Acting as the editor of this issue has been a great opportunity for
me — a sort of speed-dating. I don’t read very much contemporary
American poetry, so it’s given me a chance to get reacquainted a
little. I stopped reading it at least 10 years ago, on account of ceasing
to understand (and beginning to be irked by) its endless self-
celebration. In America, the named, endowed, and variously lauded
poets are allowed to pretend that the society values their work —
to pretend, that is, that they are the poets of the society, as though
society involved poetry, and as though they paid their bills with
their royalties and performance fees. Well, the poet who can live on
the proceeds of her poetry is rare, to say the least. We don’t pay poets
to write (and read aloud) poetry in America; we pay poets to teach
poetry. I suppose we are being hopeful? That is, maybe the next
generation of poets (the ones we are teaching now, say) will break
through and actually get to be poets, rather than Teachers of future
poets? And maybe when that happens, the whole American poetry
world will no longer need to be subsidized by the increasingly
pathetic and self-righteous American education industry? It’s
amazing that the allotting of these subsidies still conjures —
somehow — an aura of prestige for the books and the awards they
allow for; indeed, this aura is surely what drives a good deal of the
few sales that are made. Meanwhile, poets in the poetry world are
regularly making pronouncements about one another that completely
contradict the judgment of society (a judgment pronounced in
actions rather than words, i.e., a more severe judgment). A quite
large percentage of the folks in the society have never read or heard
contemporary poetry, and basically cannot conceive of its existence
— while those who know it exists stay away from it in super-mega-
droves. I’d say most poetry readings have a nonattendance rate of
one hundred percent of the society, more or less.
Ironically, American poems exist quite apart from American
society — stranded in poetry world — while the poet herself,
working as a Teacher of future poets rather than a poet, is regularly
mired in the contrived social situations a University will allow for
(fewer and fewer by the minute). She must become an institutionally
purposed social creature and be a poet at the same time. This seems
backward to me; poets should not have to work a job in which they
are constantly thrust into governance of contrived (commercial)
social situations, while poems should be absorbed into the society
they’re open to being overheard by. Sure, if one is a poet, one
inevitably enjoys, for a while, being a Teacher of poetry . . . with its
captive audience of the few, the grave, the similarly inclined. One
might even be able to enjoy it indefinitely . . . but that isn’t really
the point. There are plenty of ways to enjoy the situation if you’ve
been lucky enough (or more likely possessed of enough cultural
capital and/or explicit connections) to get into it. One might even
figure out a way to be hopeful that the next generation of poets will
actually be poets rather than Teachers of future poets. The only
drawback I see to having this kind of hope in place is that it rather
carelessly and arrogantly overlooks a gigantic problem — gigantic,
that is, for anyone who actually cares about poetry and America.
Fact: Americans don’t care about poetry, especially contemporary
American poetry. Contemporary American poetry, to be sure, is
not a part of American life. There is a system in place that allows it
to be published and then forced on students in the process of their
“education,” but that’s all, that system. Just imagine if poetry was
removed from that system — if the University no longer subsidized
and heaped prestige on the unread poetry books, and no longer
sold how to sessions, no longer formed a community of how to. What
might contemporary American poetry become if it was no longer
subsidized by our Universities? All the Teachers of future poets
would have to get other jobs, jobs in which it would be difficult,
if not impossible, to continue to call themselves poets. The society
itself would have to determine who the poets are (if any) and what
place poetry might have in the life of Americans (if any).
