[Andrew Mandelbaum]

His poetry does not reflect violence in the world. It is cropped. It reflects only the violent.

Celan responded to Adorno: ‘No poem after Auschwitz: what sort of an idea of a “Poem” is being implied here? The arrogance of the man who hypothetically and speculatively has the audacity to observe or report on Auschwitz from the perspective of nightingales and song thrushes.’ It is interesting that *Adorno never cornered the barbarism of philosophy into quiet the same pause.


Siedel merely exchanges the perspective of the thrush for the jackass. His isn't Barbaric fire as much Empiric rot.

It is the instrumentality of violence that says what poetry does is very little. Of course it would say that. I imagine writers who have died for it like Mandelstam would be surprised to find out how sleight a thing they held after all. But I can't speak for the dead. All I can do is compare the fruit of the trees. And maybe the trees themselves.

His poetry isn't saying anything about friendship and complicity, at least not in the way expressed here. You are saying that for him. At least that is how it seems to me. I have seen the Jew as marshmallow poem. We are way apart here. I have been working all week through some various commentaries and dialogues about the Armenian genocide. I didn't recognize any use or relevance for Mr. Delicious. The universal complicity was palpable in the distance our words and questions were drowning in. But I don't see anything courageous in Siedel's laying down in it and rolling about.

*(I am aware that Adorno revised the original claim, which was more complex.)