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

Immaculatus

Koslowski belongs to that tiny group of people who came
into being through immaculate conception. ‘Whether in
my case, too, the Holy Ghost had a hand in it, or
perhaps even God the Father, l just don’t know,’ Koslowski re-
marked to friends. In any case, when, at a young age
he slept with his natural mother for the first time, he
claims that he found her to be, without a doubt, still
a virgin - a story however, that hardly anyone accepts. 
‘Afterwards,’ Koslowski notes with resignation, ‘after-
wards, something like that is pretty damned hard to prove.’

Hartmut Eing - Drawing

Pantyhose

Koslowski travelled to eastern Europe several times in
the late fifties and early sixties. ‘Back then, there
were still great ways to know women.’ He reports,
‘I always took three or four pairs of pantyhose with me.
All you really had to do back then was to unpack such
a pair of pantyhose and hold them open in front of you. In
the shortest time imaginable, a woman would jump into them.’
A trick that doesn’t work anymore. Koslowski’s comment:
‘On the one hand, those were the days. On the other,
they really weren’t.’

Well-Versed in Love

One of his marriages failed in a particularly tragic way:
each time Koslowski felt especially tender and close
to his wife, he would leave their bed to write love poems
in the kitchen for hours on end. They weren’t half bad,
by the way.

An inconsequential Meeting

In 1938, in a cafe in Zurich, Koslowski shared his table
for forty-five minutes with a rather gaunt gentleman.
Koslowski didn’t have even the slightest idea that the
gentleman was James Joyce. But then Joyce didn’t have
even the slightest idea that Koslowski was Koslowski
either. And in that respect the meeting was of no consequence whatsoever.