Many contemporary American poets implicitly blame the
public, I think, for the lack of interest in contemporary American
poetry. Perhaps that isn’t a conscious thing, but how else could
the public’s rather clear and severe assessment be so quickly and
easily dismissed as a more or less irrelevant point. There are surely
many things to blame the American public for, but not caring about
contemporary American poetry might just not be one of them. The bar,
in contemporary American poetry, is routinely set so low (subsidy
being like steroids) that its “feats” tend to be rather hard to discern
for the laity (blurbs are commonly needed to bring them out of
concealment). With so many great and important contemporary
American poets, I don’t know that I can blame the public very much
for not buying the whole situation. At the same time, my work as
a Teacher of poetry has me reading poetry — contemporary and
ancient, amateur and laureated — fairly often. Then there is my
personal relationship with poetry, which stretches from college,
where I first encountered a poem, to today. As I became possessed
by the effort, the need, to find (or allow for) poetic speech, it was
implicitly understood that another need went along with it: a
desperate need to find and get to know great poems. This personal
history of encounters is a series of events occurring inside and
outside — mostly outside — of my job, i.e., all of the poems I’ve
had significant interaction with, particularly the ones I’ve been
compelled to reread, and then to read again, and again and again
— trying always to get closer to them, to hear them better, trying to
allow them to have me — to expose me, my fate. I balk a little at the
question — what poems do you love most? I always rephrase the
question as: What poems are in the constellation of poems that has
you? That’s a much better way to ask the question. I’d feel comfortable
listing the foods that I “love,” but my relationship to poems is not
nearly so simple. Love and pleasure are involved, somehow, but
there is so much more to it. These poems, after all, have me because
they work as keys to accessing a sense of my own fate, which is
the fate of a human being. That which allows access to the fate of a
human being is not well described by the word “lovable.” No, these
poems, in the process of our relationship, have held, hurt, indicted,
pleasured, shaken, assured, deceived, heartened, and destroyed
me. They’ve changed — and continue to change — how and who I
imagine myself to be.
This is not to say that they have any particular lessons to
impart. “Poetry is of no particular importance,” as Allen Grossman
wrote. My undergrads inevitably mishear this quote, which does
not say that poetry is unimportant. Poetry, Grossman is suggesting,
is tremendously important — it just has no particular importance.
You don’t write a poem to achieve this, that, or the other thing — or
if you do, God bless you. This is not to say that a poem can’t have a
particular importance; it is rather to say that a poem can’t intend to
have a particular importance. The poetic cannot endure the fingers
of the propagandist or any other purpose-driven soul. I’ve come to
think of a poem as a sort of person — a potentially respect-worthy
other. Of such an other, one does not ask: “What does she mean?” or
“What has she been created to accomplish?” The question is absurd
when applied to a person. It should be understood as equally absurd
when applied to a poem. It can only be asked of a poem if poems
are mistaken for social actions, i.e., someone’s effort to impart
something to someone else (often by secret code!). Poems are sites
of a double loneliness — one aloneness in the presence of an other
aloneness. Poems are secret persons — persons conceived of by one
who is alone, and then met with by one (a reader) who is alone.
As such, poems are never heard — they are overheard. A poem’s
being overheard allows each of the persons met in the encounter to
remain alone (nonsocial, pure). If this overhearing has no particular
use, though, wherein lies its appeal?
Its appeal lies in the opportunity it offers — the opportunity
to be in the presence of an other’s aloneness in its narrowest straits,
pressed upon for a believable recapitulation of her life, i.e., where
she has come from, toward what has she has gone, who she has
purported to be along the way, and in which direction is she
headed now. The reader of a poem is therefore made witness to
an impossible other — impossible because she exists (speaks) as a
completed system — something a living person can never be or do.
Poems are persons who have given up the right to be alive (i.e., to
change what they have to say) in exchange for the potential to live
longer than their source bodies, and to speak with the insight of
one who has seen the whole of a human story. This wholeness is
imaginary, but oddly modeled on the wholeness that reality holds
in store for every living person. The poet is driven, in the course of
events, to try to imagine that oncoming wholeness. The poem, as
a kind of person, is not something a reader uses — it’s someone the
reader might be with, spend time in the presence of, get to know.
A poem is what Allen Grossman called “eidetic exemplification,”
eidos meaning form, type, essence, species. Thus, he’s saying that
poems exemplify potential human countenances: forms (shape,
outline) of presence in the present. Poems are (or at least they
should be) literally legendary persons. One spends time with them,
listens to how and what they have to say, not to deduce some hidden
moral, but to learn of the presence of one kind of human being
(one countenance). This perhaps makes it sound like the poet has
an easy task: just be a person, with language! Just arrange some
language so that when someone reads it, it exposes personhood
in a profound way. Well, if you’ve never tried it, it’s actually very
difficult. As Dickinson famously wrote: “None may teach it — Any
— / ’Tis the Seal Despair.”
