-
To Adam
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
333 To Adam Your poems breathe. The words are never in a hurry, never forced into coherence, never inexact. You let your subjects choose themselves and speak through you, but still the voice is yours—just yours. For me that’s everything. If poetry’s no more than playing with words and not real conversation at its best, why deal with it? Your poems have the sacredness of secrets shared with proven friends. Your essays do the same. You write of Rilke as a fellow craftsman, never as Goethe’s sacrosanct, untouchable successor. Milosz and Szymborska you praise as more than fellow Poles— Milosz, for persevering to the end— Szymborska, for poems that match her candor in declining speaking junkets in her eighties thus, “Madam Szymborska will come when she is younger.” All this reveals a total generosity that’s rare in general, rarer 334 in writers and rarest in poets. Whoever said that living well requires maximum detachment plus maximum appreciation? For you that comes as naturally as speaking Polish or gazing at your wife’s face or strolling down a street near Montparnasse. In Houston, Krakow or Paris you grant what’s suddenly important just because it’s there the courtesy of absolute attention. Like Romeo embracing Juliet. Like doctors in surgery. Like Angelo Roncalli, the plump, old pope, who spoke the same to Kennedy and Krushchev as to countrymen from Bergamo, the Vatican guards and the organ-grinder smiling with his monkey near the Piazza Navona. ...