Krystyna Lenkowska published her first book of poetry in 1991, and in the last fourteen years has followed it with four more poetry collections. The most recent one is Eve’s Choice, from which she’ll read tonight. She’s also a translator—she’s translated Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson into Polish—and an essayist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous Polish literary journals. As if that were not enough, she’s also a publisher who is known for releasing attractive album-like books of poetry.
Krystyna lives in the part of Poland that has been blessed with poets and artists. For centuries it was a multi-ethnic region of the south-eastern borderlands, where people spoke different languages, observed different religious rites, and got along pretty well. That part of the region’s history was suppressed by the communist authorities whose number one article of faith was uniformity in everything—in art, music, ethnicity. But the memory of this earlier, richer time has survived, and after the collapse of communism, as if the dam had burst, there has been an amazing outpouring of talent, of writers and artists speaking in many different voices. When I first encountered this phenomenon I was already living in the San Joaquin Valley, and I couldn’t fail to see the parallels between Fresno’s vibrant poetic scene with what is happening in Podkarpacie, the area adjacent to the Carpathian mountains.
If I were introducing an American poet, I could spare you this geographical information. I could also assume that people in the audience would be familiar with the American poetic tradition and could place the poet within it. With a Polish poet, I can’t make the same assumption, so I can only hope you’ll bear with me when I try to give you some background. Polish poetry in America has come to be associated with names such as Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska, and Rozewicz. This doesn’t mean, of course, that there were no other poets in Poland. There are probably as many poets per square mile in Poland as there are in the United States. Or maybe even more, given the privileged role of poetry in Poland that goes back to the period of Romanticism. American poets sometimes say that they envy Polish poets that special position. When Czeslaw Milosz heard a similar sentiment during one of the Krakow poetry seminars, he quickly responded, “They envy the hunchback his hump.” At the same gathering a Polish philosophy professor came up with a much more mundane reason for this proliferation of poets. America, he said, is known as the land of opportunity where it’s easy to make it. In Poland few people can make it, and too few want to make it. So for lack of opportunities or drive, they turn to poetry.
The poets I mentioned and their followers came to be known abroad as the Polish school of poetry. But even though they were placed in the same school, their poems exhibited the proper individualism of poetry, ranging from intellectual and discursive to metaphysical and lyrical. What joined these poets despite their differences was their commitment and sense of mission, their awareness of history, their sense of irony and distrust of rhetoric. If they were sad, their sorrows were never completely private because they tried to transcend purely individual concerns. What’s interesting to note is that this group of poets is predominantly male.
Women poets can’t be accused of lack of commitment, but their commitments are different. Some of them like the male poets combine the personal with the historical. Many others, though, distance themselves from history and politics. Someone reading the collection Talking to My Body, the later poetry of Anna Swir, might never guess that she was just two years older than Milosz and had lived through the same historical experiences (and by the way, it was Milosz who translated her poems into English). I could mention many other women poets of the older generation into whose poetry history rarely or never entered.
After the demise of communism, in the early nineties, the new generation of poets, those born in the 1960s, adopted a programmatic distance from the historical consciousness and politics. These young poets called themselves “barbarians” (the word appeared in the title of an anthology of their poetry) and rebelled against the themes and aesthetic standards of the earlier generation. They wanted to depict individual experience and didn’t attempt to universalize it. If they felt any sense of commitment, it was commitment to themselves. They invariably used the first-person singular, and it’s clear that in their poems the speaker is the poet. Because of their attitudes, minimalist, sarcastic and often abrasive language, they have been charged with nihilism and narcissism. Marcin Swietlicki, one of the group, called the poetry of the preceding era “the poetry of slaves”:
The poetry of slaves lives on ideas,
And ideas are a watery substitute for blood.
With the coming of freedom from the communist rule, these young poets felt liberated from the obligation to put Poland first. But given the vicissitudes of Polish history, this wasn’t an altogether new idea. Jan Lechon, who began his poetic career in the period between the two world wars, expressed the same sentiment: “And in spring let me see spring, not Poland.”
To young poets in Poland that may have seemed revolutionary, but many women poets have subscribed to the idea for a long time. And Krystyna Lenkowska belongs alongside those Polish women poets who like the young poets of the sixties generation believe in the poetic imagination and in the personal superseding the public. Although the publication of her first book of poetry coincided with the “Barbarian” anthology, generationally, philosophically, and aesthetically she’s closer to the poets born after the end of the second world war. Like the poetry of other women poets, her poems display existential and literary self-awareness, as well as wry humor and irreverence. At the same time her poetic voice is uniquely her own. One reviewer of her previous collection said “The critic who will try to point out [Lenkowska’s] artistic (and also generational) affinities . . . most probably won’t find them.” The woman in Lenkowska’s poems is a modern woman who feels affinity with other women in myth, art, history; a woman who is not shy about her sensuality, who doesn’t feel that she needs to make amends, but who often painfully feels her loneliness. Yet without this sense of separateness she wouldn’t be able to create her own interior space. And without others she wouldn’t know her loneliness and her desire for togetherness. Krystyna Lenkowska’s poems are personal but never confessional. Even in the poems with concrete locales and details, the speaking “I” isn’t particularized. There’s distance and elusiveness.
Whenever I talk about poetry, or--for that matter--whenever anyone talks about poetry, I have a feeling that there’s a reduction. It almost seems as if there were an unfathomable abyss between the living voice of the poem and the dry, abstract interpretation. So let the poems speak in their own living voice of the poet. Krystyna Lenkowska will read her poems in Polish and Liza Wieland will read the English translations. Please welcome Krystyna and Liza.
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough