POETRY AND RESISTANCE

I.
A historical steam-roller has gone several times through a country . . . yet the poet emerges more energetic. – Czeslaw Milosz.

The Poles, with their 200 years’ experience of occupation, have a genius for independence of mind in intolerable circumstances. Every feeling, every gesture, every word, however personal, has its political resonance. – A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books.

II.
Poetry is in part to do with voice; it is the area of literature where voice mixes with the written word. Poetry’s pre-existence is in the verbal traditions of storytelling, coming out of the oral nature of the Epic poem and moving, with Gutenberg, into being printed on a page, and later in collections and anthologies. Early examples of poetry are as memories of forgotten cultures, being concerned with voice it is also inherently about finding an identity within and for that culture and recording its histories. Think of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Beowulf or the Baghvhad Gita.

Poetry can be roughly divided into two types, those that assay the culture as a whole and those that assay the individual within that culture. The first type leads onto the second, as we move from understanding the world around us to understanding our role in that world. Poland has a history of being divided, whether in military victory or defeat her borders are, more so than most other European nations, changeable, and have changed many times throughout her history. This naturally leads onto a certain questioning of national identity, and if we say that poetry is about finding identity through voice then the Polish poets who were writing in the second half of the twentieth century are re-engaged with the assaying of a culture, and the individual’s role within it. The momentous fractures and disasters that befell Poland between 1939 and 1945 led to a disassociation, which continued under Soviet rule, providing a block between this re-engagement, the strength of Polish poetry, and its uniqueness, lies in the way its poets deal with this.

III.
After the Second World War the scholars of Western Europe moved towards post-modern and existential theories and modes of thought. The victory of the Allies over the Third Reich had secured them their academic and intellectual freedom, they were liberated then to explore and attack, to write and say and think what they wanted; free to explore the struggles of the individual mind or the continuing importance and role of art in society. Poland though was under Communist rule, with the censorship and bureaucracy that it entails. Thus the options for intellectual attack and exploration are demarked by what the government deems acceptable. This caused two things to happen to Polish poetry; firstly, much of it is was not written in Poland and secondly the poets who were still working in their homeland where not able to say certain things explicitly, forcing their collective poetic voice to find and express itself in different and subtle ways, if they are to express itself at all. Political repression of a culture manifests itself on how that culture views itself. If in a culture you are not free to express yourself, then this will realise itself upon freedom of expression in poetry, like a chain of falling dominos, with slowly contracting circles of ‘acceptable’ ideas. So if political freedom is restricted, then freedom in poetics must come from the freedoms that are afforded to the poet by the line and form.

This political repression also creates the parallel tradition of the émigré poet, who to escape these repressions leaves his home, and begins commenting on a lost homeland from the outside. Post-war Polish poetry, in finding its own, new voice, is trying to find the voice of freedom, and it finds it in sweeping metaphysical conceits or in dreams of an apolitical pastoral scenes and idylls. This is a poetry with a formal and aesthetical unity to it that belies the fragmentary nature of Poland’s history, or maybe exists in spite of it.

IV.
Cszelaw Milosz was the pre-eminent figure of literary Poland in the 20th century; over a career spanning seventy years he wrote countless books of poetry, translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish and wrote two memoirs of his early life in Lithuania. He emigrated, first to Paris and then to America, where he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkley University, in California. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, he is memorialised at Yad Vashem as one of the ‘righteous of the nations’ and a poem of his is inscribed at a memorial for the protesting shipworkers who were killed in 1970 in Gdansk. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Milosz returned to live in Krakow where he died in 2004, at the age of 93. Milosz’s life is inseparably tied up in a situation familiar to many Poles – he was not born within the borders of Poland (borders which shifted innumerably during that period) but viewed himself as Polish, he left his home because of the political situation and returned when it was possible.

When Milosz won the Nobel Prize he was in the strange situation where he was relatively unknown in Poland, with his works being censored and banned by the government. He was then a poet writing primarily for the Polish Diaspora. Some of his most interesting works though, were written during the Second World War, between 1943 and 1945 he produced three works of historical importance for assessing Poland and what it was going through; ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’, ‘A Song On The End World’ and ‘Dedication’. These are poems that examine the impact of total war and genocide on a people and their resistance, whether spiritual or actual, of the Polish people. ‘Dedication’ talks of a ‘broken city’ in ‘the valley of shallow Polish river’, but he tells us the aims of the young poet and how he sees poetry;

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards

Poetry, in dire historical situations, must examine them and find strength through resistance.

