Favorite Poetry

Did the Nazis associated with the holocaust, especially those close to the killing, write poetry? Has anybody read such poetry, if it exists, and if so, what is it like? Could a poet, with her emotional connections to the world, sink to mass murder of strangers? If so, what poetry would that twisting experience wrench from them?

jemoyer - 08:53am Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6223 of 6739)
life is not meant to be a slow form of suicide

rshowalt 9/21/00 5:05am

There is an entire genre of political poetry that is very difficult to pull off well. Nazim Hikmet is one example of many. Wilfred Owen's poems from WWI are excellent. Carolyn Forche comes to mind, her book The Country Between Us. Lynn Emmanuel has written some interesting things about growing up in such a culture in her book Hotel Fiesta. Another local poet named Peter Oresick (o-RESS-ick) wrote a long poem in the form of a chapbook entitled An American Peace, (Shadow Press, Minneapolis,1985), which addresses the issue you raise. He describes his childhood and simple life in a small town near Pittsburgh and what would happen if a nuclear explosion occured. He writes about his religious training, philosophy, and the awareness and horror of possible nuclear annihilation. He was friends with the anti-nuclear activists Molly Rush an Daniel Berrigan, among others, who in 1980 banged the nose-cones of nuclear warheads with hammers and poured human blood all around to make a symbolic statement. Here's a short excerpt:

We have our own hope,
structured into our genes.
For ages it has talked to us and kept us
on the narrow ridge of faith,
as we sat by the rivers of Babylon;
as we sat in the Dark Ages;
as we sat in the stone cathedrals;
as we sat in the concrete libraries.
We heard it in the rushing and swirling
of our blood,
in the atoms rotating, the galaxy rotating,
the great rhythm programmed into us
during the morning of the world.
It was a matter of time before we'd walk
through the shafts of sunlight and shadow,
to sit down and pass a hand
across our heavy, thick forheads.
It brought us to consciousness
and to these instruments
where we can see matter's purple flush,
see the glowing within it,
a presence that pulls us in
relieving the terror and the long lonliness.
Four billion years to reach here.
Let's rest awhile. Let us sit.

Peter Oresick

geneva9 - 09:06am Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6224 of 6739)
"It is my soul that calls upon my name./How silver-sweet lovers' tongues by night,/Like softest music to attending ears."

ginger:

Loved your poems, especially morning and estranged.

Did think the images in the first poem nemesis were a bit confusing. You have these adult, sharp images: dazzling as diamonds, eyes glazed with ice, tin roof heart with the contrast of the cuddly puppy images of a rubber ball, shaggy dog story, matchbox cars that seem to me to war a bit with each other. I like the images per se, don't know if they belong together.

I appreciate your comments on God in January, you are so dead-on that I need to chip some more away and it really hadn't occurred to me!

rshowalt - 09:19am Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6225 of 6739)

Wow Moyer. Thanks!

wolverine137 - 05:00pm Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6226 of 6739)
Disco before death.

rshowalt:

There is a poem by a Japanese poet which excoriates the United States for using atomic weapons, but I can't remember the name since I read it probably 20 years ago. It is blank verse, and really a hatchet job. Perhaps someone recalls...if I run across it I'll share the information.

featherstone2 - 05:24pm Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6227 of 6739)

nuclear poetry

There was a very powerful poem on the bombing of Hiroshima in the latest Poetry Nation. That may be a Canadian rag. I don't have a copy myself.

featherstone2 - 10:12pm Sep 21, 2000 EST (#6228 of 6739)

rshowalt 9/21/00 5:05am

rshowalt

Have artists adressed this? Especially, have they adressed this in direct ways that many people can understand?

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