“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:

Bolesław Leśmian

That song without words does not originate in the realm of logic where every word originates but in other, nonlogical realms, where it is possible to exist without words and where the concept of existence–freed from the bonds of grammar and syntax–ceases to be a logical proposition, with its obligatory subject and predicate, its beginning and end, its birth and death.

In fact, the true realist is obliged to create what is real for him, his own reality.

Stanisław Brzozowski

Poetry must be seen as the creative self-definition of man.

The word has no absolute extra-historical meanings. It is always an infirm and limited creature of life: infirm and limited even when we consider it as a creature of the whole species, but a single one. The reality of man is relative, provisional, unfinished; there is no ready, finished, closed reality.

Art is dependent on the elements that change the slowest, on what moves us, what we feel, and its connection to our self-sympathy, becoming a moment of the drive to self-impression. So when we begin to write, it is not will that revives in us and gains the advantage of us, but nature: nature becomes will.

Czesław Miłosz

When I was … [a child] … Friedrich Nietzsche’s predictions had already been fulfilled literally, and since that time I have either had to submit to or oppose the workings of ‘European nihilism.’ Nihilistic time, to judge by contemporary art and literature, is completely devoid of values; neither its specific moments nor their duration makes any sense. It manifests itself as only a destructive, absurd force…

Thanks to religion, over the course of many centuries the authentic world, grounded in the sight of God, offered models for the artist who hoped to approach them not so much [by] imitation as by analogy.

The contemplation of time is the key to human life–but one can only circle that key, one cannot touch it. One thing is certain: not every contemplation of time is equally good; however, since it cannot be expressed in words, we can recognize its quality by the use a given individual has made of it.

If we recognize that it is our lot to live in a decadent era, we are faced with the problem of choosing our tactics. Since man is not an animal and is in touch with the entire past of his specie, and since the past, to the extent that forgotten civilizations are being rediscovered, is becoming ever more accessible, we cannot but be depressed by the thought that instead of trying to equal the greatest human achievements, we yield to inferior philosophies only because they are contemporary. It is very difficult to find appropriate tactics for resistance, and our development, if it to be worthy of that name, must be founded, I believe, on advancing from unconscious tactics to conscious tactics.

A pessimistic appraisal of the powerlessness of contemporary forces, and of the literature and art that unconsciously submits to these forces, is not synonymous with a lack of faith in individual achievements or with doubts about an eventual victory of the human race over ‘reality.’

Anna Kamieńska

The ‘cipher’ of contemporary poetry–the desperate desire to preserve the values of art, while it seems everything is being frittered away in cheap utilitarianism.

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth. It’s the vestibule of faith.

People can only open themselves up for brief moments, like flashes of lightning. At times it requires a single word. It isn’t necessarily happening where concessions pour out in a flood tide. There are little words, simple, surprising, perhaps disguised. One must be sensitive to them.

There is also solitude toward God, the fullest kind. That solitude is our freedom. That presence in solitude is difficult, an internal attainment, carved out like a poem.

The task of so-called religious poetry is to cleanse ‘religion’ of the stereotype.

Wisława Szymborska

There is, has been, and always will be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners–and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’

Zbigniew Herbert

A wise person said to me recently that at moments when a person is alone and suffering, let him try to bring that suffering as a sacrifice. That’s very good advice, very practical. I can’t do anything without suffering, but I can ennoble it in some way by an inward act. In any case I am in no way a supporter of the view that we are ennobled only by suffering. In a human life there has to be a balance of suffering and joy, because that is what gives fullness to humanity. On the other hand, a person who only suffers in the end withdraws into himself. The Book of Job, that masterpiece, really says everything about suffering, about revolt, about the overcoming of revolt and about acceptance. It is very instructive seen in that light.

I was asked once in Poland at a poetry reading: ‘but what is God to you?’ Suddenly, this question. I answered: ‘Incomprehensible.’

I had the feeling that my individuality was not absolute, certain, finished, that it was by an accident that I was born into the Herbert family. I could have been that child in the courtyard with whom I played, that daughter of the Jewish shopkeeper with whom I was so in love–she was my first love. Here we return to empathy, which for me is something completely natural and even, let’s say, a precondition of writing.

…my poetry is about fidelity: in general it is about a certain virtue of endurance, of affirming life in all its complexity.

