Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Rósewicz (b.1921) is another great poet from abroad championed by Milosz, Heaney and Paulin. He has applied to language Picasso’s technique of recycling things like old bicycles into goats. He has called himself “the poet of the rubbish dump” and collages the débris of the world’s media to create a portrait of a civilisation declining to its end. The title poem juxtaposes BSE headlines (featuring Major, Blair and Gummer), fashion histories and the holocaust.

     Actually, to readers of Pound and poetry of the sixties this isn’t particularly new. He was also thrown by the Adorno view that the holocaust has killed poetry, and this his made him seek a “new” way, which is rather like some of the Cantos. If Rósewicz’s poetry itself can seem like a rubbish dump it’s because it is “virtual” verse: it has no “form”: “gold and corpses merge, diseases leap between species, people become meat”. But after all it was the fascist Pound who spoke of our civilisation as “the great arsehole shitting flies”, and that was before World War II. Rósewicz, a “socialist-realist” who “had been looked on rather kindly by the Polish communist authorities”, in fact describes all he does as “fragments of a comprehensive poem about all aspects of human experience, which I have not yet finished and which in the end I shall leave unfinished”. Plus ça change…

     So here is the kind of thing:

..... gold laundered in Switzerland
decomposes and rots
in antiseptic Sweden

it contains gold teeth
gold caps gold rings
with diamond eyes
spectacle frames hair
fountain pens breaths
banks unveil
their bosom secrets
banks temples of the golden calf
monumental goldshcheißers
excrete
impurities…

“Goldshcheißers” means “gold-shitters”. Plus ça change…

     More cogent to my mind is his quotation from his friend Wyka: “A gold tooth torn from a corpse/ bleeds forever, even if no-one remembers/ where it came from”. A gruesome humour comes into his sequence ‘Meat’:

..... some princess went mad at court
and a cow in a shed
started singing:
in a meadow of clover
im Landkreis Hannover
a beautiful bull went insane
with a sponge full of holes for a brain

the princess raved and shouted
and wrote a book about it
the cow waved her tail before dying
and her soul ran away with a prion

He knows how to take the piss out of us as well, I think, even, or perhaps especially, when he’s accusing us of being human. His answer to the question “Where does evil come from?” is man: “he is nature’s error”. It’s true of course - but the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I found the poem ‘Francis Bacon or Diego Velasquez in a Dentist’s Chair’ (translated by his friend Adam Czerniawski) more inventive, and it really catches the essence of Bacon’s “meat-art copulating corpses”. The whole book is well-written, convincingly translated by Tony Howard and Barbara Plebanek, and has an informative introduction by Czerniawski. Arc is a noble house, and its parallel-text translation project, Visible Poets, publishing three titles a year, must be encouraged; but while this book is a diagnosis of the insane twentieth century, it’s far from a new or an unfamiliar one, it certainly doesn’t attempt a cure, or show, for me, even a way forward.