Steve Young KRAKÓW, POLAND After eight days in Kraków, I learned how to pronounce the name Czesław Miłosz correctly. Friday: 07.28.06 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Although they take place immediately after the school year, when many writers repair to Vermont, Italy, Greece, or other creative writing capitals, it’s hard to think of the Kraków Poetry Seminars as a writers’ retreat. How many such literary refuges, after all, include a visit to Auschwitz? How many can offer a tour of Kazimierz, the once bustling Jewish Quarter of Kraków emptied by the Nazis? The writers in these seminars don’t workshop, nor are they granted monkish solitude and relieved of bothersome interruptions until cocktail hour. Instead, they meet to discuss ideas, history, philosophy, art, and poetry with an intensity seldom found in American classrooms. Poetry surely needs the Wordsworthian tranquility that has become a summer industry in our MFA-rich land. But without the deep reading and constructive cultural exchange that is the Kraków curriculum, such tranquility may bear little true fruit. One wonders whether the homogeneousness one finds in some American poetry might vanish under the stimulus of outside perspectives.

The Seminars were established in 2002 by poets Adam Zagajewski—his only physical creation, he says—and his former colleague at the University of Houston, Edward Hirsch, now head of the Guggenheim Foundation. The presiding spirit is Czesław Miłosz, who during his many years at Berkeley initiated a vital dialogue between Polish and American poets. Miłosz settled in Kraków after the fall of the Soviet Union, as did Zagajewski. Part of the younger poet’s motive was to bring American writers back into Miłosz’s company to sustain the high-level, complex conversation already begun. This year’s Seminars, the first since Miłosz’s death, were dedicated to his memory; his presence was deeply felt.

In the four years of its existence, the program has attracted a pantheon of English-speaking poets, including Eavan Boland, Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Tomas Venclova, Rosanna Warren, and C. K. Williams. Among the Polish poets who have participated are Ewa Lipska, Bronisław Maj, and Wisława Szymborska. This year the faculty consisted of Clare Cavanagh, Jorie Graham, Patricia Hampl, Edward Hirsch, Tony Hoagland, and Philip Levine, as well as Polish poets Jacek Gutorow, Julia Hartwig, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Dariusz Suska, and Adam Zagajewski. Each year, an outside panel selects 10 graduate students from the University of Houston to attend, although there has been talk lately of opening the application process to students from other universities. The faculty and students are accompanied by a gaggle of auditors, friends, and onlookers, who, though freed of the substantial responsibilities of the conference, are nonetheless welcome to join the discussions.

I was lucky to enough to be a member of the latter group this year and would like to share some of the Seminars’ highlights here over the next week. The conversations and readings chronicled herein took place June 23rd through June 29th. Obviously then, this is not a blog in the true sense, but a post hoc blog, or plog as a friend says. Still, I intend to present the Seminars in day-by-day format to give some sense of a whole emerging from “spots of time,” to invoke Wordsworth again.

Literary understanding is a process; even its surest steps are provisional. If I’ve misremembered, misinterpreted, or just plain misunderstood something, I hope conference participants or any interested party will post a correction or comment.

Meanwhile, I’ll sign off today with a few lines from Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov,” which were my reason many years ago and now to go to Kraków:

             why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
     —Czesław Miłosz, “Dedication,” (Warsaw, 1945)

Truth in literature has been a vexing problem at least since Plato expelled the poets from his republic for being seductive imitators, or worse, subversive liars. Poetry is the foe of philosophy. I imagine Plato’s famous banishment must have had a personal sting for writers like Zagajewski, Miłosz, Barańczak, and others who were either émigrés or exiles during the Communist regime. Miłosz opens his Notes on Exile with a sad paradigm:

He was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words, but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say.

For some, like Pawel Kloczowski, the day’s first lecturer, exile was a domestic affair; he became active in Poland’s literary underground. And yet, whether produced at home or abroad, Polish literature flourished under the country’s massive 20th-century oppressions. Did it offer a bewitching diversion or a reality that couldn’t be found in official words?

Does poetry tell the truth? According to Professor Kloczowski, Miłosz believed that it does, setting himself against the prevailing skepticism and irony of the age as well as Plato. Yet Plato guides Miłosz’s thinking. Miłosz disliked terms of praise for literature such as “enchanting,” “magical,” and “charming,” exactly the qualities that made poetry misleading and dangerous to the republic. On the contrary, literature must be a witness to reality that cannot be too richly detailed; it must be a discoverer and a revealer of the truth rather than an invention.

