Second War cannot be represented only by the conventional techniques developed to depict events, scenes, battles, political infamies. Only the surface of the war can be pictured.
To be sure, the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the Real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the First World War. In the wake of the Second War, however, the meaning, and urgency, of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis. That is, such work which had started as a heady, even giddy, aesthetic investigation had become primarily an act of human reconstruction and reimagining. Radical modernism can be characterized by the discovery of the entity-status of language–not just verbal language but signification systems/processes; thus, the working hypothesis about the autonomy of the medium, of the compositional space; the flattening of the Euclidian space of representing and its implicit metaphysics of displacement and reification of objects. I think all of these fundamental ontological and aesthetic discoveries and inventions are carried forward into the radical late 20th century work but with a different critical understanding of the implications of this new textual space.
as if we could ignore
the consequences of
explosions fracture the present
warm exhaust
in our lungs would turn us
inside out of
gloves avoid words like
"war" needs subtler
poisons as if
conscious of ends and means
scream in every
nerve every breath every
grain of dust
to dust cancers over
the bloodstream
the bloodstream
the bloodstream
the bloodstream
the bloodstream
[Waldrop, The Road is Everywhere]
After the Second War, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and Romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent. The meaning of the modernist textual practice has been interpreted in ways that contrast with some of its original interpretations:toward the incommensurability of different discourse systems,against the idea of poetry as an imperializing or world-synthesizing agency (of the zeitgeist), not only because these ideas tend to impart to the Poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective but also because they diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice. Thus, the emphasis in the New American Poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself.
In the center of movement, a debate.
Before beginning, a pause. . . .
Pianissimo.
Curious symptom, this, that the man appears
mildly self-satisfied, as if, in spite of his
obvious confusion and . . . so ill at ease
[Nick Piombino,Poems]
After the war, there is also greater attention to the ideological function of language: taking the word/world-materializing techniques of radical modernism and applying them to show how “everyday” language practices manipulate and dominate; that is, the investigation of the social dimension of language as reality-producing through the use of radical modernist procedures.
how we read it
line after line
given
one look
refresh the eyes
against the abyss
[Larry Eigner,another time in fragments]
Poetry after the war has its psychic imperatives: to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command. This is one way to understand the political content of its form.
We are
in a sandheap
We are
discovered
not solid
the floor
based
on misunderstanding.
[Susan Howe,The Liberties]
If racism and cultural supremacism are no longer tolerable, then literary history has to be rewritten. This has its primary expression in the proliferation of poetry that rejects a monoculturally centric point-of-view.
Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies epitomize one aspect of this development.Technicians of the Sacred insisted on the immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of the “tribal” poetries of Native Americans (on both American continents), Africans, peoples of Oceania. This was a concerted assault on the primacy of Western high culture and an active attempt to find in other, non-Western/non-Oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our own. Moreover, the “recovery” of Native American culture by a Jewish Brooklyn-born first generation poet-as-anthologist whose aesthetic roots were in the European avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our domestic genocide. This gesture cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way of recovering from the Second War by refusing to cover over the genocide that has allowed a false unity to the idea of American Literature. Rothenberg’s anthologies present a multicultural America of many voices in a way that explicitly rejects Eurosupremacism fromwithin a European perspective–that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of Europe as such in favor of idealized “America.”
The effect of the Second War is audible not only in the subject matter of the New American Poetry of the 1950s but also in its form, in its insistence on form (as never more than the extension of content, in Creeley’s phrase, echoed by Olson).
He had been stuttering, by the edge
of the street, one foot still
on the sidewalk, and the other
in the gutter . . .
like a bird, say, wired to flight, the
wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed.
The words, several, and for each, several
senses.
"It is very difficult to sum up
briefly . . ."
It always was.
