The only readily available English-language collection of Sarah Kirsch’s poetry, Ice Roses: Selected Poems, translated by Anne Stokes and published by Carcanet, appeared in 2014, the year after Kirsch’s death in 2013. Born Ingrid Helle Irmelind Bernstein in 1935, she took her husband’s name when she married in 1960 (they divorced later), and changed her first name to commemorate the murdered Jews of the Holocaust;  Kirsch dryly summarizes her life in the trajectory of history: “I was a child in the Nazi era. Then I became acquainted with the GDR, then West Germany, then the one they recently tossed together. You can’t pack much more than that into a lifetime. My motto was always: a writer can’t have it bad enough”. (xi) This is quoted in Anne Stokes’ introduction, which, unsurprisingly given the places and times in which Kirsch wrote, reckons with just what it means to call Kirsch a political poet. Encountering translations of Rafael Alberti in the 1960s, “she discovered that a poem did not have to openly agitational to be directly and eminently political.” (xiv) This would have been an easier lesson to learn in socialist East Germany, where her work had gained, by the 1970s, the close attention of the Stasi, leading to its eventual suppression and her departure for West Germany in 1978. For in the poetry world of the GDR, the decision to turn inwards, and grant priority to the first-person, was inherently political: “from an early stage in her poetic development, she claimed, she had quite simply been unable to write generally and optimistically about the future of the socialist state, or to relinquish the first-person pronoun ‘ich’ (‘I’). Writing in the first person, she elaborated, had in fact, been her salvation.” (xvi) But that salvation cannot—Kirsch herself insisted—be translated into a pure political sphere, despite “the tendency of Western readers and critics to look for political meanings even in poems that are not on the face of concerned with socio-political issues.” In an interview with a younger poet near the end of her life, Kirsch explained “that her work was never overtly political, but that a certain consciousness and particular conditions that characterized her as a GDR citizen had, of course, found their way into it.” (xvii). 

              Though there has been some notable pushback in recent years, not least with the publication of Katja Hoyer’s 2023 Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany, which seeks to recover the East German historical experience from being rendered a mere aberration in European progress, it can feel that East German history easily becomes an object of prurient fascination. One superb artistic engagement with that history, the 2006 film The Lives of Others, thematizes the prurient fantasies of violated privacy. But that prurience, I think, is a symptom of a shared political reality, a shared condition of all political experience: the boundary of public and private is permeable, shifting, and both a constraint on and object of political power; it creates and is created by the political, since the political never resides on the public side alone. Intensely private poetry can simultaneously be keenly sensitive to politics: it is the very dogged commitment to hollowing out a private space that is felt, in such poetry, as a measure of a political reality that would conquer or dominate private life. This is the case, for instance, with Osip Mandelstam, Eugenio Montale, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Paul Celan; in its hermetically sealed and hermeneutically resistant design, this poetry baffles readers because it needs to communicate something that public life has rendered impossible. It is political because it erects a wall between public life and private space that a political order, or the movement of history, would deny. This is a tradition to which Kirsch is indebted, though she distinguishes herself from these writers with her playful tenderness that expresses the openness of the space she has found as much as the exhaustion of resistance. 

Take her poem, “The kite,” written from her time in the GDR:

              Thunder: the red flames

              Create a lot of beauty. The needle-shaped

              Trees fly with their entire bodies: a wild bird

              Splayed on the wind and still trusting

              Sails through the air. Has he got you

              In his southern eye, me in the northern one?

              How we are torn, and whole

              Only in the bird’s head. Oh why

              Am I not your servant I

              Could be with you then.  In this electric summer

              No one is thinking of himself and the sun

              In a thousand mirrors is a terrible sight alone. 

              It is a poem about a sundered relationship; there is nothing to tell us that the separation owes to political circumstances; we are not invited to read “red flames” as a symbolic redness here. But something does happen with the line “No one is thinking of himself and the sun,” and it is compounded by “a thousand mirrors is a terrible sight alone” since in these lines the I-you axis is transformed to an I-them or Us-Them axis, and with it, the isolation of the poet is exacerbated into a shared and widespread anomie that supersedes longing or regret. “Alone” looks both inward (she is alone) and outward (everyone is alone looking outwards, at the sun). We might begin to read backwards. “This electric summer” is likewise not only theirs. The bird that flies above is detached from the human experience, but also an observer of it; it is not just set apart from the poet and the addressee, but by virtue of soaring over the entire human landscape, and with the distinction of “southern eye” and “northern eye” (they could not have been “eastern” and “western,” but the bird is flying on an east-west path), their separation is global, and they are “whole | only in the bird’s head” because no earthly reuniting is possible. We could say that they are separated by fate, by choices they have made, or by human powers beyond their control; the uncertainty is itself an indication that something cannot be said. The appeal to the view of the bird allows nature to fulfill a role as an alternative to public life and private life; it is a view from nowhere human, an escape from the human (and perhaps the political), without which they cannot conceive of themselves as whole. 

