The Poetry of Survival

By RICHARD CHESS

Auden again: “poetry makes nothing happen.” This phrase is often cited as a challenge to poetry and poets. Can a poem feed the hungry? Provide shelter for the homeless? Healthcare for the uninsured? Can a poem stop nuclear proliferation? Genocide? Can it solve the problem of global warming? No. No, no, and no. So, what good is poetry? Isn’t it self-indulgent to invest one’s intelligence, imagination, passion—Time!—in composing or reading poems? Choose life, Jews are told. Hell, saving a life trumps even the laws of Shabbat. Don’t waste your time on poetry.

The full line from which the nagging Auden quote is excerpted reads, “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.” Well, surviving is not nothing. Surviving is something. The poem, then, as survivor. In Auschwitz, that perverse laboratory where human nature, subjected to the most extreme conditions, could be studied, Primo Levi saw clear distinctions between the drowned, those who would not survive, and the saved, those who would. The “mussulmans, the men in decay”... “suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.” In Auschwitz, one wanted to have little or no contact with them, for no benefit would come of it. The drowned, Levi writes in Survival in Auschwitz,

have no distinguished acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos and they know no secret method of organizing. And in any case, one knows that they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some near-by field and a crossed-out number on a register.

By contrast, the saved were “strong and astute individuals,” contact with whom just might result in some benefit.

Literally, Auden’s line from his elegy for Yeats means simply this: Yeats the man is gone, but Yeats’ poetry survives. It’s no small feat to craft one poem, let alone hundreds, that succeed in escaping oblivion. Survival, however, can mean more than merely enduring. It can suggest resistance, refusal to give in to that which would shatter, silence, exclude, or obliterate us. For Jewish poets, that, too, is something. Yiddish poet Mani Leyb (1883–1953) refuses to be excluded from the great tradition of English poetry. In “The Gentile Poet,” Leyb acknowledges the status of his nemesis—“lucky you are indeed!” why “the earth is yours”—then inserts himself—“I, a poet of the Jews—who needs it!—/A folk of wild grass grown on foreign earth”—into that tradition:

I chant, amid the alien corn, the tears
Of desert wanderers under alien stars.
(trans. John Hollander)

Not only does Leyb insist on chanting of his own experience—an alien, wandering on the foreign earth—he does so in one of the most traditional forms of a Western poetry: the sonnet! Welcome or not, he writes himself into the English literary tradition.

This is just one example of what I’m suggesting here is a poem as an act of survival. Another piece that suggests a poem’s—a heart’s!—ability to withstand potentially destructive cultural forces is this short one, based on Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, by the great Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain, Shmuel HaNagid:

The multiple troubles of man,
            my brother, like slander and pain,
amaze you? Consider the heart
            which holds them all
in strangeness, and doesn’t break.

(trans. Peter Cole)

For the original’s “heart,” substitute “art,” and you get this: the art which holds strangeness—slander, pain, and all the other troubles of man—and doesn’t break.

Unlike this short wisdom poem by HaNagid, which stands at a distance from lived experience, plenty of other poems of survival locate themselves squarely in the middle of situations that could break a man or woman. The speaker in Philip Levine’s poem “What Work Is” is an angry, marginally employed worker waiting in line at Ford Highland Park, hoping to be hired for the day. For a moment he mistakes another man, ahead of him in line, for his brother. Like his brother, the man has

…the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants.

In her long poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” Adrienne Rich casts an unflinching gaze on specific injustices, abuses environmental and human, and violence in American life. At one moment, she longs for “those urgently needed for the work of perception”:

work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of new streets
work of the speaker who also listens
meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate woman,
            the desperate man
—never-to-be finished, still unbegun work of repair

The work of repair—repairing the difficult world in which strawberry pickers are poisoned by Malathion, a lesbian is murdered just for being a lesbian, a political prisoner is perplexed because what he learns from his instructor in prison—“I am governed by wise and judicious men,” “I am free and should be happy”—is the exact opposite of what he encounters when he leaves the instructor’s presence—begins with an act of perception.

Like the saved in Auschwitz, the strong poem is astute, but it is not merely self-interested. It shows us what’s broken. It brings us face-to-face with all that would oppose us, with the man waiting to say “No” for any reason he wants. It offers us a way of registering that “No” without its breaking us. For the poem isn’t broken by it. Just by being what it is—a work of art—a strong poem offers us hope. Without hope, we might not turn back to the task that, as Rich says in the conclusion of “Atlas,” we “cannot refuse,” even though we know, as Rich also writes, alluding to Pirkei Avot, we will not complete the task. That’s what poems contribute to the task of tikkun olam. Survivors themselves, poems can give us a measure of what we need to survive and to return to the work that must be done to repair the world.