The Warsaw Ghetto 1940

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/10/polands-jews-fear-future-under-new-holocaust-law-nazi-atrocities

Extract

One lesser-known memorial is a small plaque on the wall of the Warszawa Gdańska railway station, a nondescript socialist-era building on the north side of the city. It was from here that many Poles of Jewish origin departed in the wake of the “anti-Zionist campaign” in March 1968, when cold war politics and a power struggle within the Polish Communist party led to an antisemitic propaganda campaign forcing thousands of Polish Jews to leave the country.

“Loyalty to socialist Poland and imperialist Israel is not possible simultaneously,” prime minister Józef Cyrankiewicz had declared in 1968. “Whoever wants to face these consequences in the form of emigration will not encounter any obstacle.” The plaque bears a tribute from the Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg: “For those who emigrated from Poland after March 1968 with a one-way ticket. They left behind more than they had possessed.”

Decide with me
Past walls of heaving lies.
Past politicians, who shall be the Bride?
Decisions fly like demons on the tide.
Grab Satan”s tail and take a free and evil ride.

I fear no pill
Can help the poor and reft.
All of their payments
Are to be
Put to the cracked Test.
We do not help
For passive is our state.
Send us to Bedlam for we are adrift.

Postmodernism
Says all stories are good
But we must sift them
With our heads of wood.
I fear no evil
For soon I think I`ll be
Driven to seek asylum
By the cold and Northern sea

Things my mother used to say, come back
Oh,Lord love a duck, she seems to quack
This caused me much confusion and deep thought
As  on  her words,  my mind seems to be caught

“I’m in the doldrums,I am stuck, bemused”
Hearing this made children feel confused
Since she lost her mother when so young
Dejection, like a garment, on her hung.

When I was unhappy with my dress
She made me feel much worse by her address
“The king won’t  look at you ,you little pest”
I used to long  eternally for   rest

Sometimes she would open the front door
Push me out,”don’t come back anymore”
I see the power and not the love she claimed
Although I do not judge, I feel ashamed

No separation,self or boundary
The only escape I found was to flee
But still, I do recall her homemade bread
And how she called,”I wish that I was dead”

I lay in bed and could not get to sleep
O mother, mother, how you make me weep

Why do we need to be told what to do? A  magazine agony aunt column had a question from 55-year-old divorcee asking was it now expected that women go to bed on a first date?
Why could she not decide herself? Is it fear of not being wanted? I think it might be dangerous unless you already know the person.On the other hand, Freud might say it is she who wants sex immediately and she projects it onto the man who is seen as rapacious.
Why again can’t we think for ourselves? A man could be thrilled at easy access to sex but where will it lead? It is harder to lose someone anyway and after getting so close it would be even more painful.

Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive
Sex and violence, lovelessness and hate
Which man or woman can we now believe?

At home, the wedded wife  has been deceived
Maybe she is old and has no taste
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive.

And is there any good that’s been conceived
Or merely human life that’s laid to waste?
Which man or woman can we now believe?

A tipping point eventually’s achieved
Women  furious at their  common fate
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive.

For a world of love, we all will grieve
Is it now and always much too late
Which man or woman can we now believe?

No wonder we prefer our phones to mates
And women fear when they go on a date
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive
Is there nothing good we can retrieve?

From the mangled chaos of the lines
Emerge strange forms and all too telling tales
O life satanic and O loss divine

Faces will make then themselves, define
From the compost and the deathly rail
And the mangled chaos of the lines

There is never reason nor a rhyme
As Jonah found when sucked in by a whale
O life satanic and o loss divine

What is living but a life of crime?
Whether trained in Borstal or at Yale
Feel the mangled chaos of the lines

We wander, having leaders well outgrown
Some days it is hell and we just crawl
O life satanic and o loss divine

I believe, in bitterness and gall,
We must hold our spirits as they fall
Dark the mangled chaos of our lives
O love satanic and O loss divine

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2018/02/change-the-world?utm_source=Poetry+Foundation&utm_campaign=2bf845f8c7-POFO_Newsletter_DEC_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ff7136981c-2bf845f8c7-185545637

Extract

It’s been a brutal year, and I have been wondering how to speak in a world that doesn’t seem interested in listening to things searingly urgent to me.

