Writing Problems: Poetry after Auschwitz

Proust, Adorno, Plath, Rukeyser, Spiegelman, Kosinski, Celan, "Limbo"

The complexity of expression in poetry has to be concerned with precision. The passionate “I” in a poem speaks from their own reality to a greater reality—the opening in the fabric of language that insists language become fresh and new.

Poems should be beautiful, but they also have to be meaningful. Beauty fails when it doesn’t give anything. But in an …