Choosing a favourite poem; or, De amicitia
Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, Blackmuir, Brooks - these are the masters who taught me to read poetry with the attention it deserves. They were uncompromising. They directed the reader’s attention to the words on the page and would hold it there in the face of the various temptations of sentimentality, subjectivism and biographism. Poems had to be treated as autonomous objects. They had to be read and studied in complete detachment not only from the life of the author, but often even in isolation from the whole corpus of his work. The model guide was Richards’s Practical Criticism which scrupulously documented, examined and condemned clumsy, inattentive and irrelevant attempts by careless, distracted and wrongheaded students to come to grips with poetic texts.
Now, after years of abnegation and self-discipline, I propose in examining a poem to indulge in a display of biographism, or rather autobiographism - a heresy so extreme that it wasn’t even noticed by the priests of New Criticism. The poem which is to be the object of this outrage is entitled ‘To Adam Czerniawski’, its author Bogdan Czaykowski. I quote it in lain Higgins’s translation:
When I ventured into a small wood,
I found even this wood had its lair;
away from capitals and vaticans
I discovered that papacy may exist anywhere.
If I lack anything, it’s paintings -
of faces gazing sagaciously, if long dead,
of blue mists in Italian landscapes,
and of forms shattered to shine from within,
for sometimes a form will crack beautifully.Doubtless my verse arouses no excitement;
it lacks expression, or something of that sort.
Perhaps it’s a matter of being distant
from the living well-springs of speech, or of talent
buried after expulsion from paradise:
rather a matter of nature than of culture.
But if you must speak so as to hear yourself,
then in the end you hear yourself like silence.
And so, if I lack anything at all, it’s images
of faces listening, in which the speaker can see
whether silence is harmony or only a jeer.Take rhyme: no sooner appeared, it fades away;
and the stanza somehow refuses to stay;
sometimes something like music sounds from within,
but then those who seem to have played
stand leaning on their instruments in an empty room,
listening, as if their roles had changed.
Before them - hollow notes, so they are uncertain,
unconfirmed, absurd....charlatans?
Perhaps their sound, though musical in shape,
is only a probing of sound, an ontic trace?And yet I don’t want to say: - that’s Being!
I have scraped together other kinds of oddity.
For instance, for me the bard’s like the listener -
transforms metaphor into synecdoche;
for the one who listens is partly the speaker,
and the speaker in turn partly listens.
Admit it: this system has its merit:
if the reader, the listener is - the poet.I’m writing this in early spring, which like the fall
is somehow exceedingly poetic.
As yet unfalled leaves are drifting from the trees
and mingling so with drifting blossoms
that you don’t know whether this is early snow,
snow falling from almond-trees,
hirling beneath the stars, which shine as sharply
as if dry frost had polished them.
And then you hear a whistling in the birches.
Your even transient bird has come again,
this bird unseen and barely heard.
Naturally, I haven’t chosen this poem solely because of its title. It’s fortunate for me (and for Czaykowski) that it is an outstanding work. It will be counted among the great achievements of Polish poetry in our time. Thematically it significantly widens its horizons: composed at the other end of the world, in Western Canada, it reflects dramatically and elegiacally the fate of a poet exiled to the periphery of culture on the borders of vast areas of nature untamed by man.
Over the years Czaykowski has several times taken up the themes that have obsessed Polish exiles. As the Polish Romantics have already taught us, exile is a very painful experience with which it’s impossible ever completely to come to terms. But, on the other hand, as we know from the works of the Polish Romantics, it can stimulate great poetry. What is significant is that in Czaykowski’ s poetry this conflict takes on forms different from the ones that have in turn become familiar through the poetry of the Romantics, of Norwid, and latterly of the Skamander and post-Skamander poets exiled in England and America during the last War. Deported to the Soviet Union in 1940 as a child he can’t, like them, express nostalgia for a specific remembered place in Poland: so he registers a longing for his native language, or rather he feels its power (“Language - my chain” he will declare in his Revolt in Verse), a force well-nigh irresistible: “I was chained in childhood”. And in Canada he misses Europe and its culture. Zbigniew Herbert travelling in Western Europe saw himself as a barbarian in a garden, Czaykowski is a solitary in a forest lair. A solitary partly against his will (the fate of exile) but also, as his poems constantly testify’, out of choice, for Czaykowski is a nature-poet, endowed with a Rousseauesque soul, but not exclusively: it encompasses a sensibility of an individual who finds it difficult to exist removed from the cultural heritage of Europe.
