An evening with poet Adam Zagajewski

Our local library has a supportive Friends of the Library which funds many great events.  In April, to promote National Poetry Month, they sent a postcard mailing for an evening with poet Adam Zagajewski.

You know the Sam Cook song, Wonderful World, that starts off ”don’t know much about history” ?  Well, replace history with poetry, and you’ve got my story!  One of my goals this year is to expand my reach, to read (and learn from) forms of literature that I don’t usually sit down with, so this seemed to be calling me!

I’ll confess that I needed a little encouragement, so I sent a quick email to Serena at Savvy Verse & Wit, as she reads a lot of poetry and is a published poet herself.  Serena said: “I highly recommend that you go to the reading.  Adam’s work is well known and he’s phenomenal.”

So that’s how it was that I found myself taking a break from my duties as a rogue Twitter cheerleader during Readathon to walk through the doors of our library on Saturday evening.  There was a good-sized group there, about 70 people.

The president of the Friends of the Library introduced Adam Zagajewski with a bit of a bio about him and his work.  He was born in 1945 in Lvov Poland; he and his family were relocated to Western Poland due to political pressure and changing borders.  His early poems, written when he was in his 20s and 30s, were considered protest poems of the New Wave or Generation of ’68 poets.  Later work has moved away from these themes; according to reviewer Joachim T. Baer, Zagajewski’s themes “are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.”  He currently teaches at the University of Chicago, and spends his times between Chicago, Paris, and Krakow.

Adam Zagajewski’s name became more well-known among the masses when Try to Praise the Mutilated World was published in the New Yorker magazine after 9/11:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

He read for almost an hour on Saturday, a wide range from some of his earliest works, to “self-portraits,” to poems crafted in the past few years.  He showed his sense of humor by joking that his wife calls him vain to indulge in painting a self-portrait through poetry.

I learned just how sensitive the microphone is on my digital recorder – it picked up every shuffle from the people near me in the audience.  I have an audio clip of Adam Zagajewski reading The Diction Teacher Retires from the Theater School.  This is a much more light-hearted poem which earned laughs from the audience when he read the parenthetical in the fourth stanza (I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to work-around the formatting of this!):

Tall, shy, dignified

in an old-fashioned way,

She bids farewell to students, faculty,

and looks around suspiciously.

She’s sure they’ll mangle their mother tongue

ruthlessly and go unpunished.

She takes the certificate (she’ll check

for errors later). She turns and vanishes offstage,

in the spotlights’ velvet shadows,

in silence.

We’re left alone

to twist our tongues and lips.

After the reading, Zagajewski took questions and had a short discussion with the audience.  To the question “How and when did you know you were a poet?” he answered “It comes and it goes.”  Asked which of his poems are his favorites, he explained that his favorites have leaps, something unexpected; they aren’t linear, there is development and growth in his favorites.

He addressed the challenges in translating his work (he writes in Polish; currently his work is being translated by Clare Cavanagh).  He said that subtleties are lost, others are created.  The linguistic “games” and connections may be distorted, but it is the images and intelligence that are translated and carried through.

Copies of Zagajewski’s two latest volumes, Eternal Enemies and Without End, were available for sale, and he gladly signed books and chatted with us.

It was an eye-opening experience, and I’m so glad I was encouraged to step outside my comfort zone.  How are you stretching during National Poetry Month?

p.s.  The alcove picture at the top of this post is where Zagajewski read, in the rotunda of the library; the statue is of Ralph Waldo Emerson.