I immediately feel compelled to apologize for Ms. Dickinson’s
sentiment — and this is no doubt due to my having been involved
in how to sessions for many years. (Keep those evals up!) The real
trouble, though, is that the workshops I teach are full of mainly
lovely young people making a noble kind of effort, a kind of effort,
moreover, that’s extremely sensitive to ridicule and praise. The
workshop must therefore be compassionate, as it consists of human
beings in the presence of one another. Thus, this fundamentally
social training ground — “Creative Writing” in academia — has
become the foundation of American poetry. Our poets come up
through it, and as they do so, their socialization aligns them and
their poetry with one another, rather than with the society they live
in. The latter expectation — to be a great poet and be known by
the society you live in — can only be offered as a joke. Take Lucille
Clifton, for instance. Almost every American I meet (99.6%, say)
outside of the poetry world is completely unaware of her poems.
A great many within poetry world are unaware. If America cared
about poetry, Lucille Clifton would be a household name. America
would be ennobled to be in the presence of — and familiar with
— those poems. But it isn’t. It sure isn’t. Even so, tonight there will
be another celebration and lauding of so-and-so at 7:30 p. m. in
Thompson Hall room 235 (cookies and soft drinks provided), and
America does not give even one fuck.
America gives a fuck about other things. Its military heroes, for
instance, heroing all over the globe in “our” various ongoing wars
— some with enemies we’re allowed to know about and some that
are classified information. This is for our own safety, I’m sure, and
our old friend national security. America gives a fuck about military
technology, too, considering the money “we” pour into it. It is a
wonderful and blessed thing, “our” ever more high-tech drone and
airstrikes, the forever increasing surveillance, and the weaponry
that is more devastating every year (and again, largely classified).
America was on my mind because I was reading poems from all
over America and because I happened to be reading the Aeschylus
play, Seven against Thebes, which is about war. In the play, Thebes
is a city besieged — a city under attack at all seven of its gates. The
Chorus in the play is a Chorus of Theban women, who are trapped
within Thebes’s walls, surrounded by a hostile foreign army intent
on taking it (and them). They express their fear. Eteokles, large-and-in-
charge, with THEBES ball-cap on, tells them to shut up their crying
and pray, as women are supposed to do. The women reply:
I will try to do my part,
to shape my prayer as these formulas require,
but the pulse of fear will not be lullabyed;
and in the neighboring regions of my heart
anxieties ignite, terrors catch fire,
and agitations, fanned by the blown sound
of the circling hosts outside,
smolder and burn. I quake,
like the mild paralyzed dove who, from her perch,
huddled with unfledged nestlings all around,
eyes the thick snake.
The women are being terrorized, I dare say — they are
“paralyzed” by “a pulse of fear.” Terror is a pretty old experience,
it seems. A city, massively assaulted, its terrified women waiting
inside to see what their fate will be. It is important to understand
that there is nothing they can do. They will not decide their own
fate; their fate, much like our own, will be decided by a war they are
not a part of. To combat the “thick snake,” what does the mild dove
have? “Eyes.” This use of eyes as a verb reminds me of the Celan
term, “Äugigem,” which is often translated as “eyenesses.” In the
Nazi camps, prisoners were reduced to being nothing more than
eyes, nothing more than a capacity to see what was being done to
them. Eyes, like ears, are sites of passive attention. Why does the
dove eye the thick snake, when such eyeing does nothing to help
her? Why continue to do it? What is the alternative — not looking at
where one is? Abandoning reality? No, the dove is in a situation she
cannot change and there is no alternative but to continue eyeing, in
terror, the oncoming threat. To experience such terror — to continue
to put your eyes on what is coming for you — is, by all accounts,
maddening. You can feel this madness rising up into the play when
the women begin to imagine the oncoming disaster . . . and then to
crave it, if only to end its terrifying approach:
And by the rule of strife,
the pale, unfamilied girl become the whore
and trophy of her captor, forced to spread
for the sweating soldier, triumphant, hate-inflamed.
Perhaps a dark deliverance may occur
in that foul bridal, the untamed
violence of that battle-grounded bed.
And there may come to her
a species of relief,
an end of tidal groans, weeping, and grief.