[Robert Creeley,For Love]
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” does not refer to the war, but it can’t help doing so despite itself. “Howl” makes it apparent that something has gone wrong with America by the early 1950s: the whole “calm” of this period can be read as a repression that Ginsberg, and others, reacted– powerfully, resonantly–against. Not as Sassoon–“I’m going crazy; I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns”; that’s the difference between the two wars: the malaise is not locatable as the official event of the war, the battles: the whole of everyday life has lost its foundations. And the poetry–or some of it–either registered this loss of foundation in the everyday, or invented ways of articulating new foundations, strikingly without the grandiosity or optimism of some of its modernist sources.
On the street I am met with constant hostility
and I would have finally nothing else around me,
except my children who are trained to love
and whom I intend to leave as relics of my intentions.
[Creeley, “A Fragment”]
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible,
for instance.
Though this is only one example. . . .
[John Ashbery, "These Lacustrine Cities"]
The New American Poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of Futurism, Voriticism or the tradition of Eliot. It rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail; extending the innovations of the 1910 to 1917 period, but giving them an entirely different psychic registration. Think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in Creeley or Eigner as opposed to the Controlling Allegories of Pound or Eliot, think of Ashbery’s or Spicer’s self- cancellation compared to Williams’s relaxed prerogatives of self or Stein’s exuberant hubris.
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
[Jack Spicer, “Thing Language”]
Or think of Olson suggesting his project as a poet is to find a way out of the “Western Box,” or Duncan’sBefore the War, or Rothenberg, in his essay on the war, writing of discontent with “regularity and clarity as a reflection of the nature of God.” (In his essay, Rothenberg quotes Creeley’s recent poem fromWindows: “Ever since Hitler / or well before that / fact of human appetite / addressed with brutal / indifference others / killed or tortured . . . / . . . no possible way / out of it smiled or cried / or tore at it and died”.) To link the New American poetry with the Second War in this way suggests that the Systematic Extermination Process had a profound effect on American attitudes in the 1950s. No doubt this projects more than is evident. While the effect of World War 2 on the United States has been far-reaching, and not only for those who fought in the war and their families, the Lagers may well have been a distant issue for most Americans. In contrast, the Cold War and the U.S.’s new hegemonic global role would be a more obvious context for a sociohistorical reading of the New American Poets. But something else lurks in these poems of the “other” tradition that suggests a discomfort with American complacency that the Cold War does not quite account for.
1st SF Home Rainout Since. Bounce Tabby-Cat Giants.
Newspapers
Left in my house.
My house is Aquarius. I don't believe
The water-bearer
Has equal weight on his shoulders.
The lines never do.
We give equal
Space to everything in our lives. Eich-
Mann proved that false in killing like you raise
wildflowers.
Witlessly
I
Can-
not
accord
sympathy
to
those
who
do
not
recognize
The human crisis.
[Spicer,Language]
The human crisis seems to have wounded a different, slightly younger cluster of American poets that keeps forming and reforming in my mind and I find it difficult to ignore the fact that they were born during the Second World War. Susan Howe gives an explicit account of what I take here to be significant:
For me there was no silence before armies. I was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 10th, 1937, to an Irish mother and American father. . . . By 1937 the Nazi dictatorship was well established in Germany. All dissenting political parties had been liquidated and Concentration Camps had already been set up. . . . In the summer of 1938 my mother and I were staying . . . in Ireland and I had just learned to walk, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered . . . . That October we sailed home on a ship crowded with refugees. When I was two the German army invaded Poland and World War II began in the West. . . . American fathers march off into the hot Chronicles of global struggle but mothers were left. . . . From 1939 until 1946 in news photographs, day after day I saw signs of culture exploding into murder. . . . I became part of the ruin. In the blank skies over Europe I was Strife represented. . . . Those black and white picture shots--moving or fixed--were a subversive generation.
I wouldn’t want to give an inclusive list of this just more extraordinary part-generation ofNewerAmerican Poets born between 1937 and 1944, but a partial list would include Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, David Melnick, Tom Mandel, Michael Lally, Ted Greenwald, Ray DiPalma, Nick Piombino, Ann Lauterbach, Peter Seaton, Jim Brodey, Charles North, Fanny Howe, George Quasha, Charles Stein, Robert Grenier, Ron Padgett, Stephen Rodefer, John Taggart, Mauren Owen, Lorenzo Thomas, Lewis Warsh, Michael Davidson, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Geoff Young, Kathleen Fraser, John Perelman–all contemporaries of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Richard Foreman. (I recognize how arbitrary it is to leave off the years just before and after, or not to mention Tom Raworth, born in England in 1938.)
o - u -
u - u -ni -
form - ity - o -
u - u - u - ni -
formity - o -
u - unit - de -
formity - u -
unit deformity
[Robert Grenier, "Song"]
While I don’t want to stereotype individuals who, if anything, stand radically and determinately against stereotyping, generalizing, sweeping claims, ideological pronouncements and the like, I’ve been struck by how much these individual artists havethat in common: as if they share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem–an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choices made, the obscenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extra-poetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally, nonliterary, career patterns. In short, they share a radical rejection of conventional American values of conformism, fitting in, getting along / going along,–of accessibility to the point of self-betrayal.
An evening . . .
Spent thinking
About what my life would be . . .
If I’d’ve been accepted to and gone
Where I applied . . .
Where I’d learned
Different social graces
Than the ones I have
Where some of the material
Values of the American dream
Had rubbed off . . .
If I’d settled down
And settled
For the foundation
On a house
For future generations
Instead of assuming
Immediately past generations
My foundation to mine
If I’d been
A little quicker to learn
What was expected of me . . .
I’ve probably been saved
By a streak of stubbornness
By a slow mind
And a tendency to drift
That requires
My personal understanding
Before happening . . .
[Ted Greenwald, “Whiff”]
Uncompromising integrity is one way I’d put it, emphasizing that the social costs of such uncompromising integrity– inaudibility or marginality, difficult immediate personal and economic circumstance, isolation, feisty impatience with less exacting choices–are not unknown to some of these individuals.
it's embarrassing to feel
my self body image etc (often)
defined by people around me (my reaction to their
reactions)
that embarrasses me a lot
zeal embarrasses me, your zeal for instance
always lining up poets and their poems
one up one down
in relation to you and your poems . . .
most of all . . . I'm embarrassed by death
death is really the only embarrassing thing
and sometimes (unexpectedly these days more often)
it scares the shit out of me
[Greenwald, "For Ted, On Election Day"]
Or put it this way: I find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of “public” forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative / authoritarian language structures. I hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: An insistence on the “human” scale of poetry–on the “human crisis”–in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior.
the lost family of scatter cabal
thought under disorder and music
filling the crumpled space owned
by another taught under disorder
to make a path through judgement . . .
[Ray DiPalma,RAIK]
While I would surely point to the remarkable amount of what is now reductively called “theory” that is implicit in the work of most of these poets, many of them have eloquently refused the “mantle” of poetics and theory, as if to engage in such secondary projects would implicate them in a grandiosity or even megalomania that the work itself abjures.
What we know is the way we fall
when we fall off the little we ride
when we ride away from the things we’re given
to make us forget the things we gave up
[Michael Lally, “In the Distance”]
While the formal invention and innovations among these poets is enormous, few of them have chosen to promote them in an impersonal or art-historical way; invention is not seen in avant-garde or canonical terms but rather as a necessary extension of a personally eccentric investigation, crucial because of the “internal” needs of the articulation and not justified or justifiable by external criteria.
We're strange features, ignoring things. Our hero
Separates from a problem in pink, the thought
To be able to thing in the world. . . .
So this is the perfect plan. And here's a creative
code.
For all its on or off old self, immersion, power and
Command. When the world was wars and wars, according
To cause breaking out from the conditions for events
And their obsessed leaders. Brute editing, the way
The frame's the response to survival aids to lust
Contains the round rations on an actual summit.
One teaches sense to a child saying you sense
How we've always talked. . . .
A deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving
Tracks the brain blew away . . .
Predatory signs which whiz by and stop,
The lid and the soul, there are reasons for this.
[Peter Seaton, "Need from a Wound Would Do It"]
So the absence of a substantial amount of poetics or commentary (the exceptions are striking but not contradictory), more, the refusal of commentary as explanation, mark a complete engagement with the poetic act asnecessarily self-sufficient. Thus: a reluctance to link up formal innovation–which is understood as eccentric and self-defined rather than ideologically or socially defined–with larger political, social or aesthetic activities, as in groups or movements, while at the same time refusing to Romanticize or sentimentalize “individuality” in place of the values of poetic work itself.
Not by
`today' but
by
recurrent light
its course
of blossoming
is not effected
by the sun at all?
`powers of
darkness' at large?
it `unfolds'
`unfolding'
flowering of powers of darkness at large?
I `see' at `dawn'?
[Grenier, "Rose"]
This formulation suggests a relatively sharp demarcation with the generation born after 1945–the so-called baby boomers who came of age during a time when personal discomfort with, or distaste for, dominant American value could be linked up to national and international cultural and political movements that seem to share these values. In 1958 cultural and political dissidence would have taken place against a totally different ground than ten years later. The situation of the fifties may have induced a sense of isolation or self-reliance in contrast to the sixties version of sometimes giddy group-solidarity.
Damage frightens sometimes–reminder
of present danger–loss, deprivation. . . .
One didn’t want to view the wreckage constantly
but sought the consolation of lovely sights and
subtle sounds. One could accept a single scratch
but in the midst of the thicket, the brambles burn
and the delay in walking at last annoys and one
loses patience.
[Piombino,Poems]
The poetry of murder helped instigate the murder of
poetry.
Looking for the root, I forgot the sun.
[Piombino, "9/20/88"]
Perhaps this can be described as a process of internalization, looking downward or inward (“the root”) rather than outward (“the sun”)–not upward as in Idealism but falling down with the gravity of the earth, the grace of the body, even the body–the materiality–of language. There is, in many of the poems of these poets, a persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed while refusing to return to, to accept, normalcy or a new equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage. This can be as much a cause for comedy as solemnity.
weracki
dciece
hajf wet pboru
eitusic at foerual bif
thorus
t'inalie thodo
to tala
ienstable
ate sophoabl
[David Melnick,Pcoet]
Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go unregistered. And they do this more in the minute particulars of registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest.
What is said
long before
the chronicle
is told Smokey
Stuff in damp rooms
Carved out
Blocked out
Piled with slits
And windows . . .
[Ray DiPalma,Chan]
The psychic dislocation of the Second War occurred when these poets were toddlers; their first experience of language, of truth and repression, of fear and future, are inextricably tied to the Second War. Perhaps poetry presented a possible field for articulation for those who atypically stayed in touch with–perhaps could not successfully repress–these darker realities.
A great block of wedge wood stint
stays at the star of its corner which.
A divider in pierces depends, wans.
For is what I have made be only salvage?
Sat in my robes, folds. Decomposed, fled.
The world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the
very pole.
Geometric, a lingual dent? Drainage, albany. Where at
the last
stand all this sphere that herded me? My cell a corner
on the
filtering world, all out herein my belts. Things in
trim they
belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. . . . The
world in anger
is an angled hole? . . .
The light that leaks from composition alone.
Scalded by a tentative. Expels the tiny expounds thing
huge,
things made be. Any and it's large. A universe is not
of use.
[Clark Coolidge,Melencolia]
These tentative angles into the unknown are a far cry from Rothenberg’s explosive, disturbing, graphic struggle with the memories of the Second War inKhurbn:
“practice your scream” I said
(why did I say it?)
because it was his scream & wasn’t my own
it hovered between us bright
to our senses always bright it held
the center place
then somebody else came up & stared
deep in his eyes there found a memory
of horses galloping faster the wheels dyed red
behind them the poles had resolved
a feast day but the jew
locked in his closet screamed
into his vest a scream
that had no sound therefore
spiralled around the world
so wild that it shattered stones . . .
