... There is not a single
cloud. Still, there is no Negro
either
A poem is somebody else
But if it is a lizard
Or a bishop – mine is the fault for
sure
Rafał Wojaczek, 1967 “The Poet Had to Be Shot”.
THE PHANTOM
GENERATION
Someone asked whether the line “YOU
BASTARD, YOU POET”[1] was a quote from
Wojaczek. – Yes, it was him. No, it was not him.
The very provenance of the word
“bastard” could point to those “Wojaczek-stigmatized” times, but would it be
justified in the context of the word “poet”? At that time, the fund
distribution index of the communist Ministry of Culture was quite appreciative
of poets, though not all of them. If the disregarded ones, the “bastards”, were
able to make it for another twenty years or so, they lived to see the times,
when the roles changed.
And
now, in the period of the new lustre of the word “poet”, due to a blaze of
media interest enkindled by a few literary prizes, such as the NOBEL prize, or
the Polish NIKE prize, thriving on political incorrectness of the subject or
the author’s biography (which is also a dimension of tolerance), at the time
when even priests are honoured, rather than ridiculed, because of their poetry,
is there anyone who “deserves” any negative publicity on the grounds of the
verse he or she writes?
What is meant by an interest in poetry or the scale of
its impact – today, when it is the popular culture, coupled with its refined
“measurability”, that decides on whether to publish, or not to publish, which
means to be or not to be for the Poet?
Is it true to say that excluding the few names which
have come to shine on the firmament of Polish literature, casting their light
over “the big pond”, all the remaining names are merely phantoms?
Is it enough for you, the Unknown Poet, to be a Poet,
perhaps an outstanding Poet? Times are hard! There is not enough room for you
to become a mere sufferer, a mere “bastard”. Well, you can still get yourself
the www.poet.pl website, at a reasonable price, and keep waiting on, ensconced
in your
In the foreword to the session
entitled “YOU BASTARD, YOU POET”, being the originator of the event, I
expressed my hope for a discussion, which might not conclude in an answer to
any of the foregoing questions, but which must be a Talk, an Encounter, Food
for Thought.
On 25 October, 2002, at 7 p.m., in
the Foyer of the Moliere restaurant in Kraków, Poland, Ms. Katarzyna Janowska,
an editor of the major Polish POLITYKA weekly and the hostess of the event,
opened the 2nd day of the “Literary Gathering at Moliere’s”
festival. Following a short introduction to the magic of the moment, she
invited all the guests, a huge crowd of spectators, to the Theater Hall, where
they came under the eyes of a dozen, or so, faces of men and women in the
portraits hanging on the wall. The “Contemporary Polish Poets” is a photography
project by Grażyna Niezgoda, which she has pursued for many years now.
Some voices commented that captions
below those portraits of poets were missing, and hence the photos seemed to be
images of just common, unknown people. Well, as a matter of fact, the Moliere
event was focused on quite anonymous poets, as to a Pole – which follows from
the context of my introduction – non-anonymous are the poets, such as Wisława
Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Jan Twardowski, Tadeusz Różewicz and, recently,
Adam Zagajewski. They climbed
The “Literary Gatherings at
Moliere’s” was formally inaugurated by Professor Czesław Miłosz, via a display
panel on the wall. The master addressed the gathering with a good-natured
approval of the meetings that seek, over the generation gap, to find the
fundamental and the aesthetic in poetry. He himself, as he admitted, used to
cherish youthful provocation, opposing the celebrities from the Skamander
group.
- “When I was
young, it was the Skamander poets that occupied
And, speaking of which, the term
“bastard” goes back to the period of romanticism, when members of the
“Philomates” society were the bohemia, the bastards of their time, he went on
to explain, with a playful smile.
- If I were
younger, I would subscribe to this line, as it belongs to the myths of the
contemporary literature that we have inherited. But even when I got drunk and
partook in the suffering of Mickiewicz’s Konrad in his cell, I never felt a
bastard.
The presence of Czesław Miłosz
definitely added splendour to the meeting held under the thought-provoking
headline “You bastard, You Poet” and turned the event into a cultural highlight
of Kraków: and hence, the interest on the part of the media (TV Channel 3,
newspapers in Kraków). Impressive attendance at this entrance-fee event,
especially on the part of young people, at the age of techno-music concerts,
multiplexes, and DVD films, deserves a separate sociological study, entitled
e.g. “Pop-cultural Dimension of Poetry and Its Elitism”.
Czesław Miłosz’s advice that the
younger poets should not give up their uprising against fashions in poetry and
in literature in general seemed to be an appeal. Furthermore, it served as a
necessary counterweight to a misleading, cursory or too literal, understanding
of that apparently “unworthy” expletive, which does not belong in the generally
respectful sense of the word “poet”. An outstanding critic, Jerzy Jarzębski,
claims that it is the most eminent masters of poetry that Polish people love.
Do we? Do we also love those, who have not become eminent yet and do not stand
any chance of ever becoming renowned masters either? Disapproving grunts and
exclamations were to be heard, even before the students of the
The drama students presented the
poems of their choice with zest and devotion, although the lack of any
information as to the name of the authors depersonalized the poets in question,
even more than the anonymous pictures hanging all around. However, that was
exactly the idea underlying the “Rustles” spectacle, staged by the students,
complemented with a well-designed soundtrack of live violin and piano.
The working part of the “You bastard, You Poet”
session was initiated with an essay by Professor Marian Stala, entitled “Trust
Poetry”, in which the author ponders over whether a variety of the styles of creating and understanding poetry is a
value. And if it is – doesn’t this variety assume a form of mutually isolated collections of works ... and become a chaos
of unadjusted and mutually exclusive voices?.