Disaster, that “foul bridal,” might be a “dark deliverance,” and
“a species of relief.” This says something about the depth of their
terror. The women seem to be reaching the end their capacity to
dwell on what they face. And what is the result, finally, of all their
speech? Does it change their predicament even one iota? No it does
not. Does it teach us what to do, should we find ourselves in this
predicament? It does not. Does their speech, their insight into war,
change the awareness of Eteokles or anyone else in Thebes? Not
really, no. The women’s speech is of no use at all. It does not help
the military effort and it does not change the horrific reality the
women may be facing. So why do they continue to speak? Unlike us
Americans, the Chorus of Theban women in Seven against Thebes are
actually in a perilous situation, deserving of anxiety their city is being
strangled. They themselves are quite powerless, and there’s no way
out. They know the situation can only be resolved by the will of
the gods, i.e., chance. When there is nothing you can do to impact
on a situation’s resolution, you may still speak of that situation and
of those who are trying to resolve it. Indeed, you might be driven
to speak of it, precisely because there’s nothing else you can do.
This seems to be the position the Theban women are in. Speaking
truthfully of their current situation, though it is of no “use,” is still
a power they possess.
What Eteokles’ bitter dialogue with the Theban women draws
attention to is the State’s need to muzzle its populace during a war.
The danger, Eteokles suggests, is that the speech of the Theban
women might cause panic to spread, undermining the morale of the
war effort. This is condescending and bogus reasoning, however,
when applied to the speech of the Theban women. Their subject
matter is disaster, true, but this is not their own choice — it has
been forced on them by an enemy’s assault and by the real oblivion
it loudly, closely, and on every side threatens. Thebes seems “a city
doomed to armored rape,” “a death trap, fatally self-ensnared.” The
women are not imagining things, nor are they inciting the disaster.
The women are simply describing how the threat of disaster feels
for a human being who is trapped in its process. Their speech dwells
with the disaster, withstanding what it is, lighting what its potentials
are. This, of course, is what truly irritates Eteokles, this bringing of
light — and human presence — to the space of action, war. But the
speech of the women, however useless it may be in relation to the
prosecution of the war, is not panicked; they are experienced, aware,
and thoughtful. It is Eteokles who evidences panic. He calls the
women “animals, repulsive beasts,” and accuses them of “sacking
the city from the inside,” and of “enslaving” the city. He has become
hysterical, I think, because the women have had the audacity to bring
forth useless speech (making themselves useless speakers) in a time
of crisis. “Whatever is to come, your noise can’t stop it,” he tells the
women. In his view, only action should be allowed to exist in a
time of crisis. Useful speech is of course welcome — it is a species
of action — but useless speech? Useless speech is “the original
crime: art, rime,” to quote from Berryman's “Dream Song 26”. And
the silencing of useless speech is the cause to which Eteokles is most
devoted. Useless speech is a danger to him because useless speech
is capable of telling the truth. In his case, it’s the truth about war, in
particular, that he doesn’t want to hear, which is understandable,
considering he has already committed himself to fighting a war in
which he is fated to kill and be killed by his own brother.
But if the speech of the women, which lights the truth of war for
the reader/audience, is not useful to anyone in Thebes, as Eteokles
suggests and as the women themselves surely understand, then
again I ask: how is it preferable to their silence? The women claim,
in the first place, that their speech is unintentional. They are driven to
speak by their words’ true author: “the pulse of fear” within. It’s “the
pulse of fear” that drives the women into a need to search out the
reality that is closing in on them. The women are alive — a racing
pulse, life, has them in its grasp. When their reality is terrifying, they
have the State lullabies to turn to, Hail Mary Mother of God, but these
women will not say their prayers. They refuse to be lullabyed; the
war is too close, and the fear too great to pay attention to anything
other than what is unfolding before them. Celan suggests that
poetic attention can be like this, akin to the fear-driven attention of
the hare. The hare can only continue to exist so long as it is attentive.
The attention of the Theban women is indeed hare-like, riveted
by fear to the present. Attention is understandable. But why allow
useless speech to develop from that frightened attention?
Seven against Thebes is the acting out of proximity to war, which
is proximity to disaster (rape, slavery, torture, death). The speech of
the women is an artful (voiced) representation of a terrifying (and
voiceless) experience, the experience of real women in proximity
to real wars. which have carried on from the time of Aeschylus to
today (for instance, “we” prosecute wars today in places like Kenya,
Somalia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, etc. . .).
