Interview |

A Dialogue with Arne Weingart on Concentration

Introduction

 

Arne Weingart, a poet from Chicago and author of Levitation for Agnostics, recipient of the New American Press Poetry Prize, and Unpractical Thinking, awarded the Red Mountain Press Poetry Prize, published his third collection, Concentration, with Futurecycle Press in 2023. The book is essentially one long narrative poem composed of 50 eleven-lined lyric stanzas in which the reader is transported into the mind of a Jewish Nazi concentration camp prisoner. “Concentration” as a title resonates in many ways: as in confinement, as in intensity, as in imprisoned, as in focus, as in hate; and in more nuanced ways: the concentration of people packed into train cars, into barracks, into rooms/showers designed for systematic murder with a specific concentration of poisonous gas, the concentration of individuals into their solitary minds, lives, humiliations and sufferings. The routine gathering of Jewish people in a community temple to pray, to study, to be together in joy, is called a congregation, a synonym of concentration. Surely, this irony did not escape the Nazis.

The poems in Concentration are written in blank verse – iambic pentameter/10-syllable lines – without rhyme. In contrast with free verse where anything goes, the poet’s choice of blank verse seems darkly humorous and sardonic. The adage “no rhyme, no reason” kept wafting through my mind as I explored the poems.

— Elizabeth Jacobson

 

XX.

A sense of time. I think I had one once.

More like an expectation of events

that happen in a certain order. But when

death is never not the next thing that

could happen time begins to bend or float

or fade or disconnect. All days the one day.

All hours the one hour. Every night

the single night which might be the last night.

You see the problem. My friend had a watch

he traded for some moldy bread. I still

can see him staring at his naked wrist.

 

III.

Last things first. You can’t imagine

what it’s like in a world without porcelain

can you? I can’t and it’s the only world

I know now. Not the eating kind.

Or the sitting on a bookshelf kind.

Never mind there are no bookshelves.

No books. I mean the kind for sitting on

and shitting in. The cold smooth white stone

that resists all indignity and is connected

to endless water. No matter what they

feed you it doesn’t mean that you don’t shit.

 

 

Elizabeth Jacobson:

A friend, a community college teacher in Florida, told me that she assigns poems about the Holocaust in every class and in every class there are a few students who have never heard of the Nazi Jewish genocide. In this way, specifically, Concentration is timely and necessary. I’m interested in how you gathered the information for this book. Would you share your personal history with us?

 

Arne Weingart:

This book is encased with so many layers of history — personal and public — and cultural, psychological, and sociological explication that it can feel next to impossible to see clearly through to its means and motives. But I agree that it’s worth the effort, just for the reasons you mention.

Like most American Jews of my generation, I’m holocaust-adjacent. I’m directly affected but at a certain remove. My parents emigrated in the 1920’s from Poland and arrived eventually in Nashville, Tennessee via Havana, Toronto, and Chicago. A few other Polish relatives preceded or followed before the immigration gates swung shut. With not many exceptions, my great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, great-uncles and aunts, and many cousins who remained were all exterminated. These are the people I came to know only in photographs.

My parents, like many of their generation, were reluctant to talk about what they had lost and the ways they had lost it. They believed in the evil eye — they had seen it stare them down and blink. They may not have believed in fate, but they seemed less than eager to tempt it. As a rule, we didn’t talk about the dead.

I grew up as the final child of parents colloquially unconnected to their new environment — their new home — through either history or language. And it became clear to me early on that we were equally disconnected to that vast web of family that naturally surrounds one, not exclusively in the American South, but everywhere and for everyone. There were relatives, to be sure, but there was something off, something unspoken, missing, and forbidden. Without knowing anything, children know everything.

 

EJ: With this knowing intact, when did your exploration about the Holocaust begin and how has it expanded over the years, particularly toward research for Concentration?

 

AW: My earliest attempts to learn about the Holocaust predate the general adoption of the term itself. “Genocide” was only officially defined and codified (with its five conditions) in 1948, the year after I was born. But I was barely a teenager when it occurred to me that my circumstances dictated that I was on my own when it came to this particular topic. I began reading my way into it with the untutored, uncynical belief that insight would lead to insight, understanding to understanding. I don’t hold it against myself that I thought I might be trying to take within my compass only an enormous lake when it turns out to have been the sum of all oceans. One of the more interesting and influential books I carted off to college was Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (1941) by Peter Viereck, which was an attempt to explain the roots of Nazism in literary, religious, historical, political, and broader cultural terms. The book was controversial when it was published early in the war (let alone when I read it, some 24 years later), but it introduced me to a way of trying to think about history that I have tried over the years to keep faith with. And my reading — or call it research — since then includes most of the usual suspects — Eli Wiesel, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Tony Judt, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Theodore Adorno, Deborah Lipstadt, and nearly countless memoirs and personal histories, celebrated and obscure. More recently, texts include Holocaust by the poet Charles Reznikoff, which is a found-poetry restructuring of transcripts from the Nuremburg tribunal and the Eichmann trial, and Cold Crematorium by Joseph Debreczeni, an unsentimental accounting of life and death in what he refers to as “The Land of Auschwitz.” The only way to remain ignorant about this aspect of our collective and recent past is by resolute and malevolent intent.