              As we read back further, to the start, we can ask if this is in fact a bird. The poem begins with “red flames” that are at first a strike of lightning, and then seem a fire sparked by lightning, and finally, as the trees fly, an explosion that “create a lot of beauty.” How jarringly “a lot of” slackens what could have been simply “create beauty”: slightly slack-jawed in its combination of stupefied awe and naïve wonder, but also, within that, we might hear sardonic irony, even sarcasm. The trees cannot “fly with their entire bodies,” cannot fly at all, being rooted; they would flee if they could, perhaps, but if they fly, it is by virtue of being forced to the air. It might be thought that the trees flying refers really to the birds flying from their branches, and they do, but “trees fly with their entire bodies” yields instead to the singular, “a wild bird.” “Wild” disorients for implying the birds might be domesticated—not that no such birds exist, but because they would not be here, in this tree; and if they would, what sort of tree is it? In this way the uncertainties, opacities, and vagueness proliferate through the poem so that we are on the one hand presented with a concentration of vision and still unable to name object or action. 

              The same force that has conveyed it into our field of sight has dislodged it from our field of comprehension. We are made to feel that the poet could explain, but that to do so would be to do away with what the poem is doing. What we are left with is the communication of a feeling, a feeling that is set right in relation to a world that inspires but cannot accommodate it; it cannot easily be distilled, but it is akin to helplessness, sharpened to a point in “splayed on the air and still trusting”: “splayed” suggests violence suffered, and “on the air” could make the air a medium or else a means of effecting the violence, without grounding, without roots, without a place; the displacement of the bird is both voluntary and involuntary, it “soars” but that soaring might be, like the trees that “fly,” a consequence of force rather than a choice; most poignant is “still trusting,” since it is itself in the air, detached from an object: still trusting in what? The word redounds back onto the speaker, a moment of self-doubt, even self-accusation. And this is the bird’s sight on which their being whole depends. 

               I will for a moment return to the thought (found in earlier posts) that a poem reconciles, or apprehends the impossibility of reconciling, the actual, the imaginary, and the right. This is a poem that dramatizes the impossibility of doing so; the imaginary dominates, so that the flight of the trees and the flight of the bird seem flights of fancy (“creates a lot of beauty” she acknowledges of her own poem, and here the self-accusation is clear) but being occasioned as they are by the “thunder” and “red flames,” the imagination behind them is possessed of terror. The imagination of the poem, its fantasy of the tree and the bird, its yearning for a relationship that could not be, cannot be reconciled to anything actual because the actual is what is denied explicit entry to the poem; it is difficult to say what the poem is about exactly because we do not quite know what is about (as in, surrounding) the poem. What we know is that something is there, and that it has to do with separation and sight and violence; and at least one of these terms—sight—is a term that indicates exposure. It is remarkable that in a poem about seeing and being seen, and that imagines being made whole by being seen from a vantage point that does not actually exist, there is an overwhelming desire to hide, to avoid being exposed; the poem does not open itself to the view of outsiders, or to the occasion of its being written. And this is why we can say it’s a political poem: because it reclaims the private against the public, the hidden against the seen, in an act (and medium) that is inherently visible and public in its orientation. 

               Lest we think that the delineation of public and private is political in the GDR but would not be elsewhere, we can consider how conveniently different social-political orders can be compared in terms of the relations they establish between public and private. Mary Douglas’ cultural theory, developed from her second book, Natural Symbols, through later books and into essays in the 1990s, models cultural variety by distinguishing ideal “types” of cultures through two general variables, which she represents as two axes on a graph: on the one hand, some cultures have a denser set of rules and regulations than others (she calls this “grid” and it is her Y axis), and some cultures have stronger inside-outside boundaries than others (she calls this “group” and it is her X axis). Her graph presents her with four quadrants, though in practice cultures could occupy any position within them (and the “zero” point along each axis has no meaning); it is perhaps better to present, as Douglas herself does at times, the axes as the borders of a box, with the four ideal types represented by the corners. At any rate, the four types she offers are fatalist (sense of having lots of rules with low group boundaries/belonging); individualist (sense of having few rules and low group boundaries/belonging); enclave or cult (sense of having few rules within the group but strong group boundaries and belonging); and hierarchy (lots of rules and strong group boundaries or belonging). The four positions are relative and might be thought of as centers of gravity to which individual worldviews or institutional structures cluster. And any culture might contain sub-cultures, distinguished by their relative positions along the axes.

              What I would like to suggest is that we could reorient Douglas’ conception of grid and suggest that it refers not to “density of rules” but instead to “density of distinct private spaces within which individuals move.” On this reading, political differences are differences in how public and private are distinguished, how private boundaries are monitored against public boundaries. Few private spaces and a porous public/private boundary make for an individualist democracy; clear public and many distinct and separate private spaces makes for a hierarchy (like the Catholic church); a lack of distinct private spaces set against a clear and policed private/public boundary, with outsiders representing a threatening “public,” makes for a cult or enclave (think here of Scientology, which, despite its internal structure of rankings and roles, suggesting lots of rules, does not allow, it would seem, individual members much scope for private lives within the group); and the peculiar fatalist position is not an individual set against a public, but an individual in a world of intensely policed private spaces in which the individual is felt to be a public intruder, pushed from one to the next.

