Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry

How, in our recent past and contemporary moment, might a groundbreaking body of poetry—radically innovative in form and content, with great international resonance, and widely perceived to have “gone for broke,” as Theodor W. Adorno famously put it—find its poetics taken up by poets and others artists of different languages, cultures, and sociopolitical situations? This seminar will consider a telling episode in the history of that emphatically comparatist question.  We’ll spend approximately the first half of the semester reading the German-language poet Paul Celan (1920-1970); in the latter part of the semester, we’ll read poetry from across the Americas that responds to Celan’s work, or that has been received in dialogue with it.  More of our American-poetry readings will come from the United States than any other individual country in the hemisphere; but we’ll also be reading a good deal of poetry from the Caribbean (French, Spanish, and English-speaking); from México, Argentina, and Chile; and from both English-speaking Canada and Québec.

Often deemed one of Europe’s greatest, and most influentially experimental post-World War II poets, Celan is probably also the figure most often placed, together with Adorno, at the center of the “Poetry after Auschwitz” debates. Reading primarily in English translation (and sometimes looking too at French and Spanish translations), we’ll read extensively in Celan’s poetry, poetics and criticism. We’ll always keep the original German texts before us, and we’ll regularly refer to them in relation to our translated versions, to understand Celan’s prosody in ways that will be comprehensible and helpful even for those who don’t read German.  (Ability to read in German—and/or Spanish and French—will of course prove beneficial, but is by no means required for the seminar.) As we read Celan, we’ll consider some of the poetry he regarded as foundational for his writing; and we’ll read poet-contemporaries with whom he engaged.  We’ll also undertake readings in some of the aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophy that inform Celan’s work, or that have been significant for its reception history. Among the central issues taken up will be the notoriously “difficult,” “hermetic,” “elliptical,” “obscure” character of Celan’s poetry.  We’ll try to evaluate Celan’s claim that the difficulty stems largely from the poetry’s materials themselves, and that his perceived radical experimentalism was simply what was required to bring the materials into form and expression.

The seminar will also take up the social and personal history often retold in accounts of Celan and his art. Born and raised in Romania (but with German as a foundational language if not a mother-tongue), interned in a Romanian-fascist labor camp during the war, Celan—having lost his parents to the Holocaust—lived most of his postwar life in France. Celan composed almost all his major poetry in German; he was thus continually vexed by the problem of how to make poems in the very language in which the National Socialist genocide had just been carried out. His wrestling with that and related dilemmas—and his development in consequence of unprecedented formal means of artistic expression that could begin to do justice to his given materials (materials derived from “what has happened,” Celan’s term for the Holocaust)—led to the creation of a remarkable body of poetry that broke new ground while holding onto, and indeed intensifying, much in the history of lyric (albeit via a severely attenuated, though notably virtuosic, musicality).

Shifting hemispheres, we’ll turn to consider how poetry and poetics in the Americas, starting in the mid-1950s, attempts to understand what Celan is doing in poetry and what he is asking postwar poetry to attempt. Among our queries—which we’ll see various poets likewise raising—will be the degree to which Celan proves translatable (in the literal sense of the translation of his poems into English, French, Spanish; and in the metaphorical sense of attempted translations of his poetry’s poetics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics to contexts that will involve, among other things, the concerns and claims of the working class,  anti-colonial, civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements).  We’ll observe this questioning perhaps above all in poets’ processes of thinking, in their poetry and criticism, about what is shared and what’s distinct in the historical experiences of European anti-semitism and New World slavery and racism: their thinking, in short, about what in Celan’s pathbreaking poetry in the wake of European fascism and genocide can, and cannot, help them as their artistic work develops its own relations to pressing ethical and sociopolitical matters.  Suffusing these reflections will be the issue of what kinds of critical agency—if any—might be generated from Celanian poetics, and how such agency would relate to longstanding notions of art’s ethical and sociopolitical commitment or engagement.

In addition to Celan’s work, the poetry we’ll read will range from brief excerpts to more substantial selections by a number of poets including, most likely: Hölderlin, Heine, Dickinson, Mallarmé, Rilke, Sachs, Brecht, Bachmann, Daive, Albiach, Du Bouchet, Césaire, Glissant, Monchoachi, Zurita, Gelman, Pizarnik, Perlongher, Paz, Castellanos, Blaser, Mouré, Brossard, Rothenberg, Duncan, Rich, Levertov,  Palmer, Mackey, Rankine, and others.  Critical, theoretical, and/or philosophical readings will likely include texts by Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben, Lacoue-Labathe, Felstiner, Rothenberg, Bernstein, Carson, and Coetzee. Depending on time, we may also work with some filmic, musical, and visual art in which Celan figures.

Required books:

–Poems of Paul Celan, Revised and Expanded, translated, with an Introduction and Postscript, by Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 2002).  ISBN: 0-89255-276-X

–Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew  by John Felstiner (Yale University Press, 02/12/01, Paper $19.00, ISBN: 9780300089226 1995 (paper, 2001))

–Paul Celan: Collected Prose,  trans., with an introduction, by Rosmarie Waldrop (NY: Fyfield Books/Routledge, 2003)  ISBN: 0-415-96723-6     ISBN-10: 0415967236
ISBN-13: 978-0415967235