Contemporary Poetry

politics and poetics 61

its affront and immensity. To me that’s what the ‘end of art

is peace’ means.^8

Heaney also calls upon the poet to bear witness to atrocity – the
poet’s responsibility is to render the horror of barbarism in the
poetic work without complicity. His pronouncement can be allied
to Jerome Rothenberg’s insistence that poetry after the Holocaust
must be human. Rothenberg suggests that a new form of lyricism
creates a poetry not necessarily ‘about the Holocaust, but a poetry
that characterizes what it means to be human, to be a maker of
poems (even lyric poems) after Auschwitz’.^9 We might add to this
meditation Charles Bernstein’s comment that ‘In contrast to – or is
it an extension of – Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibil-
ity of (lyric) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a neces-
sary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the Second War.’^10
An appeal to politics in poetry is made evident in the mid-
1980 s and early 1990 s with the growth of interest in a poetry
of witness. Carolyn Forché’s groundbreaking anthology Against
Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness itemises the wars
and turmoil of the twentieth century.^11 Her catalogue includes
poets of the First and Second World Wars as well as poetry from
the Holocaust; repression in Eastern and Central Europe, war and
dictatorship in the Mediterranean; Indo-Pakistani wars; wars in
the Middle East; repression and revolution in Latin America; the
struggle for civil rights and liberties in the USA; wars in Korea and
Vietnam; repression in Africa; and the struggles against apartheid
in South Africa and for democracy in China. Working often with
twentieth-century poetry in translation, Forché’s introduction
gives a compelling insight to the term ‘witness’:

We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish

between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems – the former calling

into mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indi-

cating a public partisanship that is considered divisive even

when necessary. The distinction between the personal and

the political gives the political realm too much and too little

scope; at the same time it renders the personal too important

and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the