The author responded to recent poems in First and then went further with his thoughts…
“I’m on the side . . .
[of] the ones used as messages . . .
of those whose deaths are part of an estimated number . . . ”
Oh my, oh my — what to do with (lines from) poems such as this, and those by Alison Stone…Such good lines/poems — are we allowed to admire them, as well as being moved, being led to reflect, to sympathize, to cry? Might there not be something just a bit off in such admiration? But if so, then why have poems at all? Which, inevitably (for some) leads to . . . Adorno:
The original German quoted here is from Noten zur Literatur: Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegeniiber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frit auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmoglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.
I translate this as: Cultural criticism forms the last stage of the dialectic between culture and barbarism: it is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz, and this also gnaws away at the knowledge that expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.
(from ANTONY ROWLAND Critical Survey, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1997), p. 65.)
So: it’s not as though there aren’t (or weren’t) poems and poets “after Auschwitz.” It’s writing poetry that can’t be done, where “poetry” is culture, some pure aesthetic art form in a ‘dialectic’ with barbarism. That opposition is what is now gone — not being overcome in some sort of synthesis, but just gone: “after Auschwitz” the world does not allow such an opposition. The poems in such a world — our world, after all — then must be poems that are a part of and responsive to that world while still able to be admired as poems. Perhaps such barbaric culture is “the last stage” of that no longer existing “dialectic” — not resolving it, but inhabiting it?
Just thinkin’
xxx
Well … as I suggested, it was from trying to figure out my own responses to those FOTM poems that I was led to Adorno: how ok is it (or: how is it ok) to respond and admire poems as poems when they are responses to atrocity (and then also, what about actually creating such poems)? I figured I’d better look into the actual Adorno, the Rowland essay turned up on a search and it looked as though it would likely have the original bit in German (and discuss the vocabulary itself). It’s called “Re-reading ‘Impossibility’ and ‘Barbarism’: Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics”, btw, I read (in and around) it, and some of it was helpful to me (so I think), but I haven’t just cribbed (so I also think).
It now seems to me, after mulling it all some more (and watching 76ers vs. Bucks last evening!), that I scanted “cultural criticism.” CC now fully unmasks the falsity of the opposition between culture and barbarism — it was always false to, as some might say, reify these two, but only now, “after Auschwitz” is the delusional/mystifying nature of the opposition unavoidable. Moreover, with the demise of this ‘dialectic’ so too ‘CC’ (in at least form/domain?) also goes away. I think this is a plausible lead-up to my paragraph in the earlier email.
I might add that poems (and aesthetic work and objects) are no less possible or desirable than they ever were. However, a category “poetry” is unhelpful in understanding and responding to the world (though one can think about a small aspect of the world — call it “poetry” — to better understand and respond to poems).
So here’s what I (right now) make of the Adorno. What comes after the colon explicates what comes before (normal enough use of a colon). With the ‘dialectic” gone, a poem must be “barbaric” now, “after Auschwitz,” because, in fact, poems always were “barbaric” — in and of the world — though only in our world is that fact so utterly unavoidable. The end of the “dialectic” and its categories means that “poetry” is “impossible” now. But so what? The fact that today poems are written — barbaric poems/culture — means that the impossibility of “poetry” doesn’t really matter. The existence of these poems “gnaws away at” the (merely) epistemic grounding of “poetry’s” impossibility. Whatever “poetry” might have been supposed to do/offer, poems can still do/offer, now liberated from a spurious “dialectic” based on an at-best dubious ontology of categories.