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Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad March 25, 2006 Poetry often pierces to the heart of ethics Scott Dalgarno “When Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet who spent half his adult life in prison, speaks of Spring coming and the sun rising, you can sense that he is seeing Spring coming through a barred window.” I heard the poet Carolyn Forche say the above at the Arizona State University writer’s conference this last month. Her subject: The poetry of witness. Besides being a fabulous poet herself, Forche has given her adult life to holding up to the sun the work of poets who have written in extremis. A 13-year effort to “understand the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination” led her to publish an anthology called “Against Forgetting.” It begins with poems about the Armenian genocide and carries right on through the bloody 20th century up through the struggle for democracy in China. One thing that makes it imperative that we hear these voices is that it has been estimated that 60 percent of those killed in war since World War I have been non-combatants — principally women and children. When I say her aim is to hold these poems in the sun I mean that quite literally. When asked to explain to the publishers at W.W. Norton company why they should be interested in publishing such a volume, Forche told them the following story: In 1944 the Hungarian poet, Miklos Radnoti, was sent to a forced labor camp in what was to become Yugoslavia. While there, he was able to procure a small notebook in which he wrote his last 10 poems. When they understood that defeat was imminent, the Nazis decided to evacuate the camp and return the detail to Hungary. It was winter. Hundreds died along the way. Only Radnoti and 21 others survived the trek. Unable to find hospital room for the survivors, Radnoti and the others were marched to the village of Abda, executed, and buried together in a shallow grave. But that is not the end of the story. It’s never the end of such a story. Radnoti’s wife knew she had to find him. She made inquiries. It took over a year but she found out what had happened, and also found the site of the mass grave. She personally exhumed his body. Once she found her husband she went through his pockets looking for what she knew she would find — the notebook of poems written along the way of the forced march, soaked through and blackened by the earth. She cleaned it as best she could and opened it, spreading the sheets out to dry in the sun. Now, if that isn’t love … Among these last poems is one entitled, “Letter To My Wife.” “Above me I see a bomber squadron cruise I was just admiring, up there, your eye’s blue sheen . . I will find my way to you for you, I have walked the spirit’s full length as it grew.” There are poems in the collection by Wislawa Szymborska, one of which details the apparent arbitrariness of fate: “You survived because you were first You survived because you were last Because alone Because the others Because on the left Because on the right Because it was raining Because it was sunny Because a shadow fell.” She writes, she says, because she has to, like thousands of others who have seen the worst the earth has had to offer. People who go through things like this feel a moral obligation to write about it. They write explicitly fearing (knowing) that their words won’t be commensurate with the suffering they have seen or felt, but they write anyway. “Write it” says Szymborska. “Write. In ordinary ink on ordinary paper: They were given no food, they all died of hunger. All? How many?” How many? Is that the proper question? Yes and no. As Judith Miller has said, Abstraction is memory’s most ardent enemy. It kills because it encourages distance and often indifference. We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million. It was one, plus one, plus one … Czeslaw Miloscz had said that the poetic act itself is to construct poetry out of the ruins. “Why not out of ruined lives? Our youth has been taken off like a shirt from a condemned man,” wrote Zbignew Herbert. How better to describe such an evil? Reading these poems, one by one, or by taking the time to see Oregon Shakespeare’s moving production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” These are moral actions one can take against the insidiousness of indifference — against forgetting. Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland’s First Presbyterian Church --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.