THE SECOND WAR AND POSTMODERN MEMORY by CHARLES BERNSTEIN State University of New York at Buffalo Copyright (c) 1991 by Charles Bernstein, all rights reserved _Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.2 (January, 1991) Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, And you're as right as rain. . . . Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . they're so wise . . . . --Siegfried Sassoon, "Repression of War Experience" (1918) [1] We never discussed the Second World War much when I was growing up. I don't feel much like discussing it now. It seems presumptuous to interpret, much less give literary interpretations of, the Systematic Extermination Process or the dropping of the H-Bomb, the two poles of the Second War. [2] When Stanley Diamond asked me to speak on "Poetry after the Holocaust"--to replace but also to respond to Jerome Rothenberg, who could not attend the symposium--my first reaction was to wonder what qualifications I had to speak-- as if the topic of the war made me question my standing, made me wonder what I might say that could bear the weight of this subject matter. Diamond reassured me that the audience would be small: "For many the Holocaust is too far in the past to matter; for most of the rest, it's too painful to bring to mind." [3] My father-in-law, who left Berlin as a teenager on a youth aliyah and spent the war in Palestine, had a different reaction: all these Holocaust conferences are a fad. This reaction is as disturbing as it is right. The Holocaust has come to stand for a kind of Secular Satanism--everyone's against it, anyone can work up a feverish moral fervor denouncing the Nazi Monster. [4] Yet I've been struck by just the opposite: that the psychological effects of the Second War are still largely repressed and that we are just beginning to come out of the shock enough to try to make sense of the experience. We stormed the citadel under the banner of amnesia, Winning absolute victory over the Germans in 1943. Fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . . [Barrett Watten, _Under Erasure_] Crysiles of cristle, piled ankle high, as wide as sound carries. Am I-- hearing it--algebras worth? There is a wind erases marks. I felt it on my cheek Summers long you can cross it & still not approach time, de- solidified, approaching mothish mists felled, the way a price knocked down puts purchase on its feet. Stammering painful clamor by coincidents appraised. Refuse is a spilled constant. _Let it loose_. [Benjamin Friedlander, "Kristallnacht"] I don't remember when I first heard about the war, but I do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. It's inconceivable to me now that I was born just five years after its end; each year, the Extermination Process seems nearer, more recent. Yet if the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the Bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future. hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks . . . where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor or perjorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below . . . [Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" (1949)] Fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for Western Civilization. It seems to me that the current controversies surrounding Paul De Man, and, more significantly, Martin Heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. In all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a Divine Mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the West, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations. [5] The Heidegger question merely personalizes the basic situation of the war: that European learning, the Enlightenment tradition, and the Ideals of Reason as embodied in the Nation State, were as much a cause of the war as a break to it. For to understand how Heidegger could be complicit in the Second War is to understand how the Second War is not an aberration but an extension of the Logos of Western Civilization. Jack Spicer's dying words--"My vocabulary did this to me"--could be the epitaph of the Second War as well: Our vocabulary did this to us. [6] Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Paul Celan committed suicide; De Man and Heidegger went on to prosper. What did the former know that the latter never absorbed? To acknowledge the Second War means to risk suicide and in the process to politicize philosophy; and if we desire to avoid death and evade politics, repression is inevitable. Which is to say that the death an acknowledgement of this war brings on is not only the death of individuals but also of an Ideal--of reason unbounded to politics, of, that is, rationality as such. fear smashes into my double out of nowhere would shrink flesh back in itself before it vomits a wet night from neck or forehead passes into the vague air swallows the liquid stays inside my corneas extend along the axis of the flow dries [Rosmarie Waldrop, _The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body_] I'd be reluctant to say any of my own poems was about the war or should be read within that frame--none would hold up to the scrutiny such a reading would promote. But I do want to make a broad, very