How to Write Poetry after Auschwitz: The Burnt Book of Michael Palmer

Abstract

In order to come to terms with the Holocaust, Michael Palmer’s poetry not only draws heavily on Jewish textual tropes of negation, but also provides evidence for the migration of Judaic tropes into non-Jewish poetry. Modeling his work after many Jewish poets, including George Oppen, but especially Edmond Jabes, Palmer’s “Jewish turn” becomes explicit through his usage of the Talmudic trope of the burnt book, a device for signaling a messianic interruption of meaning. Though the trope played a role in his early work, it assumes a more urgent meaning with his 1988 book, Sun, which investigates how language is entangled with historical atrocity. The problem of catastrophe receives sustained treatment in his subsequent collections, from At Passages (1995) to Thread (2011). By mobilizing the trope of the burnt book, Palmer’s poetry speaks to the post-Holocaust crisis of representation without succumbing to the pieties that mar much poetry of engagement. The trope allows Palmer to address atrocity in a way that keeps poetry self-critically estranged, or to put it in Adorno’s terms, “ barbaric.”