By allowing the pulse of fear — the pulse of fear in women, no less
— to pursue useless speech concerning the horrors of war in the
midst of a war . . . Aeschylus makes quite a statement, I think. He was
about 56 or so when he put on this play, and he knew war, having
fought, in his thirties, in the Battle of Marathon, an important Greek
victory, where his brother died a hero. He went back to war again in
his forties. By the time he was writing Seven against Thebes, Greece
had been plagued by war for decades, and would soon be off to war
again within a year or so. Aeschylus, then, was a soldier, a decorated
veteran, dreaming up the useless speech of helpless women trapped
in a warzone. We learn of the specific incidents of the war, the spurs
to the plot, from various men, because it’s obviously men who have
been at the battles. The men do not imagine nearly so much as they
report. They speak with useful speech — argument, command,
ordering of events, and so on — the speech of action, history. The plot,
seen as the sequence of incidents the men report, would be almost
completely hollow, however, without the anxious vocal presence of
the terrified women. Their anxiety, i.e., their presence, brings the plot
to life by putting something — primarily themselves! — at stake.
Indeed, it’s the speech of the women that brings us closest to all
that is really at stake in war: the unknown number of actually raped
and murdered and enslaved women, actually slaughtered men
and animals, actually torched houses . . . concealed beneath the
useful and “informative” sentences of the historian. History cannot
accommodate reality; history dramatically simplifies reality by way
of excluding almost everything, and by way of exaggeration.
ø
Celan suggested that a poem is something like a message in
a bottle. The unspoken part of this metaphor is the need to send a
message in a bottle. What could cause it? Isolation? Imprisonment?
Loneliness? Whimsy? Existing? The message in a bottle, if it is an
attempt to communicate with the stranger who is fated to find it, is
absurd . . . The message writer doesn’t know anything at all about
who will find it (or where, or when), so the “message” can’t really be
to its finder. The message in actuality is wholly self-concerned and
self-explanatory. The message writer writes the message to herself,
and more importantly, of herself, the location of her stranded
presence. To plug the bottle is to call it a poem and drop it into the
sea. But here is where it gets strange; Celan says that the poem’s
author “goes with it,” goes toward an other (a stranger, a reader)
she cannot foresee. The author of the poem, therefore, is not its
sender; the author of the poem is the speaker of the speech in the
bottle, the mortal soul conjured by the unfolding of that particular
act of language (the words on the page), which she has allowed to
stand for her own presence. Celan says the poem, not the poet, speaks,
and “it speaks only on its own, its very own behalf.” He points
out, moreover: “Reality is not simply there, it must be searched
and won.” A poem is a searching-and-winning of the presence of
a human being in reality, a mortal soul who — and this is really
the most important point of all — is not there to begin with, but must
be conjured by a language act. The poet, for Celan, is more like a
midwife, delivering soul (author) after soul (author), each of which
is dropped into the sea and “en route.” With what hopes? “With the
— surely not always strong — hope,” he says, “that it may somehow
wash up somewhere, perhaps a shoreline of the heart.” The hope is
that the poem, a birthed soul, will move: “Toward something open,
inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.
Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.” By “such realities,” I
think he means you and I.
It is important to understand that useless speech is not
necessarily valueless. Indeed, the value of a poem is rooted in the
power of the disruption at its source. The occasion generative
of poetic speech causes a faltering of the autonomy of the will,
generating a new sort of attention that makes language invulnerable
to use. This is the arising of the midwife presence of the poet (Celan
calls this midwife presence “a human being”), the presence that
listens for who is there. The truth has us — we do not have the truth.
With useless speech it’s possible to allow the truth to have us. A late
untitled Celan poem:
The trumpet part
deep in the glowing
lacuna
at lamp height
in the time hole:
listen your way in
with your mouth.
Listen your way in . . . to the trumpet part . . . with your mouth.
There are two ways in to a trumpet; one is where the sound comes
out (for the listener), the other is where breath is put in (by the
musician). The speaker’s command — “listen your way in” — is
directed at both sides simultaneously, i.e., himself and the reader.
The command is to act, but this action — listening in — is a curious
one. The outcome of listening in — i.e., being silent so as to eavesdrop —
is dependent on everything but the performer of the act. It’s an act of
submission, really, and its unpopularity has mainly to do with that.
Listening is something we are happy to do, but we don’t usually like
to listen in. The difference is choice. To choose, that is, what to listen
to is a normal part of the process of our general obliviousness to
where we are, our being on the way to somewhere else. When one
chooses what to listen to, one is listening out. To listen in, on the other
hand, requires a decisive abandonment of the power to choose
what one listens to. Without the choice of what to listen to, one has
only two things to listen to: what is and what was.