[“Dos Geshray (The Scream)”]
Khurbn risks the pornographic or voyeuristic out of a need to exorcise the images that hold us captive if not spoken or revisualized, marking an end to Rothenberg’s own past refusal to depict the Extermination Process.
In contrast, Charles Reznikoff’s last book,Holocaust (1975), which is based on documentary evidence about the Lagers gathered from the records of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, presents a series of details, fragments cut away from the horror. Reznikoff offers no explanation of the depicted events and he provides neither explicit emotional nor moral response to them: he leaves us alone with our reactions, making us to find our own screams or to articulate our own silences. Seemingly flat, documentary, particularized,Holocaust–like all of Reznikoff’s work since his first book in 1917–is a mosaic of salient incidents:
A visitor once stopped one of the children:
a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay.
He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare,
and his coat of good quality had no buttons.
The visitor asked him for his name
and then what his parents were doing;
and he said, "Father is working in the office
and Mother is playing the piano."
Then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his
parents soon--
they always told the children they would be leaving
soon to
rejoin their parents--
and the visitor answered, "Certainly. In a day or
two."
At that the child took out of his pocket
half an army biscuit he had been given in camp
and said, "I am keeping this half for Mother;"
and then the child who had been so gay
burst into tears.
This detail from Reznikoff brings forward, in an ineffably shattering way, the atmosphere of willed forgetting of the 1950s, or now. We blithely go about our business–busy, gay, distracted; until that blistering moment of consciousness that shatters all hopes when we recognize that we are orphaned, have lost our parents–in the sense of our foundations, our bearing in the world; until, that is, a detail jolts the memory, when we feel, as in the fragments in our pocket, what we have held back out of denial.
Denial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability. Reznikoff and Rothenberg initiate this process, but no more than other poets, ranges of poetry, that register this denial in the process of seeking forms that find ways out of the “Western Box”.
In contrast to–or is it an extension of?–Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the Second War.
Sources for Poems Cited
- John Ashbery. Rivers and Mountains. Ecco Press, New York, 1966.
- Clark Coolidge,Melencolia. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1987.
- Robert Creeley, “A Fragment,” inThe Charm (early poems) and “Hart Crane,” the opening poem ofFor Love, both in The Collected Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. “Ever since Hitler . . .” inWindows. New York: New Directions, 1990.
- Ray DiPalma,RAIK. New York: Roof Books, 1989. “Five Poems fromChan” in “43 Poets (1984),” ed. Charles Bernstein, inboundary 2, XIV: 1-2 (1986).
- Larry Eigner, frontpiece poem inanother time in fragments. London: Fulcrum, 1967.
- Ben Friedlander,Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938. Privately printed, 1988.
- Allen Ginsberg,Howl. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.
- Ted Greenwald,Common Sense. Kensington, California: L Publications, 1978.
- Robert Grenier,Phantom Anthems: Oakland: O Books, 1986.
- Susan Howe, The Liberties (1980), inThe Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990).
- Michael Lally,Rocky Dies Yellow. Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1975.
- David Melnick,Pcoet. San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975.
- Charles Olson,The Collected Poems, ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
- Bob Perelman,The First World. The Figures, 1986.
- Nick Piombino, “in the center of movement, a debate” and “A Simple Invocation Would Be,” inPoems. Sun & Moon Press, 1988; “9/20/88” in “Postmodern Poetries”, ed. Jerome McGann, inVerse, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1990).
- Charles Reznikoff, “Children”, inHolocaust. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.
- Jerome Rothenberg,Khurbn & Other Poems. New Directions, 1989.
- Jack Spicer,Language (1964) inThe Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser. Black Sparrow, 1975.
- Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body. Columbia, Missouri: Open Places, 1978.
- Barrett Watten,Under Erasure, excerpted in “Postmodern Poetries” inVerse.