Poetry / Maja Lukic
:: Margarethe ::
After Anselm Kiefer, "Margarethe", 1981 You don’t have to understand it to know all this burning straw stands in for a woman’s blonde hair. Or that the picture’s nearest association is human burning, its acrid puzzlement of the air, air that has nowhere to go to escape its fate, air that absorbs dust and skin and lashes. You don’t have to love, even, these pieces of hay rising to flame tips that resemble fingernails. The fire burns white hot centers into each tear-shaped flame, ringed incarnadine—and the hay itself? Disturbed birthday candles or a menorah, twisting up. A reverse celebration—all un-life. In the blue background, part dusk, part sea, is time itself. You traveled to see it once, then sent a photo to me— I loved you for it until the painting’s weight came down and blackened my thoughts. Its fugue was not for us. We were not to benefit from it. What are we to the dead but superficial delegates of a world going on? Are we worthy? We don’t have to touch the charred ground to imagine how the burnt flakes disintegrate in your hand.
:: The Women of Antiquity ::
After Anselm Kiefer, Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity), 1999-2002 They grace art galleries and great halls, headless and faceless plaster brides, their delicate bodies cinched in at a ruthlessly thin waist. They don’t even have legs, only white skirts and heavy objects where their heads ought to be—a glass cube for Hypatia, razor wire for Canidia’s vipers and hair, a tower of lead books for Sappho. Lead, that melancholiest of materials, heavy as hard fate, replacing her fine elastic brain, exerting gravity. What is gravity to these dead plaster beauties but the weight of forgetting? They were poets and thinkers once. Now they are voiceless, so what echoes from their bodies is a different kind of wailing—silent like a metallic taste in my mouth, the coolness of my skin in a cemetery. He makes them delicate, makes them lithe. Kiefer makes the sculptures sensual. It’s a man’s idea of beauty, which is, irrepressibly, my idea of beauty. And here the startling distance between the self’s idea of self and its final embodiment is most evident— there is no life after this one, and the woman’s body remains the Sapphic fragment on which the artist places his imagination as he recovers the whole—unfinished, fragmented and therefore perfected. He can only ever be right as he renders them. Who could fault him for remembering forgotten women poets? Anselm, what god have you made of yourself now? It was my father’s memories of my mother I most wished to challenge— this or that ringing true or untrue. She was as much his story as mine. We were completing what had remained of her with our own craft, grafting onto her what had long ceased to be, while she remained boneless, headless, the plaster new moon above us, so effaced it became one with the leaden dark. Who could remember anymore my mother’s intelligence scanning a book, a blinking light in the navy sweep of forgetting? She, the unfinished genius, the unmanifested— whatever had lanterned brilliantly in her mind went out in the darkness of the crematorium.
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Margarethe” and “The Women of Antiquity” are the results of my fascination with the artist Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer is monumental. He unearths sites of violent memory while maintaining a firm grip on something timeless. He is a deeply referential artist, placing his works in dialogue with Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, among other sources. His painting “Margarethe” engages with Celan’s “Todesfuge.” “The Women of Antiquity” is a series of headless plaster sculptures that invoke historical women, including poets like Sappho. In both of my poems, which share these titles, there is a direct meditation on Kiefer’s art but also a mid-course volta to the personal.
In “Margarethe,” the speaker questions how we relate to art about the Holocaust. For me, this questioning reflects my curiosity about how to convey the epic scale of Kiefer’s work without betraying reality. At the same time, I was intrigued to write a poem that engaged with a painting that itself engages with another poem. I struggled with the ending and had thought to say more after the final image. In the end, it was Richie Hofmann who wisely pointed out that once everything disintegrates, the poem cannot go on.
“The Women of Antiquity” parallels Kiefer’s work of reclaiming brilliant women from history. The poem places the speaker’s mother in the pantheon of great women thinkers. It asks, what happens to our minds when we die? Where do all those blinking and brilliant thoughts go? And I wanted to create a space in which the speaker could approach (and perhaps even challenge) Anselm Kiefer himself.
Maja Lukic’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, the Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn where she serves as curator of Four Way Books’ Translator’s Page and as a assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine.