Category: Other People's Poetry

I’m try­ing to write a poem about Birke­nau that com­bines a sort of infer­nal glee on the part of the Nazis and infer­nal ter­ror on the part of the Jews, Roma and homo­sex­u­als in their pow­er. This is very hard, and made hard­er by the fact that I’m try­ing to use the arrange­ment of the words to indi­cate the inti­ma­cy caused by this mad­ness. Cou­pled with the fact that I have no detailed knowl­edge of either Nazi ide­ol­o­gy and indoc­triniza­tion or the func­tion­ing of a con­cen­tra­tion camp from a pris­on­er’s point of view; this is an exer­cise in empa­thy [on all sides] that is cur­rent­ly beyond my capac­i­ty. Library, ho. This is the first poem I’m actu­al­ly going to have to do research on. Any book rec­om­men­da­tions from y’all?