              Douglas’ disheartening conclusion is that the different gravitation centers pull individuals apart and keep them apart; their views cannot be talked through or reconciled because they do not share a common framework for talking. In my account, we could say that they cannot construct a public sphere in which to reach consensus. But for the sake of discussing poetry, the intersection of group and grid, or public/private boundaries in relation to the density of distinct private spaces, provides us with an insight on how poetry from very different political experiences can speak across those differences: even as the configuration differs of these lattice works differs, we can recognize them. The public and private tension is felt in any political order.

               What’s more, it is the case with a good deal of political poetry—and certainly of Kirsch’s—to attempt to imagine possibilities of the grid/group, private/public borders that might run afoul the actual lived reality; or it might be, and we notice this in Kirsch’s poetry too, that the poetry brings into focus an ambivalence in the public-private relationships that political ideology seeks to mask. In Douglas’ model, the self-image of GDR of the 1960s and 1970s would be a cult operating at scale, with the ideal of a shared private life within the clear boundaries of belonging and strict limits to exit; hence the need for a state security apparatus featuring the Stasi. But in practice that defied ideal self-image, such a cult structure cannot be sustained. Douglas refers to enclaves as well as cults, suggesting the scale of either must be relatively small. At the scale of the GDR, inevitably, other cultural types threaten to spring up, even if only in relative and circumscribed forms; this is why the first-person of Kirsch’s poetry was perceived as dangerous, marking as it did an experience that insisted on privacy.

               In the poetry that Kirsch wrote in West Germany and then the reunified Germany (“the one they recently tossed together,” she called it towards the end of her life), the pervasive suspicion of surveillance and the threat of a monolithic enclave was absent, but the poetry is often still written from the edge of a private space, aware that something beyond might encroach within; privacy is an effort, even there. And that is because privacy, or at least the right sort of privacy, requires imagination and work no matter the social structure. Returning to Douglas’ types, even in a hierarchy, with its proliferation of private spaces, that very proliferation, the order of the structure, might be felt as an imposition on an individual, since such an order is generated by the group. Here is “Later,” published in 1992:

              The candles flicker in the garden

              As the guests depart

              Slowly. I go

              Behind the hedge disguised

              As a farmer. Getting ready for

              Something that never happens.

              We can read the final lines in at least two ways: it might be a residue of life in the GDR, the “something that never happens” after “disguised” coming as a relief, the private life of the party left intact. It also might be disappointment, the readiness for “something that never happens” tilting in an entirely different direction: a private or public life that fails to fulfill its promise or fails to provide scope for action. Here, the actual overwhelms the imagination, and the relation of private and public is also inverted from that of “The kite”: there the private vantage point was erected in and by the poem itself, against a public; that it is a public, and not private, is suggested by “as a farmer,” since it is far-fetched to conceive of this as a lover’s meeting (and even if that disguise were for such a purpose, it would suggest a public’s nosy spying). At any rate, in this poem, with the thematization of hospitality, but also with the greater clarity of occasion, and the explicit mention of “disguise,” public experience is invited in. It is admitted, though, only to leave the private fantasy stranded, whether it is relieved or disappointed at “something that never happens”—for even if it is relief in the final line, it is accompanied by an awareness that the poet’s fantasies of private resistance are ill-suited, ill-fitting, for the occasion.

               In her last poems, intently focused on small scenes from the natural world, Kirsch would seem to retreat from the pressure of public-private mediation. Here is “Advent”:

              Three windows opened

               In one speech bubble

               I discovered a sigh.

              No no no

              Airmail no

              Seismic shock

              No water mark

              No nothing only

              Patagonian cold

              The leaves are blown 

              Together from

              A great distance the sun

              Shuffles about

               In sandals. 

               It will not do to generalize from this poem alone, but it is characteristic in its narrow form, neither cramped inwards in a protective tuck nor chiseled from abundance but pieced together from a scarcity of materials. Like her earlier poems, this resists interpretation; but whereas in her earlier poems the resistance comes about from what cannot be said, as if a force without the poem has pressed it within itself, “Advent” seems an effort to gather enough, and order it sufficiently, to make interpretation of poem and world alike possible. It is not pressed upon by an experienced of a violently shared public space but it comes together in an open expanse. It does not resist forces but asserts its own small quiet force (even the “no no no” is quiet, insisting and then accounting for what is missing) ; in this too it is political.

-- By Owen Boynton  

Bibliography:

Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994)

Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. 3rd Edition (Routledge, 2003)

Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (University of California, 1983)

Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems, trans. Anne Stokes (Carcanet, 2014)