Tadeusz Rozewicz also speaks of the resistance and sanctuary that poetry provides against the political world. In his poem ‘The Deposition of the Burden’ he says that ‘modern poetry / is a struggle for breath’, for both himself and Milosz poetry must be about defiance and struggling to breathe, and thus, it is also to speak, as speech is a continuation and natural extension of breathing. And so through the act of speaking we try to understand civilisation and our role in it. For these Polish writers then the act of speech is given political connotations, in its restriction by censorship. Poetry finds resistance by placing ones liberty or safety at risk because of the poetic compulsion to say something; these are poets that understand that the poet must find his voice, no matter what.

In Polish poetry, as is in much of the poetry and literature that came out of the Eastern Bloc between 1945 and 1989, we witness the conflation of narrative with history and symbolism as a way of circumnavigating the restrictions placed upon writers by the censors. Adam Wazyk, who died in 1982, was one of the finest poets to explore the historical significances of Poland’s role in World War Two. Let us look at his poem ‘Sketch for a Memoir’, which was written upon his return to Poland in 1944 with the Polish Communist Army as an officer. It deals with the experiences of growing up between the two wars and the realisation that the pastoral idylls of youth will soon be transformed into the conflicts of 1939;

We were waked up, people of not quite bad will,
or buried under the rubble of a house.
And many were waked up
to have their eyes sealed with the bandages of death
and to be put up against the wall in paper shirts.

The apolitical idylls of youth that Wazyk describes as being a time where one ‘swam in rivers’ and talked ‘under chestnut tress’ are transformed from the Edenic to horrific, where we will all ‘wake up and recognise your epoch’. Or there is his poem ‘A Pre-Columbine Sculpture’, which was written just after the loosening of censorship laws in 1956 and metaphysically relates the sculpture of a ‘cruel god’ seen in a museum with the ‘the sadness of a passer-by stripped of his face’. The poem presents history’s examples of butchery and violence as unchanging and continuous, the passer-by is stripped of his face, and thus his identity; ‘there I should have understood everything’, says Wayzk. What he alludes to have understood is that history is cruel, that it repeats itself, and Polish history isn’t an unusual one in this, it is only exceptional in the scale of butchery. Let us also look at Anna Swirszczynska, who was a nurse during the Warsaw uprising of 1944. It took her many years to form her experiences into the long poem, Building the Barricade. Unlike much of Polish poetry that deals with the war, its aftermaths and Communist rule, Swirszczynska doesn’t treat the issues through the use of symbols or metaphysical conceits, she instead focuses on the everyday sufferings and the effect war has on the ordinary citizens and their resistance to it;

Along a street swept clean of people
a tank rolls firing.
It executes
houses
smashes
barricades.

Out of the gateway leaps a kid
a bottle of gasoline in his fist.
Along a street swept clean of people
he runs
at a crouch
at the tank.

One of Poland’s modern poets who is also engaged in this discourse about Polish history is Adam Zagajewski, in 2004 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for literature, a prize seen by many as a precursor for the Nobel, born in 1945 his life span comes after the great fractures of Nazi occupation, invasion and Holocaust, his history is tied up then with Communism, and like Czeslaw Milosz, was also an émigré poet who lived in France and America. His poem ‘To Go To Lvov’ deals with the subject of emigration and forced disposition by ideological forces, and the dream of a homeland, something of symbolic importance to the millions of Poles in Diaspora;

in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

But Zagajewski, as the émigré looking back on Poland, is ‘enchanted by that legendary, defenseless country’ where one always knows ‘full well the meaning / of captivity.’ There is, for Zagajewski, something thrilling about looking back on a lost homeland; if for some poets the history of Poland is like a fracture that must be healed through poetic exploration in order for identity to be found, then Zagajewski treats this history like a symbol for his own identity, it reaches down to something deeper, more primordial, the displacement of a homeland, and yet it also deals with the outsider in a different society, trying to integrate but separated by this looming symbol, what Zagajewski calls the ‘reckless unicorn / feeding on the wool of tapestries / beautiful, week and impudent.’

V.
With Zagajewski we have moved from examining Poland’s history as fact to symbol, and thus it is truly absorbed by poetry, it finds its poetic voice, it is no longer a comment on the recent past, an exploration of something unknown, like it was for Milosz or Wayzk or Swirszczynska, but it is now firmly part of a poet like Zagajewski’s identity. The fractures in Polish history have been absorbed by time into part of the make-up of any poet wishing to call upon them for their work, with the fall of Communist rule in 1989, we move into a new chapter and consign the previous years to history.