Tuesday, February 10, 2015

#41

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-41:-If-we-sang-in-the-wood-(and-Death-is-a-German-expert)

"Varshava" is Warsaw, Poland, and this Dream Song comes from an article B. read about three Jewish men who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto.

No attempt to link Henry’s anxieties with the Jews of Warsaw, I don’t believe. It’s simply a dramatization in verse, and a powerful one.

Most of the online versions of this poem have the error “pslam” for “psalm”. At first I took it for a simple mistake; then when I found it repeated in several places, I thought it must be deliberate, a verbal technique called a portmanteau, the mash-up of two words to create a hybrid meaning (e.g. “stagflation”, “Jazzercise”, “beefalo”). “Pslam” would be a clever portmanteau of “psalm” and “slam”, signifying a kind of raising of violence and cruelty into a complex, subtle but diabolical art form, which the Nazis tried to do. But no, it’s a mistake. “Psalm” is the intended word.

Psalms are the biblical prayer songs. This comes after the linking of human sounds—singing—with animals. Cats mew, horses scream, men sing. The dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust is expressed really well, in a compressed way. These animals have emotions, one of them being fright, and of course they may voice them, but ultimately the exquisite emotional nuances that human song is capable of are reduced to a comparison with those animal noises. Mere noises, mere fright. A horse may scream when it’s shot, but it’s just a horse. Jews may sing and worship and make art as human beings in response to genocide, but in the eyes of an expert German killer, it’s all just animal noise. To follow that use of “psalm” as a verb with “Man palms his ears and moans”—“man”, the world, trying to block the sound of the singing and hide from it, from the suffering, and consequently suffering the more as he hides. I think it’s a powerful moment, brilliant and disturbing.

The details that follow are descriptions of the escape, including simple cries of anguish: “ai!”. “Death was a German / home-country”: The Polish home-country being made German, i.e. invaded by the Germans, equates to death. For a Polish Jew, this was more than a poetic metaphor.

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