Ryszard Krynicki

I don’t know what poetry is, even though I wrote that poem. Nor do I believe that poetry can save a life. But there are poems that can give meaning to the fugitive moment, and that is already quite a lot.

Adam Zagajewski

I think about form: it is a liberation from confinement, a liberation and joy. … In my opinion, form delineates and liberates. Except one must constantly confront it with formlessness, passion, anxiety, fear; these are the various names of chaos, that is, nothingness. For the nothingness we know is not at all, in spite of appearances, nothing. On the contrary, it bursts with an excess of being, substance; all it lacks, poor thing, is form. It rushes all over the world like a tornado basically seeking form, would like to meet up with form–like wind with a sail.

I know that God would have to be both form and formlessness.

Stanisław Barańczak

The joy of writing (and reading) poems, then, lies in the fact that poetry willfully spoils Nature’s game; while fully realizing the power of Nothingness in the outside world, it questions and nullifies it within the inner world of the poem. But what is especially challenging for the twentieth-century poet is, I think his awareness that the same can be done about the power of Nothingness revealed in modern History. … All the historical dimensions of this world conspire to overwhelm the individual with a sense of his insignificance and expendability…

A poet who is offended by the course of modern History doesn’t even have to write political poetry to find an appropriate response to it. It’s enough that he writes his poems well.

To spite Nothingness–this is perhaps the essence of the perverse ‘joy of writing,’ ‘the revenge of the mortal hand.’ [Szymborska]

“In art, you’re free.”

One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to be countless poets, poetry awards, and poets with awards. How, then, do we define great poets or poetry? He gave me permission to answer publicly, on this site.

In doing so, I first have to admit that I do not feel qualified in any way to define great poets or poetry. I can really only comment on the poets and poems that are great within me. I have been giving this some thought, and have identified a few common characteristics.

Voltaire is reputed to have said, “Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.” That’s a bit harsh. But I am inclined to agree that poetry does involve its own kind of “truth.” It is not a factual truth, but more what Seamus Heaney called “a ring of truth within the medium itself,” since, according to Emily Dickinson, a poet “tells all the truth but tells it slant.” I also think poetic truth needs to be both new and moving in order to reach toward greatness.

Some would argue that newness, especially innovation in language, is all that matters. I think, instead, that innovation is actually a by-product of great poets seeking after new truths (which are often, in fact, old truths newly arranged). The quality of moving the reader in some way is, to me, essential. This does not need to involve an intense emotional outpouring. But if the reader is the same before and after reading the poem, then the reader has not been moved, and the poem can hardly be said to have fulfilled its potential for greatness.

Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz are two poets I think are great. Among other things, Heaney mostly wrote about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Milosz mostly wrote about occupied Poland during World War II. The combination of their position in history, and the profound ways in which they related to such difficult subject matter, make it clear why they were both awarded the Nobel Prize.

I believe there is an energy and intensity that comes with discovering poetry as a means to reconcile life’s difficulties, and then discovering how much one needs such reconciliation, or, at least, creative freedom. However, the drive to write does not necessarily require such epic circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote poems of remarkable ingenuity and skill in the midst of a repressive life as a Victorian spinster. In fact, I think that anyone sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of the world in which we live has all the encouragement necessary to seek the solace poetry can provide.

The most common characteristic I can identify among those poets I consider great is their absolute hunger for the freedom in art. It is this quality that galvanizes talent, effort, patience, endurance, and everything else I find inherent within those poets I most admire. It is true, as Marvin Bell points out, that in life we are not free, and even the most privileged life can be a burden. But in art, we are free, and this freedom, and the poetic truth that issues from this free space, can touch to others in ways that are great inside of them as well.

Reading Czeslaw Milosz’s “Preparation,” I am reminded of Marvin Bell’s credo: “Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, then break those rules.” Consider the poem:

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return.
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won’t happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is a man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,
He burns with a bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven’t learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

Unlike most ars poetica (including Milosz’s own poem “Ars Poetica?”), which addresses poetics in the course of a poem, this is a poem about the process of writing a poem–or, more accurately, the inability to write a particular kind of poem. If there are rules for writing about victims in a poem, the first one is to never mention their mother, second to not make matters worse by bringing in their childhood innocence symbolized by a teddy bear, and third, to never ever mention the pleasurable moment of conception. In other poems, this would toll the aesthetic death knell of the works’ literary merit. Why does this poem work?

First of all, if we consider that sentimentality means an outpouring of emotion disproportional to an event, this poem does not qualify. The Nazi invasion and holocaust in Poland are events for which there is no comparable emotion. Milosz could wail endlessly. It still would not be enough. So, instead, he takes a different tact altogether: he focuses on himself, and his own struggle to put these experiences into a poem.

The struggle is between such great emotion and his understanding of, perhaps even agreement with, the idea that sentimentality can ruin a poem. Instead of trying to write an unsentimental poem, he addresses this struggle head-on. First, he draws on nature as an introduction and a metaphor. Then, as so-called “addenda,” he begins sketching the atrocities of the Nazi invasion.

He pulls back, and decides he is still unprepared–that perhaps he needs five or ten more years. And why? Because he still thinks about that emblem of sentimentality, “the mothers.” Here Milosz does something remarkable: he does not contrast atrocity with the victim’s innocence. He instead speaks generally about “a man born of woman,” how he “curls himself up and protects his head / While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, / he burns with a bright flame.” This is objective language, almost scientific, reporting human traits. There is no specific victim tugging at our proverbial heart strings. Not until we reach the line “Her child.”

The reason Milosz can now bring in the emblems of sentimentality without ruining this poem is that he does so ironically, and self-consciously. He knows he should not do this. Yet this is not a poem about the victims; this is a poem about how much he knows he should not do this–and how much he can not help but follow his human nature. Even as a man kicked will cover his head, Milosz will keep returning to thoughts of the victims’ mothers.

In the end, though he has been reproaching himself for his inability to be less sentimental, he finally turns that reproach outward. He has not learned to speak as he “should,” that is, “calmly.” But, in this final declaration, there is as much reproach for the “should” as there is for himself. Why should anyone be calm about such unspeakable events? Why should we not include the teddy bears? Is it not, after all, human nature?

In addressing his struggle to write a poem about his experiences, so emblematic of atrocity in the Twentieth century, Milosz calls into question not only our understanding of poetry, but our very humanity. Through creating a tension between the desire to understand this work literally, as hyperbolic sentimentality, and ironically, as a poem on what never to do, Milosz imparts some of his own modern struggle to us. Through an incredibly transparent, and clearly ashamed self, we come to understand more of our own frailties, and the ambiguities in both art and life.

I have been reading Zbigniew Herbert on the train, trying to get past the translation. Apart from stunning poems like “Five Men” and “The Pebble,” most of the poems I have read so far smack of romantic Slavic intillectualism and an out-of-tune surrealism. I wonder if his work focuses more on language and lyric device to make what seem like generalizations come alive in new (linguistic) ways. In any case, it is a far cry from Adam Zagajewski, whose poems in Mysticism For Beginners are tight and self-contained–a kind of Eastern European Ted Koozer with a deeper connection to history and a more philosophical bent. Still, I’m ploughing through Herbert poems by the hundreds, hoping to get more inside this poet, hoping to read beyond the language barrier and into the mind of the man that has written poems that make my jaw drop open with their fierce, unflinching gaze.

Meanwhile, it is evident that since I was here three years ago, Polish people have immigrated to the UK in great numbers. There are now Polish grocers and restaurants just down the street. On the tube today, young Poles were poring over a glossy Polish-language magazine sporting the latest PC gaming equipment and games. According to Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish that contemporary poets employ is only nominally different from its medieval counterpart–making their poetic tradition vastly more accessible and vibrant than our own. (Imagine if Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote in English-as-we-know-it.)

I have gained tremendously from reading Polish poets. Their sense of identity has only been strengthened by centuries of occupation. The poets I have read so far seem at once world-weary and yet, unlike some European counterparts, unwilling to rely upon irony alone as a response to the difficulties of life. They kindle a kind of wise, bold, at times harrowing hope in their literature. The writing is fierce yet thoughtful–no time for pleasantries or showing off.

I am drawn to this generation of Polish poets coming to terms with the horrors of World War II in their country even as I am drawn to poetry as a means to reconcile some of the most challenging events in my personal life. I know English is a language that accepts and absorbs–that is why, for example, it is so irregular. I only hope that the English literary tradition can benefit from the current Polish influx as I have benefitted personally from coming to know the works of outstanding Polish poets.