provisional, claim that much of the innovative poetry of these soon to be fifty years following the war register the Twined events of Extermination in the West and Holocaust in East in ways that hardly have been accounted for. From the stately violence of the State a classic war, World War Two, punctuated by Hiroshima all the action classically taking place on one day visible to one group in invisible terms beside a fountain of imagefree water "trees" with brown "trunks" and "leafy" green crowns 50s chipmunks sitting beneath, buck teeth representing mental tranquility, they sit in rows and read their book and the fountain gushes forth all the letters at once, permanently a playful excrescence, an erotic war against nature.... [Bob Perelman, "The Broken Mirror"] Every cultural development I ascribe to the Second War can be just as readily traced to some other cause and can also be said to preexist the war. My argument is not deterministic; rather I want to suggest that the frame of the Second War, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, transforms the social meaning of these cultural developments. Racism and cultural supremacism do not begin or end with the Second War but they are the precise ideological instruments that mark the most unrecuperable aspects of the war--the Lagers and the mutilated survivors of the bomb. The war did not make racism and cultural supremacism intolerable, they always were, but it demonstrated, as if demonstration was necessary, their absolute corrosiveness. [7] The war made it apparent, if it wasn't already, that racism and cultural supremacism are not correctable flaws of Western logocentrism but its nonbiodegradable byproduct. I don't mean this as a thesis to be systematically argued. Rather, I am suggesting that the war undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the Enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way Eurosupremacist or hierarchic. Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law Into the same river no man steps twice When the fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one . . . To be in different states without a change is not a possibility . . . [Olson, "The Kingfishers"] Racism and cultural supremacism contaminate everything that is associated with them; if this guilt-by-association is necessarily too far-reaching, that is because it sets loose a radical skepticism that knows no immediate place to stop. [8] The Second War undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the Father, of Law, of the Nation and National Spirit, of Technorationality, of Scientific Certainty, of Axiomatic Judgement, of Hierarchy, of Progress, of Tradition. It's a chain reaction. No truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control. [9] "But it's not reason but unreason that caused the war! It's just a parody of the Enlightenment to associate it with Nazi dementia, or to see the telos of science in a mushroom cloud! The Enlightenment was a force for _toleration_ and consideration as opposed to mysticism, irrationality, and theological or state authority. Didn't the Allies represent these Western values against the Nazis!" But the matter is altogether more complicated and my account risks swerving into something too grandiose: for this is not a matter of principle but of shock and grief. If the values associated with Enlightenment are undermined, this is not to remove the Romantic legacy from its undoing. For if the Second War casts doubt on systematicity, it is no less destructive to the vatic, the occult, the charismatic, the emotional solidarity of communion. [10] There are new difficulties. It's difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value or domination by one group of another as justifiable, hard not to associate systematic operations with the systematicity of the Extermination Process or preemptory Authority with Fascism. These associations overgeneralize: but the pairs are subliminally linked, the one stigmatized by the other. Benjamin said it best and the Second War made it ineradicable (roughly): Every act of Civilization is at the same time an act of Barbarism. When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive . . . [Olson, "The Kingfishers"] The vehemence of the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement can be seen in this context: the shadow of the Second War, growing darker as the immediate compensatory shock of the first postwar decades wore off, spurred the pace of demands for change and contributed to a sometimes millenarian we-can't-go-on-the-old-way-anymore zeal. In the U.S., the war on the war in Vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the Second War--the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war. [11] The realization that white, heterosexual Christian men of the West have no exclusive franchise on articulating the "highest" values of humankind was certainly around prior to the Second War, but the war added a nauseating repulsiveness to such "canonical" views; as if they were not just something to dispute but could no longer be stomached at all. The depth and breadth of the challenge to the Western canon may be a measure of the effect of the war, though few of the parties to the controversy