D/AGST

thank you for your letter of May 15 and your friendly invitation to contribute to your anthology, My Poem Is my Knife.

I remember telling you that once the poem is really there, the poet is dismissed, is no longer privy. Today, I suppose I would formulate it differently, with more nuances, but in principle I still hold this—old—view. True, there is the aspect which people currently, and so blithely, like to call craft. But—if you will allow me to condense much thinking and experience—craft, like cleanliness in general, is the condition of all poetry. This craft most certainly does not bring monetary rewards, does not have the “golden bottom” of the proverb. Who knows if it has any bottom at all. It has its depths and abysses—and some people (alas, I am not among them) even have a name for that. 

Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e. unique, mortal soul, searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. 

Don’t come with poiein and the like. I suspect that this word, with all its nearness and distance, meant something quite different from its current context.

True, there are exercises—in the spiritual sense, dear Hans Bender. And then there are, at every lyrical street corner, experiments that muck around with the so-called word-material. Poems are also gifts—gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies. 

“How are poems made?”

Some years ago, I had the occasion to witness and, later, to watch from a certain distance how “making” turns by and by into “making it” and thence into machinations. Yes, there is this, too. Perhaps you know about it. It does not happen by accident.

We live under dark skies and—there are a few human beings. Hence, I assume, so few poems. The hopes I have left are small. I tried to hold onto what remains.

With all good wishes for you on your work, 

your Paul Celan

PARIS, 18 MAY 1960