To listen in, then, is a double eavesdropping, i.e., eavesdropping
on the present (the exterior, ongoing, infinite) and the past (the
amygdala, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal
cortex) at the same time. To listen in to the past in this way —
searching for the story of oneself — is not usually something that is
possible. It only becomes possible when the poet is faced with the
limitations of the autonomy of the will . . . and makes the decision
to abandon the autonomy of the will. Celan spoke — in his Bremen
Address — of “the efforts of younger poets who, unsheltered even
by the traditional tent of the sky, exposed in an unsuspected,
terrifying way, carry their existence into language, racked by reality
and in search of it.” This, I think, is precisely what the chorus of
Theban women do: they carry their existence into language, racked
by reality and in search of it.
American poets, in 2020, speak from the inverse situation;
however highly touted “the enemy” may be, they are not, in fact,
at our walls — they are far far away in the actual “actions” taking
place on the many borders of our solitary empire. Our being
embattled is an illusion that has been carefully developed; the truth
is something quite different: we’re a very wealthy and safe country,
safe from all but ourselves and our illusions. We have besieged
ourselves, you might say, with illusions designed to conceal and/
or normalize what we’re doing to the rest of the world. The reality
the Theban women are racked by is quite obvious — the terror of
an invading army literally at the gates. American poets must utter,
in 2020, from the inverse position, from deep within the privileged,
safe, oblivious, and proudly diseased core of a self-concealing
empire — yes, from AMERICA, a great empire’s comfortably
delusional homeland penetralia. A challenge, to be sure, even if it’s
not possessed of anything like the (voiced, artful) experience of the
Theban women. Being racked by a reality so explicit and dire rivets
the women’s attention to the unfolding of the present, which means
that they know at least where and how to begin to be “in search of
it.” They know already, that is, what it is they’re surrounded by, and
what it means for them if the gates are overrun. American poets are
not so lucky; their search for what has racked them often hasn’t the
faintest idea of where and how to begin.
The more I think about the message in a bottle metaphor, the
more ingenious it seems to get. The racked presence of Aeschylus,
or, if you prefer, the racked presence of the Theban women he was
able to conjure, was searched and won, bottled and dropped. This
bottle actually washed up somehow on a shore of the heart, my
heart. To open it and read the message is no help to me, or to my
situation, just as the speech of the women is no help to them (I will
not be their rescuer, 2,500 years later). But I was elated when I found it
and opened it. It was possessed of a very rare thing: the presence of
a human being. Celan closes a letter he wrote to Hans Bender: “We
live under dark skies and — there are few human beings. Hence, I
assume, so few poems. The hopes I have left are small. I try to hold
on to what remains.” In America, we’ve got in place a system that
artificially generates poets and poems, both of which are rendered
largely meaningless by their confinement to academia and the
society’s complete lack of interest. Perhaps it’s true that almost all
the poems written today — poems generously subsidized by our
University system — go pretty much immediately into the oblivion
of the sea bottom, meeting with no one and having little to no
impact on the society as it moves forward in time. It’s a strange and
embarrassing situation, but I think there is a golden lining of a sort.
To understand this golden lining, one has to imagine walking along
the beach somewhere . . . and actually finding a bottle with a message
in it. It would almost not matter what the message was! Who could
pretend to be nonplussed? Who could pretend not to be amazed
and weirdly heartened somehow by the completion of the bottle’s
journey? The odds that a specific poem and a specific reader would
ever meet — it’s staggering. To find one is inevitably to pay “homage
to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human
beings,” to quote Celan one last time. To find one is to have someone
to respond to, to dwell with, and to measure yourself by. The idea
that someone was actually there, someone carried her existence into
language and set that language free, dropped it hopefully into
the sea, the violent space of the unsubsided. And why? Just to —
conceivably — have been there. Just to meet me.
Joe Wenderoth
April 14, 2020
Woodland, CA
Sources
Aeschylus. Seven against Thebes. Translated by Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon.
Oxford University Press, 1973.
Celan, Paul. Paul Celan: Collected Prose. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. The Sheep
Meadow Press, 1986.
Celan, Paul. “The trumpet part.” Poems of Paul Celan: Revised & Expanded. Translated
by Michael Hamburger. Persea Books, 2002.