Subsequently, the participants went
on to read out their essays on the “bastard” subject, which were prepared after
the news of the proposed event had spread among the circles of the
“Moliere”-associated poets and students. Each presentation was introduced by
Ms. Katarzyna Janowska, who also offered a brief profile of each author. This
year’s participants in the literary festival at the Moliere – as this event
seems to have already assumed an annual formula – included the following poets,
who belong to the generation of those born in the period 1940-60: Stanisław
Dłuski, Anna Janko, Radosław Kobierski, Józef Kurylak, Krystyna Lenkowska,
Karol Maliszewski, Jarosław Mikołajewski, Jacek Napiórkowski, Ewa Sonnenberg,
Janusz Szuber, and Adriana Szymańska.
Janusz Szuber, the poet from Sanok,
analysed who he was, while - aware of the
artistic requirements, as well as of continual temptations of deceitfulness
– he was writing the following: A poet –
yes, but by whose authority? A
suspicious individual, as usurping the title (mostly undeservingly) and the
consequent privilege of speaking not only for himself, but also on behalf of
others, with ill-timed and ill-judged obstinacy; a galley slave of his own
accord, toiling on the hardly attainable perfection of shape; sprawled
coquettishly in a generous mentor’s bed or bent slavishly in his antechamber;
and – no chance at hiding that – a manufacturer of faulty and secondary
products, which are neither exquisite, nor necessary, but referred to – with
sound and fury – as literature. ... If not a bastard, then a parasite with a
poet’s label – to name but Congericola Kabatai or Kabatarina Pattersoni –
whence there’s merely a short way to being a parasite, which – according to
Josif Brodsky – is how the authorities of a fallen Empire construed the
activity and the contribution of her greatest poets.
For the sake of clarification, out of
the aforesaid generation of poets, it is only Janusz Szuber and Adriana
Szymańska who have apparently succeeded in crossing the thresholds of
Parnassus, as celebrity poets of the National Library in Warszawa (and the
National Theatre, as in the case of Szuber) and have been included among the
authors associated with the most prestigious publishing houses, such as ZNAK or
Wydawnictwo Literackie, as well as the previously mentioned “Zeszyty Literackie”
periodical.
To my mind, the “parasitic” role of
the poet, expounded upon in the essay by Szuber, is not as sad an observation
as the aforesaid fate of phantoms. Even the metaphorical curse “bastard” has
more weight than the word “phantom”, which is a reference to the state of the
poet’s usual being or, rather, not-being. A bastard may at least meddle,
provoke, contaminate, lie and interfere, which some poets mistake for a
statement of independence. A phantom, i.e. a trace of somebody/something or a
place for somebody/something, that has not started, or has already ended, or
has never existed at all, is a horrible, nihilistic state: neither human, nor
divine. To add insult to injury, the fact of non-existence does not eliminate
pain. A lack of a foot is not equal to feeling no pain in it. On the contrary,
the pain felt in an amputated part of the body is said to be far more acute
than that in a wounded leg, or lacerated soul. Following the train of thought
of Karol Maliszewski, the poet: perhaps ...
[a poet is] ... a tailor conjured by
Leśmian, sewing up his lame soul, and then working away on a raincoat for the
larger soul, the collective one. Maliszewski believes that he, being a
local poet of the Central Sudety mountains and the village of Nowa Ruda, is
needed as there are still people, who
need his consciousness and sensitivity – the encrypted self-knowledge of
mankind, made of beliefs, premonitions, moods and other – some say foolish,
ridiculous or “void” – states of consciousness ... This world shall
not be described by Czesław Miłosz. Likewise, Wisława Szymborska is also
concerned with the universals and knows nothing about the out-of-the-way
village of Ścinawka Średnia.
A description of an individual, the
peripheral feeling of pain is necessary, and just as necessary is a poetic
register of universal joy, or peripheral joy, or universal pain.
And these cannot be effected by a
single poet, nor just a few. More poets are needed, whole poetic circles.
Perhaps, for the one, tangible and visible Poet to come into being, it takes a
significant number of poetic beings: poets, their poems, all their little
independences, more or less manifest, as well as those transparent ones – all
of which add up to constitute the fabric of the background for the Only One, who
ascends at a particular time, in a particular place, in the field of a
particular clarity of vision.
The event on that Friday night did
not satiate my thoughts, as a hardly intimate mood necessitates certain
contemplative compromises. Nevertheless, it definitely constituted a bridge
over different generations of poets and their prospective readers, an
intellectual provocation with the disturbing “bastard” in its title, an
opportunity for “foyer” conversations within a “theatrical” aura. It enabled
the “phantom” poets to make an appearance – however elusive – to show their
poetic nerve, apparently slightly different from what the audience had known
and empathized with. It presented yet another proof that the edifice of a
hermetic contemporary Polish culture is co-buttressed also by the “phantom”
groups of poets, whose determination to live on and write on, despite any
feedback hints at the possibility of being fished out of the “shoal of writers”[2], makes sense.
Let me conclude with the words of
poet Jarosław Mikołajewski, who, during this festival’s confrontation between
generations, allowed the watchful audience to see his own, separate code, as if
at that moment his poetic and human phantom turned material.
Sometimes, I think that those, who are not from
poetry, pull off deals in a forum of a parliament, behind my back. And it is
only when their debates come to a stand-off that they refer to a cognitive and
conciliatory entity; that they have a poet of their own, who invents a
language, in which they would dispute the limited shape of their state, on
their way to possible survival. Poetry –
reason of state. A dialect of the constitution.
Krystyna Lenkowska
The text
appeared in Polish in the PRACOWNIA literary quarterly, in March 2003, No.31
(1/2003).
Editor in Chief:
Wojciech Woźniak +, ISSN 0867-311X, Index No.: 36066X