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.