Poems by Psychohistorians

Review of David Beisel, Ed., Wounded Centuries: A Selection of Poems (Cambridge, MA: Grolier Poetry Press, 2016), ISBN 978-1-4951-1527-1, 69 pages, paperback, $15.00.

During my professional career, I have dabbled in poetry and had four poetry books published, and a large number of poems placed in various anthologies. I see poetry as a word painting. The poetry collection, Wounded Centuries, underscores my feelings. It is a powerful book of poems, with strong imagery and feelings, which was created by David Beisel, a distinguished psychohistorian, with contributions by seven psychohistorians who write poetry.

The authors include the following: John Allman, one of America’s finest poets; Rudolph Binion, Leff Families Professor of History at Brandeis University until his death in 2011; Dan Dervin, a Professor Emeritus of Mary Washington University; Irene Javors, a psychotherapist in New York City who serves on the faculty of Yeshiva University; Merle Molofsky, a psychoanalyst in New York City; Peter Petschauer, Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the History Department at Appalachian State University; and Howard Stein, a psychological and applied anthropologist who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma.

All poems in the edition appear to be deeply felt. Listening to, reading, and watching media can suffice to create an intellectual and emotional connection to the subject matter. As the editor, Dr. Beisel, states in the preface, “These poems deal with the history of emotions, with issues of identity, and memory, with blind spots, obsessions, hidden motives and irrationalities writ large and small. Some are autobiographical, some semi-autobiographical, both fit neatly into the long standing tradition of the self as a research instrument” (viii). The poets in this selection have

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written poems of power and imagination. They are aware of history and of those disciplines, such as music and psychology, which can affect how one writes poetry.

John Allman has six poems in this anthology. They “capture famous historical figures at turning points in their lives” (vii). He was a pioneer in writing “psychologically-oriented history poems. His Clio’s Children, published by New Directions in 1985, sought to restore the importance of the individual to historical narratives” (7).

In his poem, “Bruno Bettleheim at Dachau 1938” (8), Allman’s imagery is quite vivid. Let us look at a small sample of what I am trying to convey here:

The guard tells you to pick up the pebble,
bring it
rolling to his palm.
It’s the wrong one. Older prisoners stare at dirt
lodged under fingernails. If the rifle butt comes
down, you’ll never again
tie a string: child, fumbling
with shoelaces, despised like the man eating grass,
“Moslem and filth” Will another pebble change you?
Will there be a Bettleheim
Using “I”

It should be mentioned that Bettleheim spent one year in Dachau in 1938. Obviously that experience had an enormous impact on him and on his professional career. Allman captures a moment in Bettleheim’s experience within Dachau quite vividly and powerfully. Here we have an example of a poet who has a feeling of history and sees certain experiences with a poet’s eye. It is structured and highly emotional.

Rudolph Binion explores “the nature of historical study itself, the inadequacy of rational models, and why we remember what we forget” (vii) in his poems. One of many poems which reflects this is “Traumatic Reliving”:

No traumas get forgotten, big or small.
The ones you manage to put out of mind
In their entirety, or to recall
With the traumatic effect left behind,
Are thereby ready to revisit you
In actuality, to be replayed
By you in thin disguise […] You wince remembering a twist of fate
That caught you short, a loss that wiped you out,
A death you caused, a love turned to hate,
A shameful episode you brought about?

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Be glad such misadventures fill your head;
That way you won’t recycle them instead (17).

Dan Dervin’s “poems touch on the history of protest, the historical traumas of central Europe, contemporary culture and the environment” (vii). I have included an excerpt from his poem “Gamed by the System: Poetry’s Last Manifesto?”:

Let gamesmanship triumph over thought;
Reshuffle the deck, mark your cards
In contraband icons (just click Enter
As your Muse the Mouse moves you).
Let a tap on the Return key install origin-
ality, and you won’t be held in con-
tempt for exceeding arbitrary limits (28)

Irene Javors invokes “The limits of history, take[s] us back to the magical thinking embedded in the buildings and artifacts of Scotland’s pre-history, then move[s] on to the paranoid red scare hysteria of the early 1950’s as seen through the eyes of a child” (vii). Her poem, “Skara Brae,” exemplifies this:

At the edge of the north world
etched into the rocks
abandoned stone houses
lost in time
waiting for us to come home (34).

Merle Molofsky’s poems “explore the minds of war veterans, the history of violent assaults on the earth, the importance of mother-child love, and the cruelties of dehumanizing bureaucracies” (viii). Her poem, “Safe Haven,” reflects a mother’s love and the trauma of loss with the words “all mothers weep for the broken child they miss” (41). Peter Petschauer seeks “to understand the emotional underside of Nazism as well as the causes and long-term consequences of the Holocaust and twentieth-century violence” (viii). The poem, “My Holocaust” (49), reflects this. Here is an excerpt:

His cards and letters–
decades later in an attic in New Jersey
re-awakened the ugly past.
So far removed in space and time–
re-arose the quest to understand
the fate of an uncle in wartime Warsaw.
He dreaded the onset of winter–
when he found a white summer suit.
Salvation seemed at hand–
but winter was not the problem.

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Treblinka became his destination next July.
America did not want more educated Jews.

Finally, there is Howard Stein, whose “poems deal with totalitarianism, ways of understanding enemies, corporate dehumanization and possible ways to escape cycles of traumatic re-enactment” (viii). One of his poems, which I particularly appreciate, is “A Little Morning Music Under Stalin” (57). This is one of my favorite poems in this selection because I enjoy Shostakovich’s music and I am aware of the travails he endured under Stalin. Aside from this, it should be pointed out that meter in poetry is similar to music; if one is aware of musical timing, poetry can be enhanced in its reading. The following are some lines which I extrapolated from Howard Stein’s poem:

Shostakovich over breakfast
Is not such a good idea–
Not good for the appetite,
Not to mention swallowing
And digestion. Shostakovich
Can be upsetting with his
Infectious tunes followed
By screeching dissonance
And loud hammering [….] Come to think of it,
There is no good time
For this Russian. His is the land of
Loud knocks on the door
At three in the morning.
And disappearance to the vanishing point.
Listen to Shostakovich only
When you have the stomach
For a world you could not make up.

All in all, I strongly recommend this poetry book for both beginners and aficionados of poetry. I believe these poems should be read aloud. The poems reflect a diversity of imagination and reality and strong, vivid imagery of what has been experienced and what has been indirectly experienced. I also believe that the influence of Whitman is there within these poems in that his freewheeling, open-ended style and earthy voice are totally modern. By turns, joyous and haunting, sensual and spiritual, his poetry celebrates with fierce originality nature, the body, and the contradictions of the human soul. Thus I feel his spirit resonates in these poems.

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