Jewish poet Howard Richard Debs, in his post (The Poetry of Bearing Witness) on poetry and the Holocaust, grapples with Theodore Adorno’s famous statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Debs writes “for these past 30 years, I have searched for a way to bear witness, a role Elie Wiesel imself urges upon us. In his 2003 Days of Remembrance address at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), he asked, “Who will bear witness for the witness?” — reminding us of the question posed by poet Paul Celan.” Debs’s blog asks, “Can there be and should there be Holocaust poetry?”