“Our planetary reality has split in two into the so-called West and the so-called East, and I have drunk from both one and the other poisoned well. I have also become convinced that the puzzle of the thirties still cries out for a solution.”
-Czesław Miłosz
I find myself intensely drawn to twentieth-century Polish poets. Having borne waves of tragedy in the last century, from the Holocaust to oppressive Soviet occupation, the country itself seems have been flung into a kind of national existential crisis. And so, its sensitive and intelligent poets grapple deeply and boldly with questions of faith and reason, tragedy and hope, nihilism and meaning. Many of them, like me, are fascinated with the allegorical dimensions of the Book of Job, with Nietzschean philosophy, with reconciling the tragedies of the great World Wars with the sometimes inexplicable beauty of this world. In short, they face down the deepest questions about what it means to be alive.
Yet I do not think it is only me, or only Polish poets, who must come to terms with these questions. Triggered by the worldwide disillusionment brought about by the global spectacle of the Second World War (brilliantly explained by Miłosz in The Witness of Poetry), it seems that Postmodernism is the first stage of grieving our collective loss of faith in centrality and certainty. I believe we can, and must, move past this stage by confronting the deep questions that surfaced in this time. We must heal the unspeakable wound.
Even as reconciling personal grief has been an inescapable task in my personal life, I see these same questions refusing to go unresolved in our modern world. In America, and worldwide, we are faced once again with an economic crisis stemming from the inherent problems of capitalism, and once again we regard those who offer a worldview more inclusive of the common good with deep skepticism and fear of tyranny. Religion and scientific reason continue to reinforce their differences. Generativity again takes a back seat to instant gratification in our culture. And all of it has been syndicated, and accelerated, by increasingly more sophisticated technological systems of disseminating information. Yet none of these systems, no matter how good their search algorithms, provide the means to make human meaning from this glut of data. And so, the great questions of the early twenty-first century are actually only the great unresolved questions of the last century.
Nowhere do I find more careful consideration of these questions than from Polish poets. What an unexpected kinship, and how reassuring, to read how they, too, found freedom in poetry, a declaration of their humanity capable of transcending the difficult circumstance of being human in a world that continues to shrink, even as the weight of history increases.
Now, I will let them speak for themselves. Here are some excerpts I found particularly insightful from the excellent compilation Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski:
Continue Reading “Twentieth-Century Polish Poets on Poetry”
Had a great trip down to the South coast, the highlight being a sword fight with a four-year-old on the bowling green of 
