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by officers of the army of occupation, an oblation
sweet-smellingto Mars and equally to porn god Priapus.^1Not even pausing to reassure her that she is the ‘less deceived’ of the two, her
killer insists that death at the hands of a sensitive soul is preferable to murder at
the hands of a local barbarian. Just as the killer distances himself from the local
‘bunch|of scabby patriots’, the tale of the woman’s death passes through layer
upon layer of moral distancing, as when ‘the man I know who knew this man or
some other|man’ decides to write a book describing ‘what a better educated man’
than the killer would have done in his place. This man, in Curnow’s description,
worries that the experience has been lost on the killer: ‘What can you do, with
nothing but a cock|and a knife and a cuntful of cognac,|if you haven’t got the
talent?||Abigone!’ The further we get from the actual murder the more obscene
the act becomes, even as the speakers congratulate themselves on their distance
from the inarticulate brutes below them. Condemnation and relish shade into one,
and the more articulate the speaker, the more disturbing the relish becomes.
The poem is book-ended by two silences: that of the killer and that of the poet. It
is always someone else doing the killing and pornographically relishing the results.
Yet the poem is anything but evasive: if we condemn the poet for his self-protective
standpoint, we are not repudiating but repeating the strategy of the poem; we too
play the game of competitively finer feelings and install ourselves at the top of the
self-deluding pyramid of sensitive souls. If we admire the poem, our position is
hardly less uncomfortable: if this is enough, or ‘more than enough’, to paraphrase
Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’,^2 arewetoosuccumbingtotheequivalenceof
aesthetics and morals proposed by the poem’s last speaker? Does the poet have
the phallically ‘big’ talent to make successful art out of appalling subject-matter?
The question is itself obscene. The poem seems to invalidate any successful way of
reading it, turning us into both perpetrators and queasy bystanders as we struggle
for the right reading. If not exactly a poem to love, ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’ strikes
a warning note that should resonate through any discussion of contemporary poetry
and its response to warfare and atrocity.
Curnow was born in 1911, and spent the Second World War as a journalist
in New Zealand. Although that war was not without its share of poets who saw
active service, ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’ is awar poem written out of the experience
of non-involvement, and both exemplifies and interrogates the condition of the
non-combatant poet. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and online anthologies
such asPoets Against the Warandnthposition.comhave renewed the debate about
poetry and politics, but while the technology has changed since the days ofAuthors
Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, in many ways the debate has remained the
(^1) Allen Curnow, ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’, inEarly Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941–1997
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 111.
(^2) Geoffrey Hill, ‘September Song’, inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 67.