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Concentration
Suppose that a young Central European poet were to have been swept up into one of the World War II death camps. There were many such young women and men in the camps—the sheer numbers make the argument. Concentration is an attempt to stand alongside them, three generations removed, with short, spare yet formally coherent poems that serve as a kind of journal—an entirely imaginary response to all-too-real and yet unthinkable events. In 1904 Rilke wrote (in Letters to a Young Poet) that the highest human courage was to be found in our willing embrace of what is most strange, grotesque or inexplicable in our lives. Years later, in the most exigent of circumstances, a young poet writes back.
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 2023
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January 1, 2023
We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
Excerpts:
XVI.
I'd kill you for a cigarette. That’s what
my friend said just before they put a shovel
in his hands and made him dig a trench
along with a few dozen other shovelers.
Not very deep because the light was almost
disappearing and the ground was hard.
So hard. Then all at once they grabbed
the shovels back and pushed them in the pit
and started shooting indiscriminately.
By which I mean they couldn’t be bothered
to aim. Friend I could also use a smoke.
XXX.
We who are dirty would like to be clean
again. But there’s a problem when the men
the elders of the tribe whose matted beards
smell of egg yellow garlic and spilled tea
decide what makes a woman pure and when.
For now the men can no longer decide.
The women being practical don’t care.
Our jailors and exterminators think
we are the problem. Also the solution.
But only if we disappear. I want
to stand in a hot shower for a year.
XXXIV.
Who can trust history again? We trust each other
now less than a feral cat trusts the hand
that feeds it. We look each other in the eye
only to challenge or surrender. We are
being bred back to savagery. Those of us
who manage to survive. How will we
open a book again and believe the ink?
Allow the paper to carry us forward
on a sea of words which are not ours?
I would rather you read the numbers on my arm.
Count out my vertebrae with your living fingers.
XL.
I can’t help thinking what would Rilke think
who taught us how to see hope and affliction
and beauty and love and hopelessness
with the same admiring tightly focused eye.
It was exhilarating reading him
and feeling at once ancient and the most
modern it might be possible to be.
I’m not the same reader. Despite the power
I might have felt in that unchanging place
the world that changed me is not Rilke’s world.
If he were here he wouldn’t last an hour.
Excerpts:
XVI.
I'd kill you for a cigarette. That’s what
my friend said just before they put a shovel
in his hands and made him dig a trench
along with a few dozen other shovelers.
Not very deep because the light was almost
disappearing and the ground was hard.
So hard. Then all at once they grabbed
the shovels back and pushed them in the pit
and started shooting indiscriminately.
By which I mean they couldn’t be bothered
to aim. Friend I could also use a smoke.
XXX.
We who are dirty would like to be clean
again. But there’s a problem when the men
the elders of the tribe whose matted beards
smell of egg yellow garlic and spilled tea
decide what makes a woman pure and when.
For now the men can no longer decide.
The women being practical don’t care.
Our jailors and exterminators think
we are the problem. Also the solution.
But only if we disappear. I want
to stand in a hot shower for a year.
XXXIV.
Who can trust history again? We trust each other
now less than a feral cat trusts the hand
that feeds it. We look each other in the eye
only to challenge or surrender. We are
being bred back to savagery. Those of us
who manage to survive. How will we
open a book again and believe the ink?
Allow the paper to carry us forward
on a sea of words which are not ours?
I would rather you read the numbers on my arm.
Count out my vertebrae with your living fingers.
XL.
I can’t help thinking what would Rilke think
who taught us how to see hope and affliction
and beauty and love and hopelessness
with the same admiring tightly focused eye.
It was exhilarating reading him
and feeling at once ancient and the most
modern it might be possible to be.
I’m not the same reader. Despite the power
I might have felt in that unchanging place
the world that changed me is not Rilke’s world.
If he were here he wouldn’t last an hour.
Displaying 1 of 1 review