Professor Kloczowski turned to Zbigniew Herbert’s retelling of “Apollo and Marsyas.” In the Greek myth, the satyr Marsyas plays a magic flute and is encouraged to believe that not even Apollo could make such beautiful music on his lyre. The god challenges Marsyas and prevails when the foolishly proud satyr thinks that he can both play his flute and sing at the same time. The muses declare Apollo the winner and in punishment for his pride, Marsyas is flayed alive. It’s a cautionary tale against hubris, but also, in Herbert’s poem, an admonition that silencing human singing destroys nature:

the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
will not one day arise
a new kind
of art—let us say—concrete

suddenly
at his feet fall
a petrified nightingale

Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter

“Eros Bound” by Igor Mitoraj in Kraków’s Main Market Square.

Miłosz was wise and humble enough to realize that literature could not achieve truth without an appeal to reason. Professor Kloczowski spoke of the first canto of the Paradiso where Dante invokes Apollo to rape him. Miłosz’s outlook paralleled Dante’s: the poet cannot write without prayer, without making himself the instrument—even the victim—of a higher god or another power:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
How difficult it is to remain just one person
     —Czesław Miłosz, “Ars Poetica,” (Berkeley, 1969)

Translated with Lillian Vallee

In conclusion, Adam Zagajewski reminded us that Miłosz dreamed reason would include magic and irrationality; in utopia, philosophy and poetry are one.

“Poets with History and Poets without History”

In his poem “To Whistler, American,” Ezra Pound referred to his fellow countrymen as a “mass of dolts.” He was expressing an insecurity about American poetry that continues to this day: the new world simply lacks the history, the centuries of cultural achievement, to nurture (and appreciate) the best poets. Thus Pound, Eliot, Frost, James, Gertrude Stein and her “Lost Generation,” among countless others all fled abroad where they could develop as artists. Today, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young poet in possession of talent and ambition must be in want of a trip to Europe.

Certainly the Kraków Poetry Seminars both understand and answer this want. What country, after all, can claim more history than Poland, especially in the 20th century, when it played primary host to two world wars. For decades after, it was ruled by an unwelcome Soviet Union, and it was here, in the early ‘80s, that the Solidarity movement arose and made the end of Communist rule imaginable.

Does great history (or great suffering) produce great poetry, just as adversity builds character? Does political engagement elevate the art in the culture? These questions hover about the discourse at the Kraków Poetry Seminars. It’s easy to see why. Political consciousness informs even the most lyrical Polish poetry. Polish poets are honored at home and abroad. Czesław Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980; Wisława Szymborska, another Kraków resident, received it in 1996. At the very center of town stands an imposing statue of Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), the great patriotic poet of Poland. Both Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski chose to live in Kraków when they returned from exile. And beyond the precincts of Kraków, the list of great Polish poets of the 20th century—all of them influenced by events—grows long: Julia Hartwig, Anna Swir, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rózewicz, Alexander Wat, to name only a few.

The title of the first faculty panel comes from Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay about two types of poets: those who continually interact with the ever-changing external world and those whose work moves inward, independent of time and event. Edward Hirsch asserted that, after Eliot and Pound and the European Modernists, American poetry has little sense of history. Polish poetry, on the other hand, cannot avoid history. The New Criticism essentially banned historical context from poetry, taking the poem as a self-contained thing, while Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and other New York School writers invented poetry of the continuous present. (Two of the younger Polish poets on the faculty, Jacek Gutorow and Dariusz Suska noted that O’Hara and Ashbery were important influences in their generation.) American Romantics, such as Stevens and Crane, are largely without history; when it is invoked in their work, it is subservient to lyric impulse.

Both American and Polish poets must relate to history, Hirsch argued, but in a balanced way. Poetry that ignores history becomes inconsequential, whereas poetry preoccupied with history degenerates into journalism. Hirsch concluded with Miłosz’s observation that imagination gives us the power to be in history, but also apart from it.

Clare Cavanagh framed her remarks under the rubric of poetry and witness. Americans like to see Poles as essential, serious poets, who have been given enormities to witness. This inclination raises the question of whether poets are born with their voices or develop them. Miłosz believed that Americans lacked the burdens of history and the strengths they engender. Hence, American poetry is largely lyrical and essentially ahistorical. Professor Cavanagh noted another effect of history: its tendency to distort; Tsvetaeva, for example, has become a poet-martyr. History might be imposed whether the poet summons it or not.

