First in a series of blogposts by poet-in-residence Sue Zatland, who reflects on different aspects of monumental commemoration, focusing on Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. She shares her poetic responses and experimentations with form.
ONE
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Architect, Peter Eisenman.
Above ground is an installation of 2,711 massive unmarked concrete blocks, separated by narrow alleys. The maze-like grid is disorienting, a petrified forest in the heart of Berlin. Eisenman: ‘I watched people walk into it for the first time and it is amazing how these heads disappear — like going under water.’ Primo Levi writes of similar experiences at Auschwitz, of prisoners no longer alive, but not dead either. They seemed to descend into a personal hell. Aerial photos show the stones sweeping over undulating ground like an ocean fetch.
I have been lost inside this labyrinth. One thought leads to another: labyrinth, minotaur, Dante/ Everyman/pilgrim; Virgil/guide/poet; violence, innocence, the underworld, harrowing of hell.
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Form: Dante invented a new rhythmic rhyming form for the Comedy, called terza rima. Three-line iambic stanzas with the scheme, aba, bcb, ded, and so on. It’s a marvel of form = meaning. With lyric propulsion it drives you on, right into hell and back.
Terza rima works in the romance language of Italian with its straight Roman roads of conjugations and declensions, but the muddy tracks of the English language with its Latin/Anglo-Saxon/medieval-French roots do not give us so many convenient rhyming words. Although not terza rima, I want to keep meter as the engine of the poem, and the bewitching magic of the group of threes.
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Drowning
I came to myself
at the edge of a wood
poet and pilgrim before me
at my shoulder
the she-wolf stood
in the shade of a linden tree.
An ocean of stone
rose at my feet
on the swell of a distant storm
the siren call
of the city street—
a ligature, a subtle form
of binding. From the shore
the brindled bitch gives tongue.
A reboant howl
which, once begun
snarls through alleyways
on a bare-backed wind
harrowing the aisles
until, undone, bleeds out
in the deep-mouthed stones.
I came to myself
at the edge of a wood
prophet and sinner.
Before me—
chthonic, misunderstood—
a song of symmetry
driving me into the gorge
where the light unspools
hanging on the air by a thread
and silence breaks
on indifferent walls
as the waters close over my head.
Susan Zatland
Poet-in-Residence;
Creative Writing Diploma, University of Oxford