Because I wanted to think about that with others, this fall I taught a class on listening and voicing. I wanted to counter our unlistening, and I wanted to think about who gets to voice, how they get to voice, and how we listen to each other. My late friend Akilah Oliver’s notion of the “visible unseen” was one way we framed things. She wrote a poem-essay, “the visible unseen,” as part of her grieving and healing process when her son Oluchi died. In it, she considers how graffiti makes visible the invisible body that made it. She writes,

When I first saw graffiti, I recognized an ugly ecstatic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history.

There is so much to say about that, but the best thing to do is to read that passage again, and then, if you haven’t already, to read her book, A Toast in the House of Friends.

We read a lot of other poets and writers in that class: Dolores Dorantes’s chillingly beautiful Style, translated by Jen Hofer, Layli Long Soldier’s much- and rightly lauded Whereas, Amiri Baraka’s essay “How You Sound??” We did crazy listening exercises inspired by the late great composer Pauline Oliveros, who wrote things like:

Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.

Loosely translating “the visible unseen” into the spoken unheard, Sappho was another starting point. She is a poetic mother who keeps on giving, maybe (for me) because my great grandmother took her as a guardian angel for inventing a way to be a lesbian in the early 20^th century, but maybe just because she’s amazing. In fragment 31 (quoted here in Anne Carson’s translation), all her senses famously flee from her body as she watches, in a cold sweat, the woman she desires talking to some man — “whoever he is”:

I shall eventually reclaim all my bed
The empty space is full of books I read.
But still it’s very hard to get inside
Next to the place where someone loved has died.
And so my entire house is filled with books
Or clothes and shoes and radios, please  don’t look
As bit by bit  I let in emptiness~
By gum, life’s harder than a game of chess
Then when I’m empty, I can wait for grace
Or find another man, but not in haste
As I  may be gay for all I know
It never rains but sometimes we get snow

This is the story of my washing machine.It’s a perfectly ordinary washing machine I bought 2 years ago.Like all of these, it has more programmes than I ever could need unless I married a widower with 54 grandchildren and 3 dogs and a horse that likes a clean blanket
As a highly educated person it was only natural I should lock my brain onto a 59-minute programme with a choice of several temperatures.And how I used that programme until about 6 months ago it stopped working suddenly and Hoover wanted me to buy an insurance policy for £197 per year
As the machine only cost about £250 it seemed a daft  idea so I have got by using other programmes
Then today it came to my mind that there is also a choice of spinning speeds.I changed that and was pleased to find the programme began to work again at a different spin  speed
Why did the engineer on the phone not tell me that?
Why did I not think of it myself? It would have been sensible to try different speeds but it never crossed my mind.
So at least it will save me having to buy a new one this year.
More puzzling is the amount of washing I have to do.I’ve a good mind to go back to the old ways of washing clothes more infrequently as in winter I find drying then a nuisance.
Anyway, remember to try a few changes if a  machine stops working.It might save you £300 or more
Now I have to dry the clothes!Not a day for hanging them out.It’s strange how I have never totally solved this problem.I have no tumble dryer as I have no space.So I shall drape sheets over my head and stand in front of the fire until either I faint or the sheet dries.This will be fun.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/the-25-principles-for-adult-behavior.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

“”But being a grown-up also meant accepting full responsibility for one’s behavior, life’s purpose, and the ethical treatment of oneself and others. See his list below, notable not so much for its originality but for its plainspoken reminder of the simple, shared wisdom that gets drowned in the assaultive noise of modern life. Such uncomplicated idealism was at the center of Perry’s life and work.

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

Barlow the “cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution”—as Stephen Levy describes him at Wired—“became a great explainer” of the possibilities inherent in new media. He watched the internet become a far darker place than it had ever been in the 90s, a place where governments conduct cyberwars and impose censorship and barriers to access; where bad actors of all kinds manipulate, threaten, and intimidate.”