choose to frame it this way. It's now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the Great War in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm; just as we better understand the Romantics when we keep in mind the context of the French Revolution. The effects of the Second War are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited. [12] I don't mean "War Poetry" in the sense of poems about the war; they are notoriously scarce and beside the point I want to make here. Of course, there are many accounts of the war--documentary, personal, theoretical--and many visualizations of the war in film, photography, painting. But the scope or core of the Second War cannot be represented only by the conventional techniques developed to depict events, scenes, battles, political infamies. Only the surface of the war can be pictured. [13] To be sure, the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the Real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the First World War. In the wake of the Second War, however, the meaning, and urgency, of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis. That is, such work which had started as a heady, even giddy, aesthetic investigation had become primarily an act of human reconstruction and reimagining. Radical modernism can be characterized by the discovery of the entity-status of language--not just verbal language but signification systems/processes; thus, the working hypothesis about the autonomy of the medium, of the compositional space; the flattening of the Euclidian space of representing and its implicit metaphysics of displacement and reification of objects. I think all of these fundamental ontological and aesthetic discoveries and inventions are carried forward into the radical late 20th century work but with a different critical understanding of the implications of this new textual space. as if we could ignore the consequences of explosions fracture the present warm exhaust in our lungs would turn us inside out of gloves avoid words like "war" needs subtler poisons as if conscious of ends and means scream in every nerve every breath every grain of dust to dust cancers over the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream [_Waldrop, The Road is Everywhere_] After the Second War, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and Romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent. The meaning of the modernist textual practice has been interpreted in ways that contrast with some of its original interpretations: _toward_ the incommensurability of different discourse systems, _against_ the idea of poetry as an imperializing or world-synthesizing agency (of the zeitgeist), not only because these ideas tend to impart to the Poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective but also because they diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice. Thus, the emphasis in the New American Poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself. In the center of movement, a debate. Before beginning, a pause. . . . Pianissimo. Curious symptom, this, that the man appears mildly self-satisfied, as if, in spite of his obvious confusion and . . . so ill at ease [Nick Piombino, _Poems_] After the war, there is also greater attention to the ideological function of language: taking the word/world-materializing techniques of radical modernism and applying them to show how "everyday" language practices manipulate and dominate; that is, the investigation of the social dimension of language as reality-producing through the use of radical modernist procedures. how we read it line after line given one look refresh the eyes against the abyss [Larry Eigner, _another time in fragments_] Poetry after the war has its psychic imperatives: to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command. This is one way to understand the political content of its form. We are in a sandheap We are discovered not solid the floor based on misunderstanding. [Susan Howe, _The Liberties_] If racism and cultural supremacism are no longer tolerable, then literary history has to be rewritten. This has its primary expression in the proliferation of poetry that rejects a monoculturally centric point-of-view. [14] Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies epitomize one aspect of this development. _Technicians of the Sacred_ insisted on the immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of the "tribal" poetries of Native Americans (on both American continents), Africans, peoples of Oceania. This was a concerted assault on the primacy of Western high culture and an active attempt to find in other, non-Western/non-Oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our own. Moreover, the "recovery" of Native American culture by a Jewish Brooklyn-born first generation poet-as-anthologist whose aesthetic roots were in the European avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our _domestic_ genocide. This gesture cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way of recovering from the Second War by refusing to cover over the genocide that has allowed a false unity to the idea of American Literature. Rothenberg's anthologies present a multicultural America of many