My poetry is about the place of a poet.

I come from Europe where we have a long tradition of the poet as Out-Sider, No-Sayer. Over the years, I have had a hard time explaining why this is a good position, especially to young American students who are brought up to be Team-Players and Yeah-Sayers. But the more they read Kafka, whose three sisters were killed in concentration camps, and learn about the Holocaust, they tend to better realize the value of an individual NO, especially in a fashion-dictated mass-culture, or a fascist-dictated bureaucracy.

Both by conscious choice and by unconscious compulsion, the poet places him or herself outside of history, in order to be better prepared to witness it, to join it, and to inherit it.   Therefore, my poetry has an identity torn in three directions, like a syllogism in three parts - thesis, antithesis, ad synthesis - as a way to externalize the tension inherent in the poet’s place.

One part of the poet’s place is the poet as witness to, what Karl Marx and Stephen Deadalus call,  “the nightmare which is history.” This, too, has been a hard concept to convey to young, optimistic American students. I grew up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and “the Crime Without a Name” as Churchill put it, while they grow up more or less confidently with the web. But art is useless unless it struggles with and against the conflicts in which it is born. My collection includes a rather benign, still an honest, personal response to September 11,  a poem about the Holocaust, about the war in Iraq. Hopefully, it fulfills what Czeslaw Milosz wanted when he states “owing to the extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there [in his/my part of the world] . . . we tend to view it [poetry] as a witness and participant . . . because it witnesses us.”

The second aspect of the poet’s place is the poet as member, living a day-to-day life in a family and a community. This is necessary—community and truth are two sides of one coin—but painful, nonetheless, as the community often wishes to place safety and rules above its members and, more so, its art. But art stands for the unknown; you can’t mandate what you don’t yet know.

The third part of the poet’s place is the poet as heir, struggling with ancient myths and tropes. My thought was that through the struggle between history and self, the poet forges an authentic voice, which must be added to the chorus of literary history. Because no matter how modern, how unique or individual we become, the more we read, the clearer we see that nothing is new—except the voice of the artist. It is not so much what we write as how we do it. Yet, what we write and how we do it crucially define our time and who we are. Poetry is realized only when we see how deeply we care about who we are and what we can become—our step into the unknown.