I don’t know that random, omnivorous reading counts as research, but I did become a German major in college, perhaps in the hope that taking a more informed look into a nation’s literary and artistic practices might give me some sort of special, non-political, less-reductive insight. It didn’t. But what I did come to understand is that the Germans — yes, I’ll generalize unforgivably here — are suckers for both the utterly sublime and the utterly banal. exactly in the sense that Hannah Arendt defined it, which makes them particularly good at irony. That enormous gap between the low and the high, between the quotidian and the empyrean, seems to have created a black-hole-level gravitational field into which Western Civilization’s self-respect was sucked, along with most of my extended family. It’s through this lens of incomprehension that I view current events.

 

EJ: I’m fascinated by the sweep of your imagination that generated the poems in this sequence. In a sense, they feel to me as if they gushed out of you in a concentrated period of time, which may just be an indication of terrific writing. Would you share your process with me?

 

AW: Covid turned me inward and sat me down at my desk and got me to circle back around to what had been most incomprehensible in my life and put myself in the shoes I could easily have fit into only a couple of generations ago and a continent removed — if, for example, my family had been able to migrate as late as the mid-1800’s from the Pale of Settlement and ghetto serfdom to a precarious perch of circumscribed, lower middle class respectability in one of the Eastern European capitals. Think Kafka’s family, for example. There, finally on the edge of artistic aspiration and possibility, I might have ended up in a concentration camp — as Kafka himself surely would have had he survived his own poor health — believing myself a poet and wanting both to write and survive. This entirely fictional persona is Concentration’s first person narrator.

I began writing at first as a kind of test of concep –: if such a sequence of poems could have possibly been written in these circumstances, what would they be like? To start, they would have to be short, something that could be dashed off in stolen moments. Second, and perhaps counterintuitively, they should be formal and consistent, as if in resistance to chaos and terror, but also in the interest of not having to make that choice for every iteration. Hence blank verse, three lines short of a sonnet. Also, they should be written as though without possibility of revision. After my first couple of tries, I settled into a regular routine — something I almost never do otherwise — and wrote until I felt I had come to the end of a narrative arc — which emerged only in the process of writing. Six weeks at most, sometimes two poems a day.

 

 

PROLOGUE

I try to think what happened in cafés

when we were in cafés. Or sitting in

the park when there were parks. When there was time

for staring through a thick tobacco haze

at nothing. Waiting for something to begin

we somehow had agreed would be sublime.

I can’t remember what it was we thought.

Only that there was music in the air

of the most modern type. The love we sought

was temporary but profound. If there

were verses we expected them to rhyme.

 

XXXVI.

Sometimes there is a moment in the night

after the last cough in an enormous room

full of coughing when it is possible

to think of the existence of a different

physics. Not less deterministic

or indifferent. But one where the rules

allow for light to occasionally bend

in unpredictable directions. Where gravity

masquerades as levity. And where time

is less dependent on our knowing when.

This gives me hope. Then someone coughs again.

 

XL.

I can’t help thinking what would Rilke think

who taught us how to see hope and affliction

and beauty and love and hopelessness

with the same admiring tightly focused eye.

It was exhilarating reading him

and feeling at once ancient and the most

modern it might be possible to be.

I’m not the same reader. Despite the power

I might have felt in that unchanging place

the world that changed me is not Rilke’s world.

If he were here he wouldn’t last an hour.

 

 

EJ: You begin the book with a prologue that describes a time before the war, implying hope: “If there / were verses we expected them to rhyme.” “Hope is the thing with feathers” and “After great pain, a formal feeling comes … This is the hour of lead,” two contrasting view from Emily Dickinson. Hope can be buoyant, carefree, and hope can be heavy and toxic like lead. Hope is a word that appears just two times in your poems, but throughout the book there is a tone of hopefulness, or the possibility of hopefulness in the speaker’s voice. I’m wondering where did you find the spirit and courage in your persona to be hopeful in the face of such horror?

 

AW: To state the obvious, hope is strictly forward-facing. Looking backward or at what we perceive to be the present, there are always enough arguments — good arguments! — for hopelessness. But hopefulness seems to be genetically encoded in all life forms, including the plant on my windowsill suffering my benign neglect, the ant about to be crushed under my shoe, and myself standing in the rain on a New York street corner waiting for a taxi. Hope over experience, every time.

Viktor Frankl, who survived imprisonment in four concentration camps and the murder of his immediate family, went on to try to establish a new branch of psychotherapy — logotherapy — which elevates hopefulness into a quasi-religious quest to interrogate the meaning of life. I myself, who have suffered infinitely less, am not nearly so sanguine about the healing potential of hope. But I recognize it as an inseparable aspect of human nature — of all nature. We should not attempt to expunge it on account of how disappointed we can expect to be.

As you point out, the prologue poem mentions an expectation that poems should rhyme and does itself formally rhyme, as does the epilogue poem. In between, with the exception of one poem, rhymes are infrequent, almost accidental when they do occur, although other aspects of form are maintained. Chaos and random terror have their own rules, their own formal qualities, which is something the book and its narrator try to address. A return to form, rhymes included, does not signal a world healed, a world purified, a world come back to reason. But one can — and will — always hope.