voices in a way that explicitly rejects Eurosupremacism from _within_ a European perspective--that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of Europe as such in favor of idealized "America." [15] The effect of the Second War is audible not only in the subject matter of the New American Poetry of the 1950s but also in its form, in its insistence on form (as never more than the extension of content, in Creeley's phrase, echoed by Olson). He had been stuttering, by the edge of the street, one foot still on the sidewalk, and the other in the gutter . . . like a bird, say, wired to flight, the wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed. The words, several, and for each, several senses. "It is very difficult to sum up briefly . . ." It always was. [Robert Creeley, _For Love_] "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" does not refer to the war, but it can't help doing so despite itself. "Howl" makes it apparent that something has gone wrong with America by the early 1950s: the whole "calm" of this period can be read as a repression that Ginsberg, and others, reacted-- powerfully, resonantly--against. Not as Sassoon--"I'm going crazy; I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns"; that's the difference between the two wars: the malaise is not locatable as the official event of the war, the battles: the whole of everyday life has lost its foundations. And the poetry--or some of it--either registered this loss of foundation in the everyday, or invented ways of articulating new foundations, strikingly without the grandiosity or optimism of some of its modernist sources. On the street I am met with constant hostility and I would have finally nothing else around me, except my children who are trained to love and whom I intend to leave as relics of my intentions. [Creeley, "A Fragment"] These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing Into something forgetful, although angry with history. They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance. Though this is only one example. . . . [John Ashbery, "These Lacustrine Cities"] The New American Poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of Futurism, Voriticism or the tradition of Eliot. It rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail; extending the innovations of the 1910 to 1917 period, but giving them an entirely different psychic registration. Think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in Creeley or Eigner as opposed to the Controlling Allegories of Pound or Eliot, think of Ashbery's or Spicer's self- cancellation compared to Williams's relaxed prerogatives of self or Stein's exuberant hubris. This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. It Is bread and butter Pepper and salt. The death That young men hope for. Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. [Jack Spicer, "Thing Language"] Or think of Olson suggesting his project as a poet is to find a way out of the "Western Box," or Duncan's _Before the War_, or Rothenberg, in his essay on the war, writing of discontent with "regularity and clarity as a reflection of the nature of God." (In his essay, Rothenberg quotes Creeley's recent poem from _Windows_: "Ever since Hitler / or well before that / fact of human appetite / addressed with brutal / indifference others / killed or tortured . . . / . . . no possible way / out of it smiled or cried / or tore at it and died".) To link the New American poetry with the Second War in this way suggests that the Systematic Extermination Process had a profound effect on American attitudes in the 1950s. No doubt this projects more than is evident. While the effect of World War 2 on the United States has been far-reaching, and not only for those who fought in the war and their families, the Lagers may well have been a distant issue for most Americans. In contrast, the Cold War and the U.S.'s new hegemonic global role would be a more obvious context for a sociohistorical reading of the New American Poets. But something else lurks in these poems of the "other" tradition that suggests a discomfort with American complacency that the Cold War does not quite account for. 1st SF Home Rainout Since. Bounce Tabby-Cat Giants. Newspapers Left in my house. My house is Aquarius. I don't believe The water-bearer Has equal weight on his shoulders. The lines never do. We give equal Space to everything in our lives. Eich- Mann proved that false in killing like you raise wildflowers. Witlessly I Can- not accord sympathy to those who do not recognize The human crisis. [Spicer, _Language_] The human crisis seems to have wounded a different, slightly younger cluster of American poets that keeps forming and reforming in my mind and I find it difficult to ignore the fact that they were born during the Second World War. Susan Howe gives an explicit account of what I take here to be significant: For me there was no silence before armies. I was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 10th, 1937, to an Irish mother and American father. . . . By 1937 the Nazi dictatorship was well established in Germany. All dissenting political parties had been liquidated and Concentration Camps had already been set up. . . . In the summer of 1938 my