Reading Celan

I want to express how much I love this collection. I have been reading it for a long time, which is unusual for me. I am impatient. I want to stand at the end of something so I can look back and tell myself about it. But with Celan's work, I have resisted this impulse.

At times, in some of his poems, there is a simplicity that is deceptive. You could race through them and elude their impact. They are intense. The "simplest" pieces I've read six, seven times before the wind gets knocked out of me.

So much of what he writes takes up language - the naming of things, speech, the written word, silence, illegibility. He approaches it alternately with longing, resignation, and aplomb. Much is "unrepeatable," words are "lost," "Unwritten things, hardened/into Language, lay bare/a sky." Writing is an audacious act, maybe God-challenging. It is hopeful and hopeless, triumph and failure. But it feels as if language is more all-encompassing than this, as if, for Celan, language is a metaphor for humanity - the universality of it, and its contingency or particularity. Scripts, letters, mother tongues, Babel. I have just begun to unpack this. It is so rich.

I love the often chant-like quality of his poems, the turning back on itself, the "you, you"s, the "we, we"s, the refrains - all of it like playing with the materials before building. Or perhaps like dismantling the scaffold as you climb.

I have so much more thinking to do about this, but for now, I list my very favorites (the master list of loved ones is just too long):

The Secret of the Ferns; The Last Flag; Nocturnally Pouting; Speak, You Also; Argumentum e Silentio; Low Water; The Straitening; Psalm; The bright/stones; Anabasis; Everything's different; In the air; On the white prayer-thong; The Juggler's Dream; Give the Word; Well-digger; Wolf's-bean.