Liz Marlow

Liz Marlow on “Franz Stangl’s Treblinka”

After my chapbook about the Shoah, They Become Stars, was accepted for publication, one of the editors at Slapering Hol Press suggested that I read Gitta Sereny’s book, Into That Darkness. Sereny’s book includes interviews that she had with Franz Stangl (the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka), members of his family, and survivors of Treblinka. All the interviews that she had with Stangl occurred while he was in prison for crimes he committed during the Shoah. After reading Into That Darkness, I began reading articles, watching documentaries, and listening to lectures on Treblinka. That is where I got the inspiration for this poem. 

There are many aspects of Franz Stangl’s personality that intrigued me, but the most compelling was that despite him overseeing a place where the worst horror occurred, he appeared to show remorse at the end of his life (which was different from the behavior of many other captured Nazi officials). Sereny interviewed him for hours and hours—as she built trust with him, he told her his life story and what happened in Treblinka from his perspective. At the end of the last interview with her, he hung his head in silence and died the next day of a heart attack. 

When prisoner rehabilitation comes up in the news, this is where my mind goes. Imagine if people who committed what society labels as “horrific crimes” spoke to people who truly expressed a willingness to listen. Imagine how much of a difference that could make on someone coming to terms with how their actions affected others. It could be a major first step towards a prisoner successfully returning to society after their release.

Therefore, even though this poem describes a scene from an arrogant monster’s perspective, there was also a human deep down in Stangl. His arrogance came from his “success” as commandant of Sobibor and being asked to “clean up” the “mess” of Treblinka. When he first arrived in Treblinka, the camp was a horror scene—the bruised and blackening dead, slowly decomposing into earth, piled not far from the train tracks. The smell of decaying bodies was so intense that witnesses said they could smell it over a mile away. Survivors of Treblinka documented that despite being surrounded by death, he always wore a clean white jacket, which separated him from both the prisoners and uniformed staff at the extermination camp. 

The part of Franz Stangl that was not a complete monster was the man who was known to physically abuse only one prisoner (as opposed to his subordinates who abused countless prisoners in horrific ways). He was a man who showed sadness in his face—lines in his skin deepening like the dried earth during a drought—when he discussed the crimes he committed. However, how much of that matters when we write about a Nazi? How much compassion should a writer show towards someone who was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people? How much compassion should a writer show towards someone who admitted to perceiving Treblinka’s victims (innocent women, children, men, and elderly) as “cargo” rather than “individuals” or “humans”? These are questions that I struggle with when I write about him. However, had he not showed the slightest bit of remorse in his interviews, it would not have been possible for me to write a persona poem using his voice.

Regarding the form that I used for the poem, I wanted the poem and its form to convey both chaos and order simultaneously. I imagined Stangl’s thoughts being chaotic at what surrounded him. However, he had to contain them, suppress them, and continue his horrific journey out of fear (whether real or imagined) of retribution for being a broken cog in the Nazi wheel of Treblinka. Therefore, some lines contain extra spacing between words. Those spaces are meant to emphasize pauses, while (like the tall, barbed wire fences of Treblinka) none of the words extend past the parameters of the text box. 

I wanted to understand how Stangl became a monster for several reasons. Most importantly, though, if we study how the Shoah occurred and the background of the perpetrators, we might be able to prevent future genocide and/or massive amounts of destruction from occurring again. That is the ideal outcome of writing and reading about the Shoah.

2021 Split Rock Press Chapbook Results

Many thanks to all those who submitted manuscripts to the Split Rock Press Poetry Chapbook Series. We were so fortunate to receive hundreds of submissions and selecting which to move forward was an incredibly difficult task. We’re thrilled to announce the winners and finalists of the 2021 Split Rock Press chapbook competition.

WINNERS

Leaving Earth by DJ Hills

Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski

DJ Hills (@deejhills) is a writer and theatre artist from the Appalachian Mountains. Their writing appears most recently in SmokeLong Quarterly, wigleaf, and Oyster River Pages. Find them online at www.dj-hills.com.

Rebecca Macijeski is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in English and Music from Simmons College (now Simmons University). She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She's worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, worked as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Conduit, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others. Follow her on Twitter at @RMacijeski, or read more of her poems at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.

RUNNER-UP

Field Guides by Ray Ball

Finalists

(in alphabetical order)

My National Parks by Jacob Boyd

The Fisherman's Map by Mark Caskie

Written in Nature by Nancy Cook

alchemy of yeast and tears by Patricia Davis-Muffett

Okjökull by Elizabeth Jacobson

Hallucigenalia by Cindy King

How to Find a Black Hole in Your Kitchen by Dana Kroos

LUX by Molly Sturdevant

Blood Moon, Backyard Mountain by Rodd Whelpley

Joshua McKinney

Joshua McKinney on “Patriotism”

I grew up in northern California, which is not to be confused with the Bay Area. A full third of the state lies north of San Francisco. I mean the real northern California: Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Shasta, Trinity, and Humboldt Counties—some of the largest and most sparsely populated counties in the state—and little towns with names like Chester, Hayfork, Etna, Likely. This is the part of California the inhabitants like to refer to as the State of Jefferson. Demographically, it is largely white and politically conservative. The ecosystems of this region, high desert, mountains, coastal rain forest, are striking in their variety and beauty. 