It’s this conflict which is new in Polish poetry. It is portrayed here in somewhat traditionalist verses (we catch echoes of Mickiewicz’s ‘Pan Tadeusz’ and Norwid’s ‘Promethidion’) but with a subtle music so characteristic of Czaykowski and with arresting imagery and metaphors (the motif of sound and silence is particularly well crafted and developed) - qualities that assure the work that high rank which I claim for it.
But let me return to the title and its significance. Poets normally compete with each other. A boundless egotism leads to mutual dislike, jealousy, envy and even hatred. It’s a generally noted phenomenon. That’s why it’s worth recording the rare examples of a contrary attitude: Norwid’s ‘To Teofil Lenartowicz’, Milosz’s ‘To Tadeusz R6zewicz, poet’, R6zewicz’s ‘Leopold Staff’s Lyre’ and Herbert’s ‘To Ryszard Krynicki - a Letter’, though this last has a somewhat ambivalent sense. In writing:
Richard - not much, really not much, will remain
of the poetry of this mad centuiy certainly Rilke Eliot
and a few dignified shamans [...]
Herbert implies that Krynicki’s own poems don’t stand much of a chance.
Milosz was extending a welcome to a younger poet, Herbert is also addressing a younger colleague, R6zewicz pays homage to his master, Czaykowski speaks to a contemporary, whose friendship reaches back several decades to the moment when he was shown a typescript of ‘Man is only a humming sea-shell’:
The crowd is like the sea.
We dip our hands in it
And almost blindly
Fish out friends.
Together we surface on the beach [...]
Czaykowski addresses Czerniawski but has nothing to say about him or his poetry. Rather - as we saw - he reflects on his own writing and the fate which has shaped it. That’s why Czerniawski feels free to boast of his privileged position in this poem. He appears there not as a subject of a panegyric but in the role of a silent partner in a dialogue.
My friendship with Tadeusz R6zewicz has also endured for decades. And it’s also left a mark on our poetry. Almost simultaneously and independently we have ‘placed’ each other in a couple of poems - but discreetly, secretly, so that an uninitiated reader is not likely to find the traces. Lately, also without any collusion, I wrote the following poem entitled ‘Picture-Postcard’:
White caps - snow on peaks
brown snakes - swift streams
coils of cables - mountain roads
darkening swathes - forests
gleaming stains - lakes
arrows - ships at sea;
he concludes he’s observed from above
what Rene couldn’t have seen.
But one evening
leaning out of his window
the philosopher
noticed below
rounded hats
and concluded they rested
on heads of passers-by.
While R6zewicz wrote his ‘Autistic poem’ (They came to see a poet, Anvil, 1991) which ends:
Descartes (opened a window)
expected to see people
moving along the streets
chapeaux et manteaux
rien de plus
he saw coats and hats
Nothing else
Perhaps this coincidence cannot be attributed to friendship, but since it cannot be explained in any other way either (except that we had both read Descartes) let it be recorded here.
It might seem that I am getting further and further away from my topic of discussing Czaykowski’s poem. Yes, I’m exploiting to the full my decision to free myself from the obligatory rules of literary criticism. I am allowing myself to wallow in digression and inconsequentiality as well as autobiographism. But only apparently, for the reader must by now have realised that a motif binding this essay does exist but that it primarily concerns friendship among poets rather than the choice of a favourite poem.
Page(s) 47-52
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