celan
 

For me, Celan's Meridian speech is one of the most important pieces of prose I have come across. It was always sad how little prose he left. There is this new work coming out (translated by Joris) that some might find useful.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...eral_marketing

Andrew,

I don’t know Celan’s work, and I don’t claim to understand everything at the link, but it seems to signal a pretty strong idea of inspiration. I remember that Yeats was interested in automatic writing, or something like it, and parts of these notes sound almost like the poet as medium. Could you unpack a little what you find most compelling in these notes, in Celan’s ideas on poetry? Would you? I ask from real interest.

Hey Michael.
I put these up just as a breadcrumb for anyone into Celan who might not have known they were out there. They were new to me and I was glad to find them. I wouldn't start with these notes in introducing anyone to Celan for the reasons you mention. Celan's Meridian speech, a speech that says so much about what he hoped for in poetry (if the full weight of the word hope isn't an intrusion into his being at the time) makes much of a date that, by coincidence, is relevant to us today. January 20th.
The speech, which I am most familiar with through Felstiner's translation and the book of drafts by Joris, is a poem itself with many of the key terms dropping stones in multiple wells at once.

Whichever stone you lift –
you lay bare
those who need the protection of stones:
naked,
now they renew their entwinement.

Whichever tree you fell –
you frame
the bedstead where
souls are stayed once again,
as if this aeon too
did not
tremble.

Whichever word you speak –
you owe to
destruction.

And of course what a stone January 20th would be for Celan, whose family was murdered by the Reich in a "plan" articulated so clearly on that day in 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. And what a well as the speech was given in Germany just 15 years after "that which happened" and would be a room full of so many intimate with the workings of the Reich, many who would have been complicit in that way that only good citizens can be such dates.

All that just to say that the speech is both a description of poetry as counterword and is a counterword itself at the same time. I agree with this essay here that the speech can be interpreted as a manifest of a complete theory of art. But I realize I am dragging this off into something you didn't ask.

As for the notes I guess for me I found this bit thought provoking:

Poems are paradoxes. Paradoxical is the rhyme, that gathers sense and sense, sense and countersense: a chance meeting at a place in language-time nobody can foresee, it lets this word coincide with that other one — for how long? For a limited time: the poet, who wants to stay true to that principle of freedom that announces itself in the rhyme, now has to turn his back to the rhyme. Away from the border — or across it, off into the borderless!


I write, if not in meter, a fair amount of rhyme. I often feel uncomfortable with that, sensing some times that rhyme can be a "homage to some recoverable monarchy, to some yesterday worth preserving" if one is not terribly careful. In his speech Celan refers to Lucille, a character from Buchner's play Danton's Death and her cry from the scaffold "Long Live The King" This cry of a kept oath to another majesty, which is neither the regime behind or the one present, is what rhyme is poems must be. We can return to the dead zone, dig through the wreckage and maybe we can retrieve rhyme but not as citizens, only as scavengers never forgetful of our newly returned animal-ness with a sworn enmity to crown and blade. Is that possible with rhyme? I dunno.

Thank you for your thoughts and for the link, Andrew.

I now see that Celan goes in a more sophisticated direction than I supposed, and different from Yeats. I think I follow the argument passably well through the parts touching on Heidegger, with whom I have some familiarity. For the rest, you’ve given me good leads to pursue (which I will likely misread and construe to my own purposes -- but I suspect that, as creative writers, that is what we are supposed to do.)

I love this:

Whichever stone you lift –
you lay bare
those who need the protection of stones:
naked,
now they renew their entwinement.

Hey Michael.
Yeah, that article was just to give a source for the quote but its a good read. I looked for a pdf of the Meridian online but no go. As for misreading, it is my favorite way to fly so I am right behind you.

Andrew, I found a link to a pdf version of the Meridian speech in the blog post here.

I don't know Celan's work well, but I read the Poetry link with interest, and I'm also enjoying the discussion here. I like his notion that rhyme is paradoxical in terms of freedom--this seems to me to be truer and more profound than the usual dismissal of rhyme (and metre, or any type of form) as being unfree.

One more thing on this, speaking of Heidegger and his heirs: it occurred to me that several of those notes make sense in the context of Gadamer’s writings on the ‘hermeneutics’ of art, or the way art conveys meaning. In fact, apparently Gadamer has written on Celan. I think Gadamer would also see poetry as “an event”: not only a confrontation/conjunction of words, but also of worlds. Here’s a quote from Wiki on Gadamer that is applicable to poetry, and very Lit Crit-esque, but IMHO obviously true, with wide implications:

[T]he interpretation of a given text will change depending on the questions the interpreter asks of the text. The "meaning" emerges not as an object that lies in the text or in the interpreter, but rather an event that results from the interaction of the two.

I have only dabbled in Gadamer, and that, years ago, but you might find his work interesting, Andrew, if you haven’t already read it. It seems like Celan and Gadamer are simpaticos.

Yes. And it wasn't just some riff on rhyme. It seems related the discomfort he felt with mitigating the collapse with music. It led him later to no longer allow his famous poem on the camps Todesfugue from being placed in anthologies. He saw it as Festiner said in his biography as helping students to transcend and surmount was could not be, what should not be surmounted. His follow up to the poem is Stretto, a term related to the fugue.

A bit of both below (trans. Felstiner and Unknown respectively:

From Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
……..he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air
……..where you won’t lie too cramped

He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing.



From Stretto

*

Taken off into
the terrain
with the unmistakable trace:

Grass, written asunder. The stones, white
with the grassblades' shadows:
Read no more—look!
Look no more—go!

Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are—
are at home. Slowly a wheel
rolls out of itself, the spokes
clamber,
clamber on the blackened field, night
needs no stars, nowhere
are you asked after.

*

Nowhere


are you asked after—

The place where they lay, it has
a name—it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.

Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. Not one
awoke,
sleep
came over them.

I have seen the Gadamer signposts with their arrows on the trees while following my breadcrumbs home. I have never had the time to turn down them yet. But oneday... There is so much writing on Celan it can be overwhelming. Mostly I am in it for my own thing, like all of us I guess. I have written poems I would imagine he would want to punch in the face for reasons in this thread. I am trying to find a trajectory out of what I believe to be true in his work into what I believe is true (if in another world compared to him in craft/excellence).

I think I understand, Andrew.

Once in the woods, I'm like one of those pigs the farmers use in France: bread crumbs and signs be damned, I'm after my truffles...