White Chairs and Red Wheelbarrows, and: Spowiedź, and: Confession, and: Białe krzesła, and: White Chairs

White Chairs and Red Wheelbarrows

As early as high school, Krystyna Dąbrowska (b. 1979) was drawn to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," which, in conversation with Jakub Winiarski, she called her "pocket Bible." By the time Dąbrowska first read Whitman, she had stopped going to Mass and taking religion classes at school. Her mother was a progressive Catholic and her father a committed atheist. In a recent e-mail exchange with me, she wrote that during her childhood she "felt a tension between faith