The Poetry of Survival

A tribute to Daniel Weissbort—a gentle man in a violent world.

Photo of Daniel Weissbort provided by Arc Publications.

By Michael Judge

          we’re not comfortably at home
          in our translated world . . .
                  —Rainer Maria Rilke
                      Duino Elegies (trans. A. Poulin, Jr.)

So we have war. Calls for peace. Protests. More war and speeches about the “barbarism” of our enemies. Like King Nimrod’s ancients in the land of Shinar crawling from the rubble of the Tower of Babel, words seem powerless to salve the wounds or prevent still more death and destruction.

Some of us turn to contemplative silence, prayer, poetry. Yet even poetry can seem obscene—a vain and useless sacrilege—at times like this. The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously proclaimed, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Adorno was and is wrong. The world needs what’s at the heart of poetry—witness, warmth, humanity, grief, resistance, ritual, music, irreverence, wonder—more than ever.

No one, I believe, understood this more inherentl…