Poetic Knowing/Essay on Fugitive Pieces

http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol41/anne_michaels.htm

Excerpt:

One of the most powerful fictional tellings of the stories of the Holocaust to have emerged from contemporary Canada is Fugitive Pieces (1996) by the Toronto-born poet Anne Michaels. A novel that, in the words of John Steffler, "constructs a delicate bridge between the present and the haunting past and leads [its] characters to solid ground and a permanent place in our memories," Fugitive Pieces is divided into two parts, the first narrated by Jakob Beer, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Canada and subsequently published several volumes of poetry based on his experiences, and the second by a young Jewish professor known only as Ben whose "own connection with the wounding legacies of the war kindle a fascination with Jakob and his writing" ("Advance Praise"). Both thematically and stylistically, Fugitive Pieces is an exercise in "poetic knowing," an epistemological mode that Michaels carefully distinguishes from mere knowledge in a meditation on love, poetry, and memory entitled "Cleopatra’s Love" in the March 1994 number of Poetry Canada Review:

The distinction between knowledge and "poetic knowing" resembles the distinction between history and memory. Knowledge/History is essentially amoral: events occurred. "Poetic Knowing"/Memory is inextricable linked with morality: history’s source is event, but memory’s source is meaning. Often what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.
     Memory, like love, gains strength through restatement, reaffirmation; in a culture, through ritual, tradition, stories, art. Memory courts our better selves; it helps us recognize the importance of deed; we learn from pleasure just as we learn from pain. And when memory evokes consideration of what might have been or been prevented, memory becomes redemptive. As Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai wrote: "to remember is a kind of hope."
                                                                                                                           (15)

Or as Jakob puts it in the novel:

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
                                                                                                                         (138)

Acutely aware though she doubtless is of the problems of historical imagination and literary representation,² Michaels nevertheless attempts in Fugitive Pieces "to speak of events…that one has not witnessed, that one has not lived through personally but has absorbed through the culture, through the family, through the home" for, as she told Douglas Fetherling in an interview published shortly after the appearance of the novel, she felt "an obligation to establish some relationship" with "the largest and most devastating reality" of the twentieth century "in order to try to understand how one emerges" from such an event with a capacity for "faith" and the capability to "move towards a place of love in the world" ("Narrative Moves" 16, 18).