February 12, 2017An Obedience ExperimentSonya Taaffe

“The night before I wrote this poem, I read an article on the implementation of the new administration’s travel ban and knew from the first lines that I would find Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment cited somewhere in it. The citizen infant separated from her non-citizen mother was not mentioned, but I had been thinking of her for some time. The mythological possibilities of Milgram’s name (מילגרוים, milgroym—“pomegranate” in Yiddish) were brought to my attention by Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story, which I recommend to anyone with an interest in either Milgram’s life and research or Brechtian biopics generally. The pomegranate in Jewish tradition is often said to contain 613 seeds, the number of mitzvot in the Torah. The working title of this poem was ‘Stanley Milgram’s Ghost Is Disappoint.’”