Like many of my poems over the years, “Patriotism” features details regarding my father and our relationship. He did, in fact, say that he “loved his country,” and he meant it literally, taking wry pleasure in the distinction he was making between his love of the land itself and any notion of a “nation under God.” He was born at least a hundred years too late and would have been more content exploring his country before California was a state, perhaps trading with the indigenous peoples of the region whose culture he respected and whose lifestyle he envied. I may have inherited some of his general misanthropy. Certainly, my relationship with the inhabitants of northern California has changed, as I have changed, over the years. 

“Patriotism” evolved as I grappled with my discomfort with the politics of the region where I was, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, “partly raised.” Despite the allure of the landscapes, I no longer feel at home there. Typically, my poems grow towards some kind of conclusion, but “Patriotism” was a poem whose thematic concerns were unclear to me at first, and it grew smaller with each revision. Early drafts contained much more about my father, musings upon being born out of one’s time, and various other ramblings that I would be embarrassed to share. Even Kintpuash—aka Captain Jack, the Modoc chief who, with a small band of followers and outnumbered ten to one, held off the United States Army in the lava beds for several months in 1872-73—even he made an appearance. If there is a lesson in craft here, it is an old one: let the poem sit, get some distance from it, allow the poem to determine its direction, and don’t be afraid to cut. 

In a sense, it was climate change that finished this poem for me. Over the past two decades, California has been increasingly ravaged by wildfires. Fire season is almost yearlong, and this trend shows no sign of abating. We Californians have grown accustomed to “red flag” days and air indexes in the “unhealthy for all groups” range. Mt. Shasta (14, 179 ft.) is home to the four largest glaciers in California. Surprisingly, and in contrast to what is being observed in most areas of the world, the Shasta glaciers are growing. Whitney Glacier, for example, has expanded thirty percent over the last fifty years. This is because increased temperatures have tapped Pacific Ocean moisture, leading to snowfalls that supply the accumulation zone of the glacier with forty percent more snowfall than is melted in the ablation zone. Predictive models suggest, of course, that eventually the glaciers will begin to retreat. 

These hard facts, foregrounded by the epigraph from Frost, subsume the poem’s other particulars. Ultimately, I came to understand that my poem was about change. I hope that the details of “Patriotism,” both personal and climatological, have melded into a whole that resists paraphrase, something a reader will be able to feel rather that fully articulate, something, perhaps, like the feeling of insignificance and awe I felt when gazing down from the slopes of Mt. Shasta. 

Susan Cohen

Susan Cohen on “Omens Being Bad“

“Omens Being Bad” began with snakes. In Northern California, we have both the Northern Pacific Rattlesnake and the Pacific Gopher Snake that can resemble rattlers in color, length, and blotchy back. People kill Gopher Snakes sometimes, not realizing they’re harmless.

Spotting two large snakes stalled directly across my path in one week would have entered my notebook at any time. They seemed to deserve to be the poem, so, in the earliest versions, I described their patterning, where I saw them, and how each slid away—one over a wall, the other into dry grass. It seemed noteworthy that both waited before departing, as if wondering whether I intended harm. In other cultures, surely a two-snake-week would be seen as omen.

But something about seeing them now, when the political and natural world are simultaneously endangered and dangerous, made them even more insistent as an image. The world has never felt more threatening. I’ve found it almost impossible to write this year because almost every attempt brings me back to the pandemic, as if the virus also infects my work. Over and over, I’ve abandoned the poems I started.

One sure escape has been nature, which has nourished my spirit, just as it has always nourished my writing. I walk to get away from my too-familiar walls and to find material to write about. Luckily for me, Berkeley offers both a large regional park in the hills and paved trails along the edge of San Francisco Bay. I find plenty to see and hear besides other humans.

A very short poem like this still can require months of revising. Maybe especially a short poem, because each word bears so much weight. I’m one of those who tend to pare down rather than to expand as I discover where the heat lies for me over weeks or, in some cases, months. Even as I began thinking the snakes offered me a concrete way to grapple with something I was feeling, the actual details about how they looked and where they went became less and less important. What remained essential in every version was the encounter 

I had to acknowledge to myself that this was a pandemic poem, after all. One of the worst aspects of this terrible virus is the way it’s made us stop, jerk back, or step aside when a fellow human being comes too close, even on a narrow hiking trail. We look to see if he is wearing a mask. We wonder whether she is the person who will infect us. Every encounter is a potential threat.

Once I knew what the poem was about, the coincidence of my teapot giving up its whistle had to go in there as an omen, because I see everything now through the lens of the pandemic. In went the incomprehensible number of deaths at that time. The final line came to me last: So far, no one I know. It just popped up, the way a line can, from some voice in my mind that had been whispering too softly for me to hear. As each month goes by, the possibilities of infection and death creep nearer, even as people stand farther apart. 

Bless those snakes who offered me a way express everything I just spent paragraphs discussing, without saying it all. Or did I? Saying and not saying at the same time. Isn’t that what poetry does?