Using the notion of fractals
I see my home is infinitely large
That’s why  a woman’s work is never done
But why does gender come into it?
And why is it not valued?
Theories are all very well
But the sheets still need washing
And the baby still cries
As if she can see her future
An infinite amount of dust
Waiting to taunt her
Boiling hankies and washing up
Try to imagine  if most MPs were women
And men washed their clothes for them
And remembered to buy bread
How would men feel?
They   like groping but feeling is not the same
Whatever their game

No still, small voice, no Burning Bush, no God
No symbols of transcendence,no   shared rites
How to die without a psalm or prayer
How to smile the last time  in your life

No Joseph with his many coloured coat
No Moses in his basket in the reeds
No Sodom,No Gomorra, that’s a joke
As that is where our path now seems to lead

No journey  through the deserts of the heart
No Faith, no  aims,no  others by our side
Where did you think the images would  part?
No holy  meal,no connections and no guide

No images of angels  decorate
No steeples will point  up to Heavenly dreams
God has left us to our sorry state
Oh, Europe, you’ve destroyed with  wars and schemes

No sacred symbols but a  heart of stone
For we  are nothing more than flesh and bone

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/30/mind-and-cosmos-thomas-nagel/

Ultimately, Nagel echoes John Updike’s reflection on the possibility of “permanent mystery”:

It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development.

Though Mind and Cosmos isn’t a neat package of scientific, or even philosophical, answers, it’s a necessary thorn in the side of today’s all-too-prevalent scientific reductionism and a poignant affirmation of Isaac Asimov’s famous contention that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”

Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (public library), originally published in 1950:

We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/12/descartes-hope-fear/

Extract:

In a sentiment that calls to mind Kierkegaard’s insistence that anxiety powers rather than hinders creativity, Descartes writes:

When hope is so strong that it altogether drives out fear, its nature changes and it becomes complacency or confidence. And when we are certain that what we desire will come to pass, even though we go on wanting it to come to pass, we nonetheless cease to be agitated by the passion of desire which caused us to look forward to the outcome with anxiety. Likewise, when fear is so extreme that it leaves no room at all for hope, it is transformed into despair; and this despair, representing the thing as impossible, extinguishes desire altogether, for desire bears only on possible things.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/11/01/john-keats-on-negative-capability/

Quote:

“Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity. Triggered by Keats’s disagreement with the English poet and philosopher Coleridge, whose quest for definitive answers over beauty laid the foundations for modern-day reductionism, the concept is a beautiful articulation of a familiar sentiment — that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

Keats writes:

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason

chrome-extension://bpmcpldpdmajfigpchkicefoigmkfalc/views/app.html

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

embargo

noun

Definition
1 : an order of a government prohibiting the departure of commercial ships from its ports

2 : a legal prohibition on commerce

3 : stoppage, impediment; especially : prohibition

4 : an order by a common carrier or public regulatory agency prohibiting or restricting freight transportation

Did You Know?
Embargoes may be put in place for any number of reasons. For instance, a government may place a trade embargo against another country to express its disapproval with that country’s policies. But governments are not the only bodies that can place embargoes. A publisher, for example, could place an embargo on a highly anticipated book to prevent stores from selling it before its official release date. The word embargo, dating from around the year 1600, derives via Spanish embargar from Vulgar Latin imbarricare, formed from the prefix im- and the noun barra (“bar”).

How d’ you start writing? I don’t know.
Once I was by Lidl’s in the snow
A song-line came uncalled into my throat
Oh,Lord, I saw an ink blot on my coat

Rorsach is a name we all  can hear
If we are unstable in our fear.
Yet seeing visions in a blob of ink
Would make me a psychotic in a blink

We are all unstable  till we’re dead
If you are a statue, don’t see red!
I get angry with my muse at night
She sends me thoughts when I turn off the light

The one I got by Lidl’s made me hunt
I had to create ten more to put in front
And then I had to write the bitter end
For cliches are so useless round the bend

And when it happens at 11 pm
I feel like saying, can’t you come again?
I don’t know what some parts might really mean
If they come to me when I am rapt in dream.

