Poetry and life …

… Life-saving prosody | The greatness of Avrom Sutzkever. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In 1943 Sutzkever and his wife Freydke, escaping from the Vilna Ghetto, went into hiding in the forests where he fought with a Jewish unit of the partisan resistance. “Kol Nidre”, his long, harrowing Holocaust poem of that year, had brought him to the attention of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, who sent a plane to rescue them. In order to reach the plane, the couple had to negotiate a minefield. Sutzkever solved the problem by crossing it in metre. “Sometimes I walked in anapaests, sometimes in amphibrachs.” “Each section of the minefield”, explains his friend, the poet Dory Manor, “had its own rhythm, an entire prosody of life-saving.”