This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
On October 27th, 2018, a gunman murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. In the immediate aftermath of such horror, poet Matt Hohner struggled to write. He expresses his apprehension in “A Poet Sits Down to Write After a Massacre,” in which he responds to a statement by German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
Yet, in the face of continued acts of violence, what role might art play in confronting, educating, and even healing?
Matt Hohner, Poetry Editor for The Loch Raven Review, has published two collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Rattle: Poets Respond, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A lifelong resident of Baltimore, Hohner’s wife’s entire family hails from Pittsburgh, which makes football games interesting. His mother’s family has roots in south central Pennsylvania.
Hohner explains today's poem with "There is nothing justifiable or righteous about violence against people because of who they are. . . . the same principles apply globally to all nations, always, without exception. . . ."
Today's poem won the 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend International Poetry Prize in Ireland and was published in The Irish Times.
Here’s “A Poet Sits Down to Write After a Massacre” by Matt Hohner.
A Poet Sits Down to Write After a Massacre
Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
October 27, 2018
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
–Theodor Adorno
The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems
to wrap them in. Pockmarks across synagogue walls
are a new font in a familiar language I refuse to utter.
Men have begun again to speak in tongues syntaxed
by phonemes of caliber and clip capacity: diction I
will not assemble into sentences; sounds I cannot make
into words. What color, the stripes being woven like old
narratives into new camp pajamas? How many stars
asterisk prayers into the bluest night? There is no
metaphor for what I cannot abide; no pentameter
for the sound of earth falling from the hands of love
into a freshly-filled grave. My iambs are a pair
of backwards-turned boots in the stirrups of a riderless
horse. We measure the inarticulate grammar of fear
in the steady metronome of newsfeed updates,
punctuate the lulls between carnage with promises
enjambed in the wind. Cover my eyes with verses
if you must. Bribe the ferryman with curses and dust.
A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped,
ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.
Winner of the 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend International Poetry Prize (Ireland). Published in The Irish Times February 27, 2019.
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Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