“I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.’”

After finishing The Witness of Poetry, I found myself mourning the loss of a man I never met and mourning, most importantly, a mind and spirit so capable of characterizing the poetics of the past century–and thereby helping us understand a bit more of ourselves. Milosz seems to have defined the major dialectic forces at work in twentieth century poetry: language versus mimesis, classicism versus realism, science versus imagination, alienation versus “the human family” and West versus East. Owing to Poland’s unique, liminal situation in the interplay of so many of these forces throughout Europe, Milosz speaks with a kind of visceral authority about such broad characteristics of poetry in the past century.

He is not without bias in describing these dynamics. Fortunately for me, his biases run along similar veins to my own, so I frequently felt he was expressing many of my own latent thoughts and beliefs in a much more articulate and compelling way. Regarding science supplanting imagination as an organizing principle for our lives, he points out:

… science not only contributes to the perfecting of ever more lethal means of conducting war. It also penetrates the very fabric of our collective life, causing transformations whose range still eludes our comprehension. The pollution of the mind by certain images, those side effects of science, is analogous to the pollution of the natural surroundings by technology derived from the same science.

and much later, in relating to the horrors of the twentieth century–from the holocaust to the atomic bomb–he points out the stakes in such a dynamic are not merely aesthetic, but that, “It is possible that we are witnessing a kind of race between the lifegiving and the destructive activity of civilization’s bacteria, and that an unknown result awaits in the future. No computer will be able to calculate so many pros and cons–thus a poet with his intuition remains one strong, albeit uncertain, source of knowledge.”

Milosz points out that a defining characteristic of or time is not so much that life is harder now than in the past, but that we are more keenly aware of it en masse. He points out, “People have always suffered physical pain, died of starvation, lived as slaves. Yet all that was not common knowledge as it now is because of the shrinking of our planet and because of the mass media.” I have often related to poetry as a kind of antidote to the linguistic dissolution brought on by mass-media and technology, but Milosz goes further in framing poetry as a means to interpreting this new circumstance and therefore a kind of hope for humanity in the coming age:

Instead of presenting man through those traits that link him to higher forms of the evolutionary chain, other of his aspects will be stressed: the exceptionality, strangeness, and loneliness of that creature mysterious to itself, a being incessantly transcending its own limits. Humanity will increasingly be turning back to itself, increasingly contemplating its entire past, searching for a key to its own enigma, and penetrating, through empathy, [emphasis mine] the soul of bygone generations and of whole civilizations.

Milosz points out many other dynamics unique to modern poetics, though all of them are necessarily subordinate to this overarching struggle between science and imagination.

One other dialectic progresses between classicism–which Ellen Bryant Voigt and others might more recently call “lyricism”–and realism (also known as “formalism”–the rendering of the real). Milosz defines this struggle very clearly: “If I cross out a word and replace it with another, because in that way the line as a whole acquires more consciousness, I follow the practice of the classics. If, however, I cross out a word because it does not convey an observed detail, I lean toward realism.”

This struggle is further defined by somewhat newly introduced dimensions in contemporary poetry, including the move toward language poetry and its more traditional counterpoint–mimesis–the representation of the tangible in art. Of this, Milosz says, “Of course there are poets who only relate words to words, not to their models in things, but their artistic defeat [?!] indicates that they are breaking some sort of rule of poetry.” Though Milosz admits, “all attempts at enclosing the world in words are and will be futile,” he concludes from this, “let us respect the rules of the game as adopted by consensus and appropriate to a given historical period, and let us not advance a rook as if it were a knight. In other words, let us make use of conventions, aware that they are conventions and no more than that.”

By defining the trends, themes and limits of poetry, Milosz has given me a remarkably well articulated view into much of what I have already sensed: that poetry, in its capacity for empathy, in its ability to be so much more than an exercise from the neck up, can help us to understand our unique human condition in this particular time–and that all the the trends toward nihilism and deconstruction ultimately either must come to an end–or else we must follow them all the way down. That is, the choice between poison and medicine still rests with the “unacknowledged legislators”–as does the choice, with each word, line and verse–about which of the two will flow from our pens.