mother and I were staying . . . in Ireland and I had just learned to walk, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered . . . . That October we sailed home on a ship crowded with refugees. When I was two the German army invaded Poland and World War II began in the West. . . . American fathers march off into the hot Chronicles of global struggle but mothers were left. . . . From 1939 until 1946 in news photographs, day after day I saw signs of culture exploding into murder. . . . I became part of the ruin. In the blank skies over Europe I was Strife represented. . . . Those black and white picture shots--moving or fixed--were a subversive generation. I wouldn't want to give an inclusive list of this just more extraordinary part-generation of _Newer_ American Poets born between 1937 and 1944, but a partial list would include Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, David Melnick, Tom Mandel, Michael Lally, Ted Greenwald, Ray DiPalma, Nick Piombino, Ann Lauterbach, Peter Seaton, Jim Brodey, Charles North, Fanny Howe, George Quasha, Charles Stein, Robert Grenier, Ron Padgett, Stephen Rodefer, John Taggart, Mauren Owen, Lorenzo Thomas, Lewis Warsh, Michael Davidson, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Geoff Young, Kathleen Fraser, John Perelman--all contemporaries of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Richard Foreman. (I recognize how arbitrary it is to leave off the years just before and after, or not to mention Tom Raworth, born in England in 1938.) o - u - u - u -ni - form - ity - o - u - u - u - ni - formity - o - u - unit - de - formity - u - unit deformity [Robert Grenier, "Song"] While I don't want to stereotype individuals who, if anything, stand radically and determinately against stereotyping, generalizing, sweeping claims, ideological pronouncements and the like, I've been struck by how much these individual artists have _that_ in common: as if they share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem--an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choices made, the obscenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extra-poetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally, nonliterary, career patterns. In short, they share a radical rejection of conventional American values of conformism, fitting in, getting along / going along,--of accessibility to the point of self-betrayal. An evening . . . Spent thinking About what my life would be . . . If I'd've been accepted to and gone Where I applied . . . Where I'd learned Different social graces Than the ones I have Where some of the material Values of the American dream Had rubbed off . . . If I'd settled down And settled For the foundation On a house For future generations Instead of assuming Immediately past generations My foundation to mine If I'd been A little quicker to learn What was expected of me . . . I've probably been saved By a streak of stubbornness By a slow mind And a tendency to drift That requires My personal understanding Before happening . . . [Ted Greenwald, "Whiff"] Uncompromising integrity is one way I'd put it, emphasizing that the social costs of such uncompromising integrity-- inaudibility or marginality, difficult immediate personal and economic circumstance, isolation, feisty impatience with less exacting choices--are not unknown to some of these individuals. it's embarrassing to feel my self body image etc (often) defined by people around me (my reaction to their reactions) _that_ embarrasses me a lot zeal embarrasses me, your zeal for instance always lining up poets and their poems one up one down in relation to you and your poems . . . most of all . . . I'm embarrassed by death death is really the only embarrassing thing and sometimes (unexpectedly these days more often) it scares the shit out of me [Greenwald, "For Ted, On Election Day"] Or put it this way: I find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of "public" forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative / authoritarian language structures. I hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: An insistence on the "human" scale of poetry--on the "human crisis"--in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior. the lost family of scatter cabal thought under disorder and music filling the crumpled space owned by another taught under disorder to make a path through judgement . . . [Ray DiPalma, _RAIK_] While I would surely point to the remarkable amount of what is now reductively called "theory" that is implicit in the work of most of these poets, many of them have eloquently refused the "mantle" of poetics and theory, as if to engage in such secondary projects would implicate them in a grandiosity or even megalomania that the work itself abjures. What we know is the way we fall when we fall off the little we ride when we ride away from the things we're given to make us forget the things we gave up [Michael Lally, "In the Distance"] While the formal invention and innovations among these poets is enormous, few of them have chosen to promote them in an impersonal or art-historical way; invention is not seen in avant-garde or canonical terms but rather as a necessary extension of a personally eccentric