PETER BALAKIAN: FORGED BY FIRE, SHAPED BY TALENT
Alin K. Gregorian
Mirror-Spectator Staff
Apr 21, 2010
Peter Balakian, whether he likes it or not, has become the unofficial
chronicler and the narrator of the Armenian Genocide in the American
mass media.
Balakian, a professor of English at Colgate University, was known
as a first-rate poet by the non-Armenian community before he wrote
The Black Dog of Fate, his autobiography, which garnered tremendous
reviews – and sales – about a young boy’s desire to fit in and just
be the same as everyone else, and finding about the horrific past of
his family, survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
"Well, whatever chronicling I’ve done is the result of being a poet
for whom the idea of the past is important and one of the domains of
the past I’ve written about is the Armenian Genocide and the Armenian
cultural past."
He added, "The most important act of imagination is transformation.
Transforming that history into a poetic language that has reach and
depth and freshness has been the goal of my work and if I can engage
that act of transformation, the history will have another life."
"Both sides of my family had Genocide survivors, although in very
different contexts. It has shaped my understanding of some of the
possibilities for the imagination and some of the reaches of poetry
and prose," he said.
"I began writing poems in the early 1970s. As a young poet I was
engaged with the natural world and the American landscape. After
uncovering some aspects of the Genocide experience, my writing
changed," he explained.
"History became an important dimension of my poems and a force that
became a shaper of the imagination," he said. Balakian said that
one of his early poems, "The History of Armenia," deals with his
grandmother’s survivor experience.. That poem, he said, "opened new
possibilities about of how to transform the past."
That poem is now part of a new CD by Shout Factory titled "Poetry on
Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work 1888-2006."
Past Expressed through Poetry
The nature of the past is such that it envelops the present, and
deals with traumatic reverberations of the past for Balakian.
And it is not only historic works that add to one’s understanding of
certain events in history. Once the event happens, it is over and our
whole understanding of the event comes from what’s written about it,
he explained.
Literature, he explained, "does much more than document the past,
.it gives the historical event a much deeper and more interpretive
and imaginative life to events that are often hard to imagine."
He added, "A work of literature creates a powerful form of exploration
that offers interpretation and meaning and sensual palpability in
language that is vivid and humanly engaging.
"The truth is that the event lives on more broadly and universally in
literature than in any other form," Balakian said, noting that film
and visual arts also belong to that category. "Catastrophic events
like the Genocide or the Holocaust or the genocides of Cambodia and
Rwanda are more alive to readers through artistic works than scholarly
works," he noted. "Of course scholarly works are indispensable."
He also praised the poems of Siamanto, Taniel Varoujan, Charents and
Tekeyan, which he deemed "essential" to a literary embodiment of,
in this case the horrors of the ‘genocide period.’
He said he was recently re-reading many of the poems and was
"overwhelmed at how very good they are."
As for books by non-Armenians on genocide and the Holocaust, he praised
the poems of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis and Nelly Sachs, and the prose of
Primo Levy and Elie Wiesel.
Grigoris Balakian’s Legacy
Balakian said that the memoir of Grigoris Balakian, his great-uncle,
which he and Aris Sevag translated and which was published in 2009
(Armenian Golgotha), is one of the most important non-fiction books
on the Genocide, as it offers the first-hand point of view of someone
who had been selected for execution on April 24, 1915, along with a
whole host of Armenian community leaders.
Works on the Armenian Genocide are much more mainstream now, he said,
cautioning however that it is still hard to sell a book on the subject
in general. "The niche has opened up and there is awareness about it
as an important chapter of history" he said.
Balakian said that he has just finished a new book of poems, Ziggurat,
which will be out in September. He is also working on a book of essays
on poetry, art and culture.
This month, of course, has been a particularly tough one for him. Not
only is he touring various cities and speaking, he also inaugurated
Genocide Awareness Week at Syracuse University, focusing on the topic
of "The Armenian Genocide and Modernity."
"The personal voice and the art of seeing have universal reach," said
Balakian about Golgotha, a book that has performed very well in terms
of sales. "Our community needs to support writers and all artists,"
he added.
"The arts and letters are the legacy of history and if we want
our history to have a healthy life in the wider world, we need our
community to place a high priority on culture and support it with
financial backing. That goes for the making of films, museums,
foundations for the arts, and so on," Balakian said.
Balakian is the author of five books of poems, most recently June-tree:
New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. The others are Father Fisheye
(1979), Sad Days of Light (1983), Reply From Wilderness Island (1988),
Dyer’s Thistle (1996), and several fine limited editions. His work has
appeared in American magazines and journals such as The Nation, The
New Republic, Antaeus, Partisan Review, Poetry and The Kenyon Review;
and in anthologies such as New Directions in Prose and Poetry, The
Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, Poetry’s 75th Anniversary
Issue (1987), The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry and the four-CD set
Poetry On Record 1886-2006 (Shout Factory). Black Dog of Fate won
the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir and was a New York Times Notable
Book. His other non-fiction book, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response, won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and
was a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times and national
bestseller. He is also the author of Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields
(LSU, 1989).
Balakian was born in Teaneck, NJ and grew up there and in Tenafly, NJ.
He has taught at Colgate University since 1980 where he is currently
Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the
department of English, and director of Creative Writing. He was the
first director of Colgate’s Center For Ethics and World Societies. He
is co-founder and co-editor with the poet Bruce Smith of the poetry
magazine Graham House Review, which was published from 1976-1996,
and is the co-translator (with Nevart Yaghlian) of the book of poems
Bloody News From My Friend by the Armenian poet Siamanto.