Tony Hoagland agreed that there is much in American culture that deemphasizes history. Emerson, he argued, believed that Americans didn’t need history; their responsibility is to forge an original relationship with the universe. American poetry is based on individuality (hysterical individuality, in Hoagland’s term), the personal, and empathy. Unlike Polish poets, whom history has forced into responsibility, American poets might become historically aware because they’ve grown bored with their own individuality. Or so fascinated with it that they pay attention to the larger forces shaping it. Hoagland’s interests are increasingly sociological, that is, more and more historical.

Phil Levine commented that American poets are ignored, and therefore have greater freedom in what they choose to write.

Jorie Graham found the characterization of Americans without history misleading. There is, after all, a rich tradition of political poetry in the United States. Think of Kinnell, Lowell, Bly, and Ginsberg writing about the Vietnam War, she said.

Later, Graham commented that poetic genius is such a rare and unpredictable thing that seems to occur utterly independent of historical circumstances.

To end, a few lines from Tony Hoagland:
standing on my kitchen table
whose cut stem draws the water upwards
so the plant is flushed with the conviction
that the water has been sent
to find and raise it up
from somewhere so deep inside the earth
not even flowers can remember.
      —“Requests for Toy Piano”

One purpose of the Kraków Poetry Seminars is to bridge American and Polish poetry cultures. Towards that end, the two major readings of the week, reviewed on this site by Bradford Gray Telford, featured both American and Polish poets reading their own poems and one another’s in translation. In the classroom, this circuit was made through two panels: American Poets Respond to Polish Poetry with Jorie Graham, Philip Levine, and Edward Hirsch; and Polish Poets respond to American Poetry with Jacek Gutorow, Julia Hartwig, and Artur Szlosarek.

Hirsch first read Miłosz’s “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” and “Dedication” when he was 23. He admired the poems’ unashamed tenderness and vulnerability. Here was a poet who could connect with the dead and honor them. Milosz’s poetry offered a genuinely human dialogue between the metaphysical and the historical. From Alexander Wat’s autobiography, My Century, Hirsch learned that poetic development meant losing a sense of harmony to “scraps and tatters.” Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” also endorses an exacting poetry, devoid of literary artifice, and as fragmented as reality:

Mr. Cogito’s imagination
has the motion of a pendulum

it crosses with precision
from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it
for the artificial fires of poetry

he would like ot remain faithful
to uncertain clarity

Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter

Jorie Graham, who grew up in France until 1969, loved America for its freedom from history. But what she came to value in Polish poetry is the inseparability of the metaphysical and historical. It makes the personal collective: a “we” not an “I”. In America the enemy is abstract, whereas in Poland, it is specific, well-known, and visible. Miłosz and other Poles can confront the bleakest truth, but praise anyway. American poets, on the other hand, must explain their claim to history.

When he was young, the politically-conscious poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Sigfried Sassoon intimidated Phil Levine. A love of Garcia Lorca drew him to Spain and an engagement with political poetry. Antonio Machado was a great influence, but so too was Herbert’s “The Rain,” about a soldier who returns from World War I shell shocked. The veteran is increasingly absorbed by military history until language and life desert him.

Before World War II, Poles were well read in Russian and French poets. Interest in American poets didn’t begin until after the War, according Julia Hartwig, an eminent Polish poet and editor of an anthology of American poetry. Emily Dickinson was the first American poet to be read in Poland, in translations by Stanislaw Barańczak, along with Miłosz’s versions of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay. T.S. Eliot had a huge influence among Polish poets, owing perhaps to the French strains in his poetry, though he was not the dominant force he was in the English-speaking world. Jacek Gutorow turned to Wallace Stevens, whom he has translated, when he could find no English poets of interest after the Romantics. Although Miłosz didn’t always approve of Stevens—particularly his fascination with scientific method—the two poets are linked by their metaphysics and their ultimate faith in the imagination.

The Beats, and particularly the New York School poets had a tremendous impact on Polish poetry, which coincided with Polish independence in 1989. Emancipation, Adam Zagajewski suggested, demanded a radical transformation in language and poetry. The truth could now be personal, free of larger social concerns and the collective experience. The message of O’Hara and Ashbery is that poems are just poems. Aesthetics and ethics are separate. Against Miłosz and Herbert, the poet could now respond to solemnity with irony or absurdist humor.

