Submitted by Michael Neininger
on
I co-edited a special issue of The Germanic Review on the poet Paul Celan. As Natalie Lozinski-Veach and I write in our introduction, Celan’s poems demonstrate a remarkable capacity to touch on others’ histories and experiences and to be touched by them in turn. Drawing on transnational German studies, this introduction sketches out a framework for appreciating the connections that his poetry facilitates. The essays that follow the introduction offer connective readings of Celan that range from the 13th-century Anatolian mystic Yunus Emre to the contemporary American poet Claudia Rankine.
My contribution to that issues, "Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies,” reads his poem “Low Tide” for its traces of the overlapping ecological legacies of Auschwitz and the Middle Passage.