My Poetic Journey Against Theoretical Frameworks

This is a response to Howard Stein’s exceptional elabora-

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tions about poetry. Dr. Stein, my dear friend and colleague, is a brilliant theorist who approaches poetry with theory in mind. He does not just write beautiful and challenging poetry; he places it carefully into a theoretical framework and even creates a completely new approach to poetry in his book with Seth Allcorn, Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space (2023). I deeply admire him for his purposefulness.

My approach has been somewhat different—neither better nor worse, just different. Theories about poetry have not been at the forefront of my creations. For me, it all started in 2014. While we were in his car driving to a presentation at his former university near New York City, Dr. David Beisel suggested that I write poetry.

I had no idea how to write poetry, had not written poetry, and did not anticipate that poetry could become a permanent predilection. My emotional hesitation rested in my early childhood attempts to remember and recite in elementary school Friedrich Schiller’s and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s well-known poems. My brother Klaus remembered sections of Schiller’s “The Bell” with ease and recited them, even though he was only three and a half years old. “Why,” he asked in mock amusement, “can you not remember? It is so easy.” Had he not died at four and a half, he might well have become a major writer.

My initial difficulty with poetry was only somewhat mitigated later in Gymnasium (an advanced high school) in Germany. There, we memorized sections of several major poems for a German literature class and then recited them as a group in class. To this day, I can recall some of these verses. One of them stems from Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell”: “The ax in the house saves [calling on] a carpenter.”

So, when Professor Beisel asked me to write several poems for a collection, Wounded Centuries (2015), I did so, but without awareness of the theory or practice of poetry. Except someone told me that today’s poems should not rhyme. Almost immediately, I realized that with poetry, one could express complex topics, concerns, and issues, both personal and societal, practical and abstract, succinctly and understandably. Some of my first poems dealt with my “four mothers,” others with the complicated situation of my father.

Let me highlight the latter. Many years ago, I read about

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Attila Petschauer, a Hungarian journalist and fencer of the 1920s and early 1930s who, individually or along with his team, won gold and silver medals in fencing, including in the Olympics. His colleagues tortured him to death in January 1943 in the Davidovka concentration camp in Ukraine.

In the poem about these events, I wondered how my father could not have known about this man and what he undertook emotionally and practically to avoid being associated with a fellow journalist. My father never spoke about this awkward reality, but the poem allowed me to deal succinctly with a potentially deadly outcome for him and my belated dilemma. I saw in this potentially dangerous situation for my father a conflict that surely brought him sleepless nights as the then SS officer. Here is a personal or local history overlapping with meta-history. It records a rather insignificant story that nevertheless interlocks and creates the tragic larger history.

A later example is the poem I wrote in Listen to Rarely Heard Voices (2022) about horse apples on the path between my condo and Bass Lake in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In itself, the poem’s content would have been insignificant, but when I recalled that my first wife and her sister were asked by their mother after WWII in 1947 or 1948 to collect such dried samples in their neighborhood and ensure fuel for their cooking fire, the poem made sense.

A third example is a recent poem about two soldiers who were crushed into roadways at very different times and places. One was a German soldier in front of snowy Moscow in 1941, and the other was a Russian soldier in the embattled Eastern Ukraine in July 2023. The inspiration for the poem arose when I saw a photograph of the Russian soldier’s mangled body and instantaneously recalled the image of the previous one of the German one.

In my poems, I endeavor to absorb the essence of the situation before me without imposing myself onto it. I learned this approach from the brilliant Japanese poet Matsuo Basho in his work Narrow Road to the Interior (2000). Dr. Jeffrey Rubin reinforced it for me in September 2023 during a Psychohistory Forum meeting titled “Psychoanalytical and Psychobiographical Explorations of Shakespeare as Revealed in His Plays.” In response to a question, he explained that in counseling, as with his understanding of the brilliant English bard, he does not rely on theory, such as those of

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Sigmund Freud. He arrives at the session with what he calls a filing cabinet of ideas about how he might best consult with a patient.

I approach poetry with many different impressions, ideas, and experiences. One is the repetition of walking the same path, yet never knowing what I might see, hear, or encounter along the way. I write similarly about historical topics. I am not guided by a particular approach, but having read and taught history for six decades gives me a “filing cabinet” of information from which to draw when I compose.

That is the background to my poem about the last name Petschauer. I had taught European history for decades, so I am intimately aware of WWII and the Holocaust, and I had absorbed a great deal about my father. With the assistance of Dr. Rubin’s “filing cabinet” of knowledge, experiences, and ideas, the poem practically wrote itself.

A recent and more pleasant poem of mine, which has not been published elsewhere, is about fall 2023.

Fall Again

Once more I head to the lake,
the sound of crunching leaves under my shoes,
the returning smell of fall,
a horse leaving its characteristic effusion.
I am alone.

Many tourists have departed,
a few remaining couples ambulate along the lake –
enamored with this afternoon’s glistening surface,
carry massive backpacks as if Mount Everest were in their hiking plans,
taking selfies to catch the moment.

Thousands of Rhododendron —
planted three generations ago —
shed worn yellow leaves.
Intrusive Caribbean grasses —
delivered by an unnamed hurricane,
overwhelmed native plants during the height of summer –
their vibrant green now yellow and brown.
Tiny native asters raise their frail heads,
their blue hues shine subtly as if in defiance.
An acorn crashes into some leaves behind me –

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stops me in my tracks for a moment.
This too is part of every fall.

(10/1/2023)

With this poem, I hope to highlight my approach to poetry. It is less about me on the path and more about a picture that reverberates and can be enjoyed by its readers. In this case, I am no more than the carrier of images, sounds, and impressions. In other cases, like our family name or the bodies of the two soldiers, it is an attempt to allow the reader to sense the calamity of war and the dilemmas of uniquely personal situations that offer a historical context.

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