You must see that it’s wrong that following the Shoah
there can only be no
poetry,
because to save from Flood all living beings, Noah
used wood God caused to grow
into a Noah tree,
the one from which to make an Ark God grew wood
so that all forms of life
were not destroyed,
its wood the unforbidden fruit from which Old Noah understood
how with his wife
to fill the world, no void—
like the forbidden fruit our parents had consumed
from the knowledge tree—
leading to survival
of all the forms of life which would have otherwise been doomed
for their misanthopology,
without the Ark’s archival.
In his essay ”Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), Theodore Adorno wrote that ”after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.”
In an obituary of Gerald Stein in the 11/1/22 NYT (“Gerald Stern, Poet of Wistfulness, Anger and Humor, Dies at 97)”, Neil Genzlinger writes that Stein said in a video discussing “The Dancing,” from his collection “Paradise Poems” (1984):
“We remember the famous words that after the Holocaust, after Shoah, there can be no poetry,” he said. “The alternative is, after Shoah there can be only poetry.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
