Found poetry is a key aspect of postmodern theory and philosophy. As we've discussed in class this past week and a half, these poems are wrought with poignant tales of survival, longing, and hope. These motifs become juxtaposed by death, forgetting, and the loss of hope. Indeed, these works, as Forché reminds us, have been found, compiled, and published as a direct means of not forgetting!
In an ACE'd paragraph of at least 7-10 sentences, select two poets which we have read so far in this unit. Then, select two poems from these poets to analyze for their literal and figurative meaning. Consider the following questions as you compose your response:
- How do these works illustrate the motif of extremity?
- What do they express and how do they express it?
- How does the form of your chosen works serve to accentuate the content and the thematics of the poems?
- And, finally, how do these poems bear witness to the atrocities of WWII and to the humanity which so many individuals sought to erase, and yet failed to do so?
Your responses are due, posted below as a comment, by classtime tomorrow. Thanks all!
The second World War left countless unpublished works of poetry left for the Earth to digest until later found, collected, translated, and published in an anthology by Caroline Forché. The anthology partially de-scatters a larger narrative of poetry that would otherwise remain fragmented. The aim of the anthology was to bear witness to the extremities of the World War, and readers can find such extremities gathered in lost prose from poets such as Miklós Radnóti in Picture Postcards where the word blood leaks out of oxen mouths, every man’s urine, and arguably leaks into the text itself as a motif. Seventh Eclogue more explicitly expresses the extremities of war affecting the very nature of the poem. The speaker writes: “I write my poem in half-dark, blindly, in earth-worm rhythm” (Forché 373). Extremity is even further expressed in the poems’ status as a found work because the poems were literally affected by the presence of war in their physical keeping. The poem Picture Postcards documents the emerging dread surrounding WWII, claiming the “flowering of death” (Forché 373). This is a mirror to Celan’s poem I HEAR THAT THE AXE HAS FLOWERED, I hear that the place can’t be named which also claims the flowering of death while also acknowledging the lack of documentation and attention given to the soldiers of the war all in the title. Fortunately, Caroline Forché facilitates documentation of the soldiers by the act of organizing the anthology. The collection of found poems brings some justice to the silence because it compels readers to take in the extremities of war from a multitude of otherwise lost voices.
ReplyDeleteSach’s poem Oh the Chimneys is a sarcastic and deeply disturbing ode to the nefarious Nazi gas chambers and crematoriums. From the very beginning, she bombards the readers with the graphic imagery of “Israel’s body drifts as smoke / through the air-” (Sachs 2-3). Sachs archives her recollection of the horrors of the holocaust by reliving them in her poem, which is liberally sprinkled with the religious references. In an ironic twist and a form of revenge for the Nazis, she eulogizes their contraptions through a form a writing similar to that found in Judaism and filled with Jewish figures. Sachs bears witness to the extremity of the Holocaust because she refuses to shy away from it. She acknowledges that the only way to move forward as a people and as a world is to understand what transpired in the death camps between 1939 and 1945. Her poem serves as the metaphorical “ripping off the bandaid” which, while painful, is crucial for recovery. Moving on, Radnoti and his poem Forced March conveys extremity through every aspect of the poem. Indeed, extremity moves beyond the bonds of figurative language, manifesting itself in the literal poem breaks where the lines jump from a discussion of loss and despair to one of hope and sunshine. Radnoti poem delves into the deeper questions that all survivors faced of whether they would return and what exactly would they be returning to. Radnoti acknowledges this with his narrator’s admonishment of a young man “But see the wretch is a fool, for over the homes, that world, / long since nothing but singed, winds have been known to whirl” (Radnoti 7-8). The lines describe resignation with the fact that war destroys everything. His story is told through the beauty of literature and through a poem with multiple interpretations and formats. Perhaps his format is so different from Sachs’ because of the diverse circumstances that resulted in said poems. Where Radnoti was jailed and persecuted due to political choices that he had made, Sachs had no choice in what happened to her. It was part of a systematic effort to eliminate a religious group of people that she was a part of. However, what binds the two poets and countless others, is their ability and desire to express pain and suffering through works of art.
ReplyDeleteBoth Miklos Radnoti and Paul Celan suffered immensely under the Holocaust as forced laborers. Celan’s parents were killed in a concentration camp, and Radnoti was murdered by Hungarian officers after a forced march. Their poetry survives them as a legacy of one of the most notorious horrors in history, and a testament to what these poets experienced. Despite having had similar experiences, the perspectives expressed in their poetry are very different. Forced March, by Miklos Radnoti, despite its tragic content, has a distinctly hopeful tone to it. Repeated in the poem is the possibility that home could be just where the speaker left it, his wife and their fruit trees waiting patiently for his return. Compare this to Paul Celan’s There Was Earth Inside Them. The wording is final: “They dug.” There is no possibility of a future beyond the earth that they sift. They lose faith in God, in love, in the future. The respective behaviors of Radnoti and Celan reflect this. Radnoti, in an effort to get back to his wife, volunteered for the first trip home, only to be killed by his handlers at the end of the journey. Celan committed suicide at the age of 49. Despite similar traumatic events, they had an extremely different perspective afterwards, showing the breadth of the impact of just one of many atrocities during World War II.
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