I write the ideas down on bags of flour
On novels which to read I then aspire
I write them on my wrist in my own blood
But only when I’m feeling I’ve gone mad

If I search the house for paper scraps
I find some with the ordnance survey maps
Those precious maps we bought for holidays
Not knowing we’d no time left in our Play.

I find scraps on my bed or in the hall
And some take flight and end up on the wall
If I glued them onto a large card
I’d have a collage with a message shared

Oh,start where e’er you want, like Coleridge
Or admire Hopkins and his saviour Robert Bridge
Maybe it is Bridges,I forget,
Entertaining daffodils I met.

https://magmapoetry.com/how-does-any-poet-start-writing-a-poem/
Some comments

Daphne Milne
October 7, 2013 at 12:46 pm
It’s an untidy sort of process – sometimes a line or a title comes as a gift and the poem almost writes itself. Usually it’s start writing first thing on waking up [well opening the eyes] and BEFORE I put on my glasses, like making the first mark on the blank canvas get something down to work with – or not. Always, always a notebook for the odd remark or overheard comment that could be the start of something. I have found that I have lost several useful things or titles by trying to remember them. ditto the notebook by the bed. The things forgotten may not have been any use but I am always convinced they would have been.

Henry Seltzez
October 7, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Okay, I’ll consider the question with the respect it deserves.

A word, phrase, line, something someone says, a song, a sight, a sound, a feeling, a thought, in fact, practically any random event can be the stimulus for me. Usually though what is put down quickly needs reshaping through a transformative poetics – lifted off the page – through patient editing and reworking as most of my pieces, unless they come straight out of the hand in one piece (which doesn’t happen often) – seem to lie dead on the page. The trouble then being, of course, halting the transformative poetics before the poem is stillborn or overcooked.

That’s my take on the writing process, take it as you will.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68657/how-to-and-how-not-to-write-poetry-56d2484397277

Advice for blocked writers and aspiring poets from a Nobel Prize winner’s newspaper column.
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
Introduction
In the Polish newspaper Literary Life, Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska answered letters from ordinary people who wanted to write poetry. Clare Cavanagh, translates these selections.

The following are selections from columns originally published in the Polish newspaper Literary Life. In these columns, famed poet Wislawa Szymborska answered letters from ordinary people who wanted to write poetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh, they appeared in slightly different form in our Journals section earlier this year.

To Heliodor from Przemysl: “You write, ‘I know my poems have many faults, but so what, I’m not going to stop and fix them.’ And why is that, oh Heliodor? Perhaps because you hold poetry so sacred? Or maybe you consider it insignificant? Both ways of treating poetry are mistaken, and what’s worse, they free the novice poet from the necessity of working on his verses. It’s pleasant and rewarding to tell our acquaintances that the bardic spirit seized us on Friday at 2:45 p.m. and began whispering mysterious secrets in our ear with such ardor that we scarcely had time to take them down. But at home, behind closed doors, they assiduously corrected, crossed out, and revised those otherworldly utterances. Spirits are fine and dandy, but even poetry has its prosaic side.”

To H.O. from Poznan, a would-be translator: “The translator is obliged to be faithful not only to the text. He must also reveal the full beauty of the poetry while retaining its form and preserving as completely as possible the epoch’s spirit and style.”

To Grazyna from Starachowice: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?”

To Mr. G. Kr. of Warsaw: “You need a new pen. The one you’re using makes a lot of mistakes. It must be foreign.”

To Pegasus [sic] from Niepolomice: “You ask in rhyme if life makes cents [sic]. My dictionary answers in the negative.”

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: “You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?”

To Puszka from Radom: “Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?”

To Boleslaw L-k. of Warsaw: “Your existential pains come a trifle too easily. We’ve had enough despair and gloomy depths. ‘Deep thoughts,’ dear Thomas says (Mann, of course, who else), ‘should make us smile.’ Reading your own poem ‘Ocean,’ we found ourselves floundering in a shallow pond. You should think of your life as a remarkable adventure that’s happened to you. That is our only advice at present.”