Clare Cavanagh pointed out that Robert Frost doesn’t figure prominently on the Polish landscape, although Barańczak translated him and Miłosz knew of him through Brodsky. It may be that Mandelstam overshadowed Frost.

The other major Americans missing from the canon in Poland are Lowell, Sexton, Plath, and the Confessionals. They are available in Polish, but they’ve had nothing close to the tectonic impact that they continue to have in the States. This is especially surprising in the case of Lowell, whose early poetry is deeply historical and religious, and who for a time was the standard-bearer of political protest in the U.S.

Visitors to Kraków should not miss Massolit Books, a huge English-language bookstore. It’s evidence that the bridge between Polish and American poetry is already quite wide and well trafficked.

Owing to time and space limitations, I’ve been able unable to discuss all items in the rich Kraków Poetry Seminars curriculum. There was, for example, a superb lecture by University of Houston Professor David Mikics about Auden’s well-known “September 1, 1939” and the much more lighthearted poem, “Heavy Date,” which he wrote less than a month later. Auden came to disavow the first, with its often-cited imperative “We must love one another or die” more sentimental than true he thought. “Heavy Date,” despite its innocent tone, is more the song of experience, giving a far darker, almost Larkinesque view of love as fickle, selfish, and irrational: “Love like Matter is much / Odder than we thought.”

The ten graduate students from the University of Houston—Craig Beaven, Jericho Brown, Darin Ciccotelli, Farnoosh Fathi, Peter B. Hyland, James May, Paul Otremba, Vanessa Stauffer, Bradford Gray Telford, and Sasha West—all presented provocative papers on such topics as “Poetry and the End of the World” and “Happiness and Reading.” One night they gave a reading of their own work and work by others they admired. The reading took place in one of Kraków’s many underground bars. I kept thinking of crocuses breaking into sunlight.

There was an evening of American music, featuring Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” with Ed Hirsch as the voice of Abraham Lincoln: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” Phil Levine found himself in a state of rapture as he listened; whatever he might feel about his country now, Levine felt himself overcome with Lincoln’s vision of America: “That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Patricia Hampl recounted her class with John Berryman when the great poet asked his students to write their autobiographies. A very young Patricia Hampl confessed to Berryman that she didn’t believe she had anything to write about. He replied, “You have a memory don’t you!” This lead her to an understanding that “memory’s genitive core is incompleteness.” When Phil Levine later introduced her to Miłosz’s work, she saw that memoir isn’t confined to an exploration of the self. The self can be used to illuminate history; it is, in fact, an elemental part of it.

There was Phil Levine’s eloquent statement of egoless camaraderie. The Vietnam War created a community of poets, including James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, and others. Levine felt certain that this group mattered, whether or not Levine himself was significant. He loved his fellow poets then as brothers.

Threading its way through the entire week was the issue of irony. The message, sometimes on the table, sometimes under it, was this: in general, young American poets depend too heavily on irony. They are reluctant to believe anything and hesitant to engage history. As a result, their work is often distant, unaccountable, opaque, and trivial. The argument reached a kind of crescendo on the last day of panels, with Bradford Gray Telford and other students asserting that beliefs and convictions lead to trouble—the war Iraq—or stupidities, such as the stoned, love-in generation of the sixties.

One by one, the faculty responded to these “legitimate dangers.”

Tony Hoagland: “You must love other poetry more than your own.”

Adam Zagajewski: “Poems always have something to say. It is good, not wrong, to have something to say.”

Edward Hirsch: We must defend meaning against meaninglessness. Ezra Pound said it matters that great poems get written; it doesn’t matter a damn who writes them. Every poet must find what he or she can give.

Jorie Graham: The poet must be brave, open to the changes of mind that writing a true poem entails. Irony suggests there is another self, but what self do you have beside the vulnerable one that loves and fears and doubts and seeks survival. This is the origin of poetry. You can’t write, you can’t live, if you think you have to be right.

As we were chatting after the last session, Ed Hirsch told me that our classroom, Number 56, Collegium Novum, Jagiellonian University, was where the Nazis gathered approximately 150 Polish professors before sending them off to prison, labor camps, or worse. Now, decades later, a talented group of young American writers had gathered in the same space and been set free.

Huge thanks and appreciation are due Jennifer Grotz for organizing the Krakow Poetry Seminars.