Rothenberg non-Adorno: writing after Auschwitz

Al Filreis

Here is a short excerpt from a longer interview with Jerome Rothenberg. It has been transcribed by the wonderful Michael Nardone. The transcription is good but it's still a work in progress, and we hope to release this and other interview transcriptions through Jacket2 in the coming months. Meantime, here I am talking with Jerry about writing about the Holocaust.

FILREIS:
I guess the first question I have is about your uncle. You’ve said in a poem and in a preface, and also in conversation that the only story that has come directly to you, or indirectly maybe, about the Holocaust and your family is the uncle who was lost who found about his family killed, I think at Treblinka, and drank a bunch of vodka and blew his brains out. There were obviously others who were lost. When you got back, when you got to Treblinka, it wasn’t a roots visit, it was something that happened along the way because you were already in Germany. You decided to make the trip and you went to Treblinka but there you said that the poems you heard at Treblinka were the clearest message you’ve ever gotten about why you write poetry. Can you explain that a little more, and specifically what do you mean you heard the poems at Treblinka?

ROTHENBERG:
It wasn’t as if a voice was speaking to me. [Laughter]

FILREIS:
Glad we cleared that up. Jerry—

ROTHENBERG:
But it was if that experience plus more. I don’t if I began to write those poems following the Treblinka visit, which was early in the trip. Later, having passed some time in Krakow, in Silesia, we then travelled to Auschwitz. But the whole thing, from the moment that I set foot into Poland, I had a great sense of upset, you know, it triggered something. I think quite understandably.

FILREIS:
But the clearest message you’ve ever gotten about why you write poetry?

ROTHENBERG:
The clearest message, yeah, in the sense that I think for many of us, maybe most of us, who became poets and who had lived either directly or vicariously through the experience of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the great, very intense, brief period of destruction, you know, a few years. I’ve always tried to get an accurate account of how many people were killed during that time from 1939 to 1945. An extraordinary numbers of deaths, of burnings, of maimings.

I think I began to write poetry under the impact of that. I was still living under the, as were others of my generation. I don’t think I can define very clearly what I mean. I understood then, for the first time I was willing to say that something of what had happened there was what brought me into poetry in the first place.

I had been meditating to, or thinking about the statement of Adorno, attributed and sometimes mistranslated from Adorno about not writing poetry after Auschwitz. But that’s wrong, because really what drove me into poetry, or what I feel retrospectively drove me into poetry was the experience of Holocaust. And not just what happened in the death camps, although that was an extremity, but you know, the other, particularly once we got away from the war itself. And what happened at Hiroshima began to sink in first, I was a kid when we got news about that. I don’t think it was for me, at the age of 14, a sense of the horror of Hiroshima, but it didn’t take long before one realized what we had done there. And then, of course, things like Dresden only came to light for us much later.

FILREIS:
And you don’t really disagree with what we imagine to be the impetus behind Adorno’s statement, which is that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.

ROTHENBERG:
O no.

FILREIS:
That is to say you believe that the enormity of that situation robbed language of its capacity to express appropriately what had happened. The disagreement is what happens afterwards, because you believe strongly, and you’ve said this in Khurbn, you’ve said it at the end of The Burning Babe, I believe, and you’ve certainly said it in various statements that poetry is all we have left.

ROTHENBERG:
Well, I think that the transformations that poetry makes possible were to me a more meaningful response than silence. Although silence can be very powerful, but who will know about it?

FILREIS:
Well there are some artists who would argue differently about silence.

ROTHENBERG:
Yes, but somebody has to get the word out.

Anyway, silence was not an option.

FILREIS:
Silence was not an option for you.

ROTHENBERG:
Silence means withdrawing from the world.

FILREIS:
In the Elie Wiesel sense, if you’re silent, you’re helping the bad guys. Don’t be silent. In that sense.

ROTHENBERG:
Yes, it’s not just the Elie Wiesel sense.

FILREIS:
I know that, I threw that in there to get a rise out of you.

ROTHENBERG:
You generally assume that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. This is stated in many different ways. As a poet, I began more and more to talk about the response to that mid-century Holocaust, holocausts, and so much that followed, the response being through the transformed language of poetry, and of course other responses also.

April 7, 2010

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.