• Archive: Paul Celan

Excerpt from “The Meridian” Speech

Perhaps we can say that every poem is marked by its own ’20th of January’? Perhaps the newness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to be mindful of this kind of date? But do we not all write from and toward some such date? What else could we claim as our

Deathfugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when