Tomasz Różycki and I met a decade ago, at a New York City party celebrating the publication of my An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. He was an up-and-coming poet then, a new generation, and I was told he was someone to watch.
I had met Poland’s greatest living poet, Adam Zagajewski, during my first visit to Kraków in 2008; he became an important reason to return to that jewel-box city. But I didn’t know of the connection between the two poets until The Los Angeles Review of Books‘ quarterly review (that’s right, the LARB has a print edition) published this marvelous homage: “Dark Coat: On Adam Zagajewski,” remembering the poet’s life and work before his shocking and unexpected death on March 21. The artistic reason for the tribute: the younger poet writes that “poetry is, finally, a mourning of each death, of every vanishing, witness to the ‘fury of disappearance.'” In this case prose will serve the cause as well.
According to Tomasz Różycki: “He followed his own path, and at times it seemed that he had been abandoned there, alone.” In writing a retrospective, he has written the best introduction to Adam Zagajewski and his work I know. (The translation of the essay, by the way, is by the poet Mira Rosenthal, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford.)
A couple excerpts, the first one discussing Adam Zagajewski’s renowned poem, “To Go to Lvov”:
It was a very concrete and Polish kind of poetry, as much as Polish recollections of a lost Lwów can be — and, at the same time, it was detached from our cursed Polish problems. It was different, worldly, free. Not because the poems were detached from reality, as Polish critics often accused them of being, no — they were about reality itself, since our reality is twofold, if only because of the fact that it’s made up of the visible and the invisible and, in addition, to quote Hegel, it is threatened by the “fury of disappearance” and, therefore, only accessible to us within the blink of an eye. Moreover, poetry is the awareness of this vanishing, an elegy, a farewell to reality, a moment of mourning, necessary for us to be able to cope with the loss and to deal with the overabundance of memory.
I’m writing this because some things only happen once in a lifetime; we can pass them over in silence, but sooner or later that silence will overwhelm and engulf us. We can try to be thankful for them, however ineptly, but that gratitude by its very nature will be less than the gift we received. It’s helpful to gain distance from something in order to describe it. It’s even better if the object of description has been frozen, though that’s not possible in this case, even with the help of such a fixative as death.
***
His poetry seemed different from anything I had read before, especially from contemporary poetry, which was marked by some king of gloomy heaviness, some kind of dry, wooden palpitation of language. Within Adam’s poetry, there was breath, space; it was not cramped, but exploding with light. Within it, there was no confusion or great toil; it was exactly as he had written — “a search for radiance.” And it was a poetry of joy — the pure joy of being, of admiration for beauty and the world, of being a child in the world. Joy like the joy of swimming in the warm Mediterranean Sea. He understood and wrote about the fact that, in the same sea, refugees were drowning, just as he understood and wrote about the fact that Lwów, a city that he loved dearly, was the site of so much death just before his birth. “A poem grows on contradictions, but it can’t grow over them,” as he wrote in “Ode to Plurality.” His poetry did not absolve him of anything, but it took on what poetry has taken on from the beginning: a celebration of human existence, of human life. The world is sometimes difficult and unbearable, but it also deserves to be praised, life deserves our gratitude and good that is more powerful than evil. Czesław Miłosz adored how Adam’s poems were so “intoxicated with the world.” His poems are often ecstatic, orgasmic, starting with the concrete and transforming into a hymn — as in, among many others, the poem “Lava,” which could be seen as an attempt to answer Adorno’s famous assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. So many poems tell of flashes of happiness — of those times, as Schopenhauer says, when “we are, for that moment, unburdened of the base press of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the workhouse of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still,” and which Nietzsche described with the phrase “eternal return.” Adam’s poetry is slight and piercing at the same time, and when I read it, I get the sensation that the calendar has made some kind of mistake again and forgot to note the holiday that the poem announces.
Why did he do it? Here’s the way himself explained it in an interview with Peter Vail, included in the book: