Zero Visibility, by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Al Filreis

Grzegorz Wróblewski’s new book, Zero Visibility, translated by Piotr Gwiazda*, has reached me — and I’m thrilled to have it. Wróblewski is constantly fascinating; he is often precise and whacky both. Many modes are here in this new book. One — perhaps my own favorite — is surrealist post-Soviet consciousness:

Cosmonauts

What was going through his mind when for the first time in his life
my dog saw a horse? He frozen like a statue, erect, hypnotized.

It was as if he had encountered a space alien.
He didn’t move until the horse disappeared over the horizon …

Another is the dystopian love poem (there are many of these in this volume; I find them strangely moving):

I Think about You Constantly

A shooting in Seattle, five people …
The Vatican hands over a priest accused of pedophilia,
while the Taliban kidnaps ten …

Traces of RDX found in the wreckage!
(I think about your constantly …)
Poultry processing plant is being evacuated.

Another mode, carrying the irony of the imagist-epigraphic wisecrack, is the extreme punchline juxtaposition:

When I Meditate about Cortez

… I am set upon by black flies.

Grzegorz Wróblewski reminds me constantly of what powerful things a poem can do through radical condensation — and specifically, again, through the irony generated by deft juxtaposition. We encounter a natural observed fact, described succinctly. We sense it is merely an observation, the result of looking. Then another natural phenomeon is observed, although the scene has slightly changed, perhaps merely after the slight passing of time. But we glance back at the title, and a hint of the contextual irony — and often a bit of sardonic (and Polish, might I add?) political wisdom — is surely about to come. Then it comes. The final line — in several poems in parenthesis. Four of five of the poems in this book function exactly as just described. Here’s one:

The sun leans to the west

The wind ceases
at dusk

(How’s the dollar doing?)

This hardly needs explaining. Wróblewski strikes readers as having a deep knowledge of what “west” means, and (I think it’s safe to add, without my knowing the details) of what this means to the Polish poem — but there’s not a hint of pontification. Anxiety (over structure and stability and predictability) is pervasive through tone, and that tone is going to find its way, as here, into the very tropes of nature lyric. Wróblewski’s wise speaker is constantly checking himself and his surroundings, freed oddly by knowing that all categories of poetic checking are to be engaged. The result is humor, of course, but there’s so much more. “$” is of course a political poem, or, rather, a poem about the shaping ironic language produced from geopolitical consciousness.

I’m pleased and proud to say that this poet has been published in Jacket2 a number of times over the years. Here, to take just one of many examples, is the publication of two poems in 2006: LINK. Here is Wróblewski commenting at his best: “The human brain is probably still the greatest mystery of the universe. It reacts to its surroundings in different ways. We do not know what it does when we are asleep. Scientific theories about it change every year. Neurosurgery, psychology, psychiatry — basically, they all are helpless. We really don’t know what that eternal dualism of body and soul is all about. Dolphin hunters and theologians argue about it. Every individual is an unexplored planet.”

* Piotr Gwiazda has also translated Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga. He has had other English translators, including Adam Zdrodowski (A Marizpan Factory), Agnieszka Pokojska (Let’s Go Back to the Mainland), Joel Leonard Katz, Rod Mengham, and Malcolm Sinclair (Our Flying Objects).

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June 3, 2017

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.