Rothenberg non-Adorno: writing after Auschwitz

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.