For the launch of my collection, published by in Poland, I made a set of videos in Truro (Cape Cod) on August 22, 2020. I had to cancel my visit due to covid, although the literary festival was not cancelled and the videos were projected. My thanks to Kacper Bartczak for his translations, the capstone of years of correspondence; and to Susan Bee, video camerman.
On a December visit from Los Angeles to his native city of Kraków, writer and translator Piotr Florczyk longs for the snow of his childhood, and I think of how weather translates from physical to emotional, personal to communal, into landscapes current and remembered.
They say there is no weather in Los Angeles, but for one who's lived here always, it's a different story. Only in deep winter, do all the camellias open to a riot of pink, the backyard orange tree alight with small suns.
The first time I saw snow in the real world, I was in a home other than my own, an Amsterdam pensione in the century before Airbnb.
I proselytize for Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) and his poetic legacy as a new convert, not with unique insight into his importance or his poetics. That I leave to the eleven Polish poets sampled here (and several translators), who can testify better than I can.
The way the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) is used by the school system in Poland shows how we disfigure some poets to make them palatable. The educational package has it that his was an attempt to rebuild the basic powers of language after the catastrophe of human slaughter in this part of the world during WWII.
Among many other things, poetry is a drama of the poet’s hand. The writing hand, the hand of the writer, may be treated as both metaphor and metonymy, and it is in-between these two figures of speech that a distinct narrative of Różewicz’s work unravels. In several of his poems, the hand is a metaphor of writing, and it is very often accompanied with images of exhaustion and emptying. At the same time, it is a metonymy of the poet’s body, which is revolting and not at all committed to what the mind intends to say.
For someone who has worked with, and in, words, Różewicz has always approached language with an uncompromising suspicion. I cannot think of another poet who distrusts words more consistently. After the war, when words seemed compromised, Różewicz made a utopian attempt to rebuild trust in words by returning to simplest phrases and basic truths.
Biuro Literackie readings (2020)
For the launch of my collection, published by in Poland, I made a set of videos in Truro (Cape Cod) on August 22, 2020. I had to cancel my visit due to covid, although the literary festival was not cancelled and the videos were projected. My thanks to Kacper Bartczak for his translations, the capstone of years of correspondence; and to Susan Bee, video camerman.