investigation, crucial because of the "internal" needs of the articulation and not justified or justifiable by external criteria. We're strange features, ignoring things. Our hero Separates from a problem in pink, the thought To be able to thing in the world. . . . So this is the perfect plan. And here's a creative code. For all its on or off old self, immersion, power and Command. When the world was wars and wars, according To cause breaking out from the conditions for events And their obsessed leaders. Brute editing, the way The frame's the response to survival aids to lust Contains the round rations on an actual summit. One teaches sense to a child saying you sense How we've always talked. . . . A deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving Tracks the brain blew away . . . Predatory signs which whiz by and stop, The lid and the soul, there are reasons for this. [Peter Seaton, "Need from a Wound Would Do It"] So the absence of a substantial amount of poetics or commentary (the exceptions are striking but not contradictory), more, the refusal of commentary as explanation, mark a complete engagement with the poetic act as _necessarily_ self-sufficient. Thus: a reluctance to link up formal innovation--which is understood as eccentric and self-defined rather than ideologically or socially defined--with larger political, social or aesthetic activities, as in groups or movements, while at the same time refusing to Romanticize or sentimentalize "individuality" in place of the values of poetic work itself. Not by `today' but by recurrent light its course of blossoming is not effected by the sun at all? `powers of darkness' at large? it `unfolds' `unfolding' _flowering of powers of darkness at large_? I `see' at `dawn'? [Grenier, "Rose"] This formulation suggests a relatively sharp demarcation with the generation born after 1945--the so-called baby boomers who came of age during a time when personal discomfort with, or distaste for, dominant American value could be linked up to national and international cultural and political movements that seem to share these values. In 1958 cultural and political dissidence would have taken place against a totally different ground than ten years later. The situation of the fifties may have induced a sense of isolation or self-reliance in contrast to the sixties version of sometimes giddy group-solidarity. Damage frightens sometimes--reminder of present danger--loss, deprivation. . . . One didn't want to view the wreckage constantly but sought the consolation of lovely sights and subtle sounds. One could accept a single scratch but in the midst of the thicket, the brambles burn and the delay in walking at last annoys and one loses patience. [Piombino, _Poems_] The poetry of murder helped instigate the murder of poetry. Looking for the root, I forgot the sun. [Piombino, "9/20/88"] Perhaps this can be described as a process of internalization, looking downward or inward ("the root") rather than outward ("the sun")--not upward as in Idealism but falling down with the gravity of the earth, the grace of the body, even the body--the materiality--of language. There is, in many of the poems of these poets, a persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed while refusing to return to, to accept, normalcy or a new equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage. This can be as much a cause for comedy as solemnity. weracki dciece hajf wet pboru eitusic at foerual bif thorus t'inalie thodo to tala ienstable ate sophoabl [David Melnick, _Pcoet_] Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go unregistered. And they do this more in the minute particulars of registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest. What is said long before the chronicle is told Smokey Stuff in damp rooms Carved out Blocked out Piled with slits And windows . . . [Ray DiPalma, _Chan_] The psychic dislocation of the Second War occurred when these poets were toddlers; their first experience of language, of truth and repression, of fear and future, are inextricably tied to the Second War. Perhaps poetry presented a possible field for articulation for those who atypically stayed in touch with--perhaps could not successfully repress--these darker realities. A great block of wedge wood stint stays at the star of its corner which. A divider in pierces depends, wans. For is what I have made be only salvage? Sat in my robes, folds. Decomposed, fled. The world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the very pole. Geometric, a lingual dent? Drainage, albany. Where at the last stand all this sphere that herded me? My cell a corner on the filtering world, all out herein my belts. Things in trim they belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. . . . The world in anger is an angled hole? . . . The light that leaks from composition alone. Scalded by a tentative. Expels the tiny expounds thing huge, things made be. Any and it's large. A universe is not of use. [Clark Coolidge, _Melencolia_] These tentative angles into the unknown are a far cry from Rothenberg's explosive, disturbing, graphic struggle with the memories of the Second War in _Khurbn_: "practice your scream" I said (why did I say it?) because it was his scream & wasn't my own it hovered between us bright to our senses always bright it held the center place then somebody else came up & stared deep in his eyes there found a memory of horses galloping faster the wheels dyed red behind them the poles had resolved a feast day but the jew locked in his closet screamed into his vest a scream that had no sound therefore spiralled around the world so wild that it shattered stones . . . ["Dos Geshray (The Scream)"] _Khurbn_ risks the pornographic or voyeuristic out of a need to exorcise the images that hold us captive if not spoken or revisualized, marking an end to Rothenberg's own past refusal to depict the Extermination Process. [16] In contrast, Charles Reznikoff's last book, _Holocaust_ (1975), which is based on documentary evidence about the Lagers gathered from the records of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, presents a series of details, fragments cut away from the horror. Reznikoff offers no explanation of the depicted events and he provides neither explicit emotional nor moral response to them: he leaves us alone with our reactions, making us to find our own screams or to articulate our own silences. Seemingly flat, documentary, particularized, _Holocaust_--like all of Reznikoff's work since his first book in 1917--is a mosaic of salient incidents: A visitor once stopped one of the children: a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay. He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare, and his coat of good quality had no buttons. The visitor asked him for his name and then what his parents were doing; and he said, "Father is working in the office and Mother is playing the piano." Then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his parents soon-- they always told the children they would be leaving soon to rejoin their parents-- and the visitor answered, "Certainly. In a day or two." At that the child took out of his pocket half an army biscuit he had been given in camp and said, "I am keeping this half for Mother;" and then the child who had been so gay burst into tears. This detail from Reznikoff brings forward, in an ineffably shattering way, the atmosphere of willed forgetting of the 1950s, or now. We blithely go about our business--busy, gay, distracted; until that blistering moment of consciousness that shatters all hopes when we recognize that we are orphaned, have lost our parents--in the sense of our foundations, our bearing in the world; until, that is, a detail jolts the memory, when we feel, as in the fragments in our pocket, what we have held back out of denial. [17] Denial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability. Reznikoff and Rothenberg initiate this process, but no more than other poets, ranges of poetry, that register this denial in the process of seeking forms that find ways out of the "Western Box". [18] In contrast to--or is it an extension of?--Adorno's famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the Second War. ------------------------------------------------------------ Sources for Poems Cited John Ashbery, _Rivers and Mountains_. Ecco Press, New York, 1966. Clark Coolidge, _Melencolia_. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1987. Robert Creeley, "A Fragment," in _The Charm_ (early poems) and "Hart Crane," the opening poem of _For Love_, both in _The Collected Poems_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. "Ever since Hitler . . ." in _Windows_. New York: New Directions, 1990. Ray DiPalma, _RAIK_. New York: Roof Books, 1989. "Five Poems from _Chan_" in "43 Poets (1984)," ed. Charles Bernstein, in _boundary 2_, XIV: 1-2 (1986). Larry Eigner, frontpiece poem in _another time in fragments_. London: Fulcrum, 1967. Ben Friedlander, _Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938_. Privately printed, 1988. Allen Ginsberg, _Howl_. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956. Ted Greenwald, _Common Sense_. Kensington, California: L Publications, 1978. Robert Grenier, _Phantom Anthems_: Oakland: O Books, 1986. Susan Howe, _ The Liberties_ (1980), in _The Europe of Trusts_ (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990). Michael Lally, _Rocky Dies Yellow_. Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1975. David Melnick, _Pcoet_. San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975. Charles Olson, _The Collected Poems_, ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Bob Perelman, _The First World_. The Figures, 1986. Nick Piombino, "in the center of movement, a debate" and "A Simple Invocation Would Be," in _Poems_. Sun & Moon Press, 1988; "9/20/88" in "Postmodern Poetries", ed. Jerome McGann, in _Verse_, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1990). Charles Reznikoff, "Children", in _Holocaust_. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975. Jerome Rothenberg, _Khurbn & Other Poems_. New Directions, 1989. Jack Spicer, _Language_ (1964) in _The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_, ed. Robin Blaser. Black Sparrow, 1975. Rosmarie Waldrop, _The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body_. Columbia, Missouri: Open Places, 1978. Barrett Watten, _Under Erasure_, excerpted in "Postmodern Poetries" in _Verse_.