The violence sung by poetry, then, must ever be rediscovered, not in order to forget the past but in order to see it for the first time, as perhaps Primo Levi understood the hell of Dante for the first time when describing “The Canto of Ulysses” to a fellow prisoner in If This Is A Man. This panel engages and juxtaposes three artists of imagination who are – physically and mentally – suffering repetitive violence now, even as this proposal is being written.
Ukrainian poet Lyubov Sirota is best known in Ukraine and internationally for her Chernobyl poems written after being evacuated in 1986 from her home of Pripyat, 2 km from the nuclear reactor. Living in Crimea when Russia invaded in 2014, she fled to northern Ukraine, which the Russians invaded in February 2022, forcing her to hide in occupied area for two months before escaping to Austria, where she is currently a refugee and continues to write her poetry. In “Ukraine Thrice Assaulted: The Evolving Poetry of Lyubov Sirota,” Debra Romanick Baldwin, one of her English translators, looks at the trajectory of Sirota’s poems not only in their change from Russian to Ukrainian language, but also in their troubling tonal shift from anti-Soviet peace activism to the violence of spiritual apocalypse.
Salman Rushdie is a “poet” both in the classical sense conveyed by the inclusive term poesis, but also in the lyricism of his narrative art and its concern with form. His horrific stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12, 2022, has not resulted (as it has for Sirota) in a new poetry. Instead – by extending the shadow of the death threats against him, beginning with the 1989 Iranian fatwa issued on his life – the recent jarring event prompts a reassessment of the novel that propelled him to international renown before he was a target of violence, Midnight’s Children. Judith Paltin, in her paper, “In the Shadow of Chautauqua: Re-evaluating Violent Repetitions in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children,” shows how the novel’s dominant stylistics reflect its central character’s obsessive search to comprehend the violent cycles of history, and how the novel’s own fractionalized and recursively told stories not only constitute an unnerving anticipation of biographical events but move beyond representation to catharsis and towards healing.
Finally, the poetry of Brynn Saito, whose multiple Japanese-American grandparents suffered in internment camps, turns the discussion of violent repetitions in another direction: generational repetition. In “The Immediacy of Ancestral Trauma in the Poems of Brynn Saito,” José Espericueta explores Saito’s concept of ancestral trauma alongside the modern science of epigenetics. Epigenetics interestingly supports a duality found in Saito’s poems: while pain can be inherited, it is not a permanent mutation. Thus, although her poetry carries a deeper burden of trauma than that of mere witnessing, it also offers, as does Rushdie’s narrative art, a therapeutic response to the deep-rooted damage inflicted by violence.
This timely panel includes no formal respondent in order to leave the most time for an inclusive Q&A. In addition to drawing out the kinships and contrasts between the poets considered, we hope it will range into some of the larger issues that these three papers raise: What is the relation between poetry and violence? Does poetic form necessarily aestheticize violence? Does repeated violence to poets themselves deepen or damage their work? And, especially as prompted by Saito’s vision of past and present violence and trauma defining us in ways that we might not be aware, what is our present responsibility?
Although for the reasons mentioned earlier in our application, we hope that this panel will happen in person, nevertheless, if the panel needs to be virtual than we have a request: please disable the chat function to ensure the same attention and respect that would be granted to papers delivered in person.