Clare Cavanagh: 04.17.06-04.21.0

Friday 04.21.06

Wislawa Szymborska’s Do’s and Don’ts Continued (With One Example of How It’s Done)

To Esko, from Sieradz: Youth really is an intriguing period in one’s life. If one adds writerly ambitions to the difficulties of youth, one must possess an exceptionally strong constitution in order to cope. Its components should include: persistence, diligence, wide reading, curiosity, observation, distance toward oneself, sensitivity to others, a critical mind, a sense of humor, and an abiding conviction that the world deserves a) to keep existing, and b) better luck than it’s had thus far. The efforts you’ve sent signal only the desire to write and none of the other virtues described above. You have your work cut out for you.

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Thursday 04.20.06

Wislawa Szymborska’s Tips on Poetry for Daily Use

To Ula from Sopot: A definition of poetry in one sentence—well. We know at least five hundred definitions, but none of them strikes us as both precise and capacious enough. Each expresses the taste of its own age. Inborn scepticism keeps us from trying our hand at our own. But we remember Carl Sandburg’s lovely aphorism: “Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.” Maybe he’ll actually make it one of these days?

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Wednesday 04.19.06

Szymborska’s Tips for Beginning Bards, Part Three

“In Central and Eastern Europe,” Czeslaw Milosz proclaims, “the word ‘poet’ has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a ‘bard,’ that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens.” This is not simply what Seamus Heaney once called “the unacknowledged legislator’s dream.” Milosz’s words hold true for modern Polish and Russian poetry—the traditions I know best—in ways I will not attempt to elaborate here. “If they’re killing people for poetry,” Nadezhda Mandelstam remembers her husband insisting in the mid-1930s, “that means they honor and esteem it, . . . that means poetry is power.”

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Tuesday 04.18.06

The Use and Abuse of Poetry for Life, Part Two,
or Wislawa Szymborska’s Do’s and Don’t for Beginning Poets, Continued

“Poets are poetry, writers are prose,” Szymborska comments in her resolutely anti-poetic “Stage Fright”—or so public opinion would have it.

Prose can hold anything including poetry,
but in poetry there’s only room for poetry—

In keeping with the poster that announces it
with a fin-de-siécle flourish of its giant P
framed in a winged lyre’s strings
I shouldn’t simply walk in, I should fly . . .

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Monday 04.17.06

The Uses and Abuses of Poetry for Life

“What would American poets and critics do without the Central Europeans and the Russians to browbeat themselves with?” Maureen McLane exclaims in a recent issue of the Chicago Tribune book review (December 11, 2005). “Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky—here we have world-historical seriousness! Weight! Importance! Even their playfulness is weighty, metaphysical, unlike barbaric American noodlings!” For some time now, Anglo-American writers have tended to see Eastern Europe, with its 20th-century sufferings, as a perverse promised land for modern poetry, with Poland in particular serving as a shorthand for “The Oppressed Country Where Poetry Still Matters.” I will not attempt to speak for all the poets McLane has assembled here. Szymborska for one, though, would be shocked to find herself ranked among the metaphysically serious and universally significant world powers of modern poetry.

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