 

EJ: When I discovered the found poems of Charles Reznikoff, they destabilized me in the way he wrought cold, historical documents into incisive, moving art. The poems in Concentration, although not centos, sometimes read like historical evidence, but they are much warmer in feeling and tone. The following three poems, which appear at the end of the book, are crafted in nuanced and paradoxical language. These poems show me that as this Nazi Holocaust is drawing to a close, yet your language presumes that the same holocaust, in a sense, is beginning all over again: “But looking at us you will feel a judgement / descend. And When they find us if they find us we will be/almost impossible to look at.”

How did you manifest the speaker’s steady emotional tone, what did this signify for you, and how did you maneuver an ending for something that historically never actually ends?

 

 

XLIV.

When they find us if they find us we will be

almost impossible to look at. We are

occupants of a planet whose existence

is theoretically conceded but

upon which no human wishes to tread.

We are both sub- and superhuman. Therefore

alien and never to be trusted.

We will grow back our human flesh and hair.

Regain our appetites. Our base desires.

But looking at us you will feel a judgement

descend. May you be judged. But not by us.

 

XLV.

They’ve started piling corpses up against

a wall. This is not normal based on all

that passes for normal. Regardless we

are not alarmed. We’ve seen how the supply

of bodies can so easily exceed

demand inside our little factory.

Things even out. Death. Life. The natural need

for order inside chaos. Eventually

a plan will be revealed only to be

cancelled or forgotten. But meanwhile they

are piling corpses up against a wall.

 

XLVIII.

You’ll probably want to know if I’m alive.

That’s if you still believe in narrative.

One thing followed by yet another thing

and so on. The gun resting on the mantle

in the first act that goes off in the third.

Or doesn’t. You can’t help wanting to feel

you know something about the world. I can’t

help it either and I know less than nothing.

But I was not trapped in a fairytale.

There were no kings. No spells. No princesses.

In the deep wood no monsters. Only men.

 

AW: I’ll try to address this question of tone by first quoting from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” one of the most beautiful and devastating poems ever to take up some of these same themes:

 

Black milk of daybreak we drink it come evening

we drink it come midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we shovel a grave in the air where there’s plenty of room

There’s a man in the house who plays with his snakes who writes

who writes in the twilight to Deutschland

your golden hair O Margareta …

 

With its driving rhythm of anapests and dactyls and the constant circling back of fugal form, Celan creates a masterpiece which, while itself very much a performance — a macabre, keening song even — somehow seems as calm as the eye of a hurricane. One wants to scream, face to face with either history or the mirror, but a scream is not a poem, much less a fugue or a symphony. To keep oneself from screaming, therefore, one must sometimes whisper. It’s the built-in problem of the political poem, to find the comfortably uncomfortable place between certainty and doubt, outrage and resolution. In this sequence of poems, I tried to think of each of them as a question without an answer. As Primo Levi famously said, “Here there is no ‘Why?’”

And as for historical endings, I think we’re all shocked and disoriented by how quickly the horrors of the previous century seem to be circling back to us, as if on a demented carousel.

 

EJ: Finally, Arne, you have transcribed Concentration into a play. I can see how bringing actors and music into a conversation with these poems will heighten their themes and foster a deeper irony. What was this writing process like for you, and what did you discover in your poems, specifically about the speaker, that you may not have realized before?

 

AW: Almost immediately after finishing the book, it occurred to me that what I had written was an extended dramatic monologue. I’m grateful that knowledge escaped me until afterward — I don’t think the work would have benefited from an extra layer of self-consciousness. But then I also began to wonder how the book might best find it readers — whom I started thinking of as an audience. The book was, as mentioned, a monologue with a dramatic narrative arc. Could it possibly work as a kind of play? Not exactly a recital but a performance, all the same. And what if there were some music? Music could be good. Actually, music could be great.

So now, about a year after the book was first released, it will have its first “performance” with five actors and original music by my composer friend Cherise Leiter. Outside of being extremely captivating and moving strictly on its own, the music brings tension and release and continuity, qualities that a mere recital of the poems might never capture. And having multiple actors voice the poems elevates them somehow, transports them from the reading chair to the more public territory of the stage. If we all can imagine ourselves as the speaker, then the book will have succeeded beyond whatever my hopes might otherwise have been.

Contributor
Arne Weingart

Arne Weingart lives in Chicago with his wife Karen, where he is the principal of a graphic design firm specializing in identity and wayfinding. He was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University.  Journal publications include Arts & Letters, Coal Hill Review, Mudfish, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod, Oberon, Passager, Plume, Poetry Daily, RHINO, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, Paterson Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, the Moth, Solstice, Southeast Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southword, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He received  the Moth’s 2021 Nature Writing Prize, judged by Helen Macdonald.  Published collections are Levitation for Agnostics, Unpractical Thinking, and Concentration (FutureCycle Press).

Contributor
Elizabeth Jacobson

Elizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems, There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, will be published in 2025 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her previous collection, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, was awarded the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

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