Author’s note: Probably the first thing to say about this “poem” is that I didn’t write it. All the words here belong to Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary General of the United Nations who was later discovered to have been, also, a former SS officer in Hitler’s Germany. (So if you don’t like the writing here, blame Waldheim, not me). I composed this text by deleting words from Waldheim’s memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, and closing up the spaces left by my “erasure.” Then I took the liberty of visually arranging the resulting word-sequences into the “step-down” tercets that William Carlos Williams used for his poetic sequence on the underworld, but I didn’t rearrange the order of words in Waldheim’s original text.
The second thing to say, I think, would be that this is an excerpt from a longer passage in my book, Voyager, that depicts Waldheim’s imaginary descent into the underworld. I was trying to find a story under the surface of the story—about the United Nations and Cold War geopolitics—that Waldheim tells in his memoir. Because Waldheim himself never talks about the secret story of his involvement in genocidal war crimes during World War II, it seemed right to me to find a “subtext” inside Waldheim’s memoir that recounts a Dantean allegory about reckoning and accountability.
The last thing to say is that I don’t think I’ll ever try my hand at literary erasure again. Deleting this passage into existence was one of the most difficult things I’ve attempted as a writer, and now that it’s done, I’m glad I did it—but now I’d like to try speaking for myself, for a change.
Voyager, Book 3 (Chapter 6)
Mymy
Archbishop A
with his deteriorating wing
regarded the world.
I visited the spirit
there in his august palace.
He complained about the heat
and asked if I would mind
if he took his mitre off.
I agreed and took off my coat
Whether he really believed
is difficult to say . . .
Certainly life
burned inside him.
He had composed a few lines
in Greek,
insisting it was only a draft.
My shaky work he called it,
but I had to admire the line
Therethere.
In Greek I repeated it.
He would look
into the blue overhead
from this private chamber
and praise his own words
with no intention
whatsoever to stop.
Very little could be done,
so I took it upon myself
as cautiously as possible
to cross that phantom out thus
Archbishop A
and took the chair
therethere
in disrepair.
There was an eerie silence
at the table.
I tried making
stone men to continue
the discussion.
As evening progressed,
the men unbent –
Good
edging closer
goodgood . . .
We spent hours discussing forms.
One had a map of the real
that we later published
in the Times in Latin.
One opened a little clock
and said freedom.
Together
we opened my will
over August wine
poured into new bottles
as one asked
Why don’t you smile?
I smiled, and set my spade by.
Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry–Facts for Visitors (2004), and Voyager (2011)–both published by the University of California Press. A book of criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. He has received fellowships and awards from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Creative Capital Foundation, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy is currently an Associate Professor of English a the University of Chicago.
photo credit: stone faces (license)