honoring the poet Paul Celan
(1920-1970)
“Sometimes this genius goes dark
and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.”
Friedrich Holderlin
A poet’s breath,
first final,
held, expelled,
what grave gravity
lured him into depths?
The last solid contact,
cold steel, the bridge,
cold steal the stolen life,
on that green gray night.
Intimately engulfed,
he inhaled the river,
its aching loneliness,
its apologetic grief.
Water-whelmed
toward silence,
he couldn’t spit
the river’s sad word out,
could only add his body
to its drastic weight.
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Paul Celan (1920-1970) a German speaking Romanian Jew whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. He was held in a forced labor camp and was freed by the Russian army after the war. He became a poet, experimenting in his native language with new ways to express the horrors of the systematic extermination of his family and millions of European Jews. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno said “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Celan was caught in the barbarism of the Holocaust and was determined to express that suffering through poetry. He was plagued by depression all of his life and committed suicide by jumping from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine on April 20, 1970., This suicide note from the German poet Friedrich Holderlin was found on Celan’s deak.