Wayne Koestenbaum, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Lara Mimosa Montes Reflect on a Single Poem at Jewish Currents

Last week at Jewish Currents, poets Wayne Koestenbaum, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Lara Mimosa Montes reflected on “a poem they’ve been holding close during this difficult time.” Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) and her poem “Abends” is prominent in Koestenbaum’s mind’s-eye. “This ostensibly simple poem resists fathoming,” he writes. “Does song intensify her bitterness?” Later:

I keep circling this poem as if it holds the answer to a riddle, but the poem is, in fact, the riddle itself. The puzzle it proposes returns every time I read these lines, their transparency a lure, a screen growing opaque when I disturb its resistant surface with my inquiry. The poem pretends to solve the enigma, but her mood’s unspeakability lays its rhythmic weight on our will to draw conclusions. 

For years I’ve carried near me this little book, Lasker-Schüler’s Selected Poems, translated from the German by Audri Durchslag-Litt and Jeanette Litman-Demeestère, and published by Green Integer in 2002. Here’s a brutal biographical fact cited on the pocket-sized volume’s back cover: “When the Nazi government took power, Lasker-Schüler, after being accosted by a group of Nazis and beaten with an iron rod, immediately boarded a train to leave Germany.” It may be preposterously maudlin and ahistorical for me to imagine that the evening weight descending upon her in this poem prefigures the iron rod. A fit of melancholy isn’t the same as state-sanctioned violence. But let me suggest that a person is an impressionable surface…

Further in, Abdurraqib discusses beyza ozer, and Montes lovingly tributes Gregg Bordowitz. Read on at Jewish Currents.