Birkenau

world
war[m] bloodb
eat­ing a
crack of yel­low a
sliv­er
s[train]ing
again [st
a [res]]
stom­ach
[g]rumbling
smoke
[stop
[s]tart
s]tacks. engine th
Rom for­tune-telling.

the opened do[horr]or.

g[r]ay men
[p/h]unching
gun­butts

all divid­ed
son­derkom­man­dos
[a sh]ambling [jews] guards think

what[?] a g[h]as.t

This is the poem for which I request­ed pri­ma­ry sources. I end­ed up read­ing Maus and rewatch­ing Tri­umph of the Will. Maus filled my need to some extent and Tri­umph act­ed a bit as a spring­board to allow me to extrap­o­late that pomp into patho­log­i­cal hatred, but was ulti­mate­ly inef­fec­tive. So here is the poem as it stood when I first asked for help. Main­ly what I’m try­ing to do is use the same let­ters to rep­re­sent the forced inti­ma­cy of the pris­on­ers with their cap­tors and show how forced inti­ma­cy is dehu­man­iz­ing. It is also an exper­i­ment with form, which gets too busy I think. I won­der if Fiat Tab­u­la Rasa is going to be the only one in that sort of form that sort of works for me.

If you’d like to read some­thing good, read this: Per­sim­mons by Li-Young Lee