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Anna Janko - Afterword to the book "An Overdue Letter to a Pimply Angel" (2014)
translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
There is something in these poems which – despite their apparent simplicity – makes
them get under one’s skin, where they begin to complicate themselves, acquire non-
verbal values and even descend into madness. We don’t sense all that when we
read them the way we read everything. . . We can undoubtedly appreciate the
intellectual quality of this poetry, take in its subtle and by no means feminine
emotions, discover its linguistic schemes and their shadows, and beneath the
restrained narration discern a certain implicit lushness of its second plane. . .
But that second plane is what matters here because Krystyna Lenkowska is
the master of the second plane. We should stop reading those poems as actively as
is usually done, stop staring at them, searching for solutions or expecting the punch
line. We should commune with them passively in the Buddhist sense, switching on
”peripheral attention,” sidelong vision since only then will we have a chance to gain
the insight that poetry imparts. And then the inside world opens to the essence of
things, which the poet calls “is—isn’t.” Then we can see how the words in the
sentences draw apart to reveal the root of language as the translator of existence.
Then the daring of Lenkowska’s free associations--straight talk from home, from the
street, from the hospital, from the edge of an event, the crumb suddenly picked off
the lip--“takes wing” or metaphysically takes root. At the same time the poet is honest
to the point of pain--to pain and total powerlessness since not for a moment does she
forget that language is an island in the sea of the unnamable. And this, like the
common good-no-good, she also shares with the reader.
Anna Janko
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