The impossible, essential task of writing poetry after Auschwitz

When I was 16 I visited the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany and confronted a horror I had up to then never imagined. This was in 1964, at a time when accounts of the Holocaust were not as accessible as they are now. After that teenage confrontation with Dachau I have at times intentionally separated myself from the literature that describes the Holocaust because it pushes me into an abyss and makes me question God’s reality in the midst of unspeakable suffering.

This past summer, over 50 years after that first encounter with the Holocaust, I joined a group of Christians and Jews on a trip to visit some of the death camps and killing fields in Poland. We read aloud names of the dead as we stood next to one of the mass burial sites. At Auschwitz, Birkenau, Maj­danek, and Treblinka, we paused to read scripture. We paused at some places to read poems.

As a poet, a poetry editor, and a teacher of poetry, I have often found myself haunted by a statement German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno made in the late 1940s: “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” Adorno was a Jewish refugee who fled to the United States but returned to Germany after the war. He was a learned critic of fascism who studied authoritarianism and anti-Semitism.