SYLLABUS: Holocaust PoetryCary Nelson Holocaust Poetry--Graduate Seminar--English 563 In Survival in Auschwitz holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi decribes an indicative incident during his first days at the camp. Desperately thirsty, he reached out a window to grasp an icicle. A beefy guard knocked it away. "Warum?" Levi asked. The succinct answer carried a certain uncanny ethical and philosophical depth: "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why. If the question could not be posed in the death camps, can it be posed in poetry instead? Can poetry put forth its humanity in the face of a world where all such values were extinguished? In 1940 the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was drafted into a labor battalion along with thousands of his fellow Jews. As the war progressed and Hungary brought its policies into greater compliance with those of its German ally, these labor battalions, brutal from the outset, became increasingly lethal. Beaten and starved, the Jews were now randomly murdered. Radnóti nonetheless transformed the horror into poems and wrote them in a small notebook. On August 29, 1944, nearing the end, he wrote the first of four poems under the title "Razglednicas," Serbo-Croatian for "picture postcards." A month later he writes the last of the "Razglednicas" on the back of a cod-liver oil advertizing notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: "shot in the neck . . . blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear." On November 9th he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was distinterred and the blood stained poems recovered. Is it sufficient justification for poetry that his testimony now outlives his executioners? There is no more severe challenge to the aspirations and social functions of poetry than that posed by the holocaust. Leo Haber calls it "pale consolation, dear God of poetry, of justice, of mercy, / of explanations, for the murder of little children." Adorno famously remarked that to write poetry after Auschwitz was obscene. Yet poetry was written both during the war and after, including anti-Semitic poems produced by the Nazis themselves. In that context we might conclude that the genre was so marked by its demonic uses that its myths of transcendence became a cruel joke. We will examine this whole history--poems written by wartime victims, witnesses, and perpetrators; poems written by later generations seeking to keep the historical memories alive and make the events more real. We will read poems from many different countries, using English language texts but comparing them to the original language texts whenever possible. In some cases multiple translations of individual poems exist. Again, we will compare them. Some translators feel one should find equivalents for Radnoti's rhymes; others feel that is the worst choice possible. Class attendance is required. Each week you need to post by e-mail (to all seminar members and to me) a 2-page poetry analysis and commentary on the week's readings. Date/Readings: Sep. 7 Susan Gubar, "Why Poetry Matters," from Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Levi & Rothberg, The Holocaust, "General Introduction," pp. 1-19 Hilda Schiff, ed. Holocaust Poetry, including the introduction. We will read the whole of the Schiff collection to give us an overview of Holocaust poetry. You should send an email post this week to the class in two parts: 1) an analysis of two of the poems in the Schiff collection; 2) first thoughts on Holocaust poetry, consisting of questions and issues raised by the Schiff collection. Sep. 14 from Levi & Rothberg: Aaron Kramer, ed. The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust Sep. 21 Susan Gubar, "The Dead Speak" Jean Francois Lyotard, "The Differend," 257-62 (Levi & Rothberg) Walter Kalaidjian, "The Holocaust at Home" Jorie Graham, "Annunciation with a Bullet in It," Michael Hamburger, "Treblinka," Anthony Hecht, "The Book of Yolek," Randall Jarrell, "Protocols," Sharon Olds, "That Year," Alicia Ostriker, "The Eight and Thirteenth," Sylvia Plath, "Daddy," "Getting There," "Lady Lazarus," "Mary's Song," Adrienne Rich, "Eastern War Time," Charles Simac, "My mother was a braid of black smoke," W.D. Snodgrass, "A Visitation," Yyevgeny Yevtushenko, "Babii Yar." Sep. 28 from Levi and Rothberg: Packet of poems by Abraham Sutzkever, Dan Pagis, Nelly Sachs, Oct. 5 from Levi & Rothberg: Packet of poems by Paul Celan, Jacob Glatstein, Miklós Radnóti Oct. 12 from Levi & Rothberg: William Heyen, Shoah Train, "Erika," Oct. 19 from Levi & Rothberg: from Marguerite Striar, ed., Beyond Amazement: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Lily Brett, etc. Oct. 26 Comparative Trauma: packet of poems about, witness, personal and political violence, modern trauma. This will give us the opportunity to compare other extreme subjects Readings will include: World War II: Ingeborg Bachmann, "Early Noon"; Alan Dugan, "Memorial Service for the Invasion Beach Where the Vacation Flesh is Over"; Charles Simac, "Begotten of the Spleen" To pursue this topic further see Carolyn Forché, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Cynthia Edelberg, ed., Scars: American Poetry in the Face of Violence, and Cary Nelson, ed., Anthology of Modern American Poetry. November 2 from Susan Gubar, "[Reznikoff]" from Levi & Rothberg: Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust (photocopy) November 9 from Levi & Rothberg: Susan Gubar, "Could You Have Made an Elegy for Every One" selections from Charles Fishman, ed. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (photocopies)
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November 30: from Levi & Rothberg: Dec. 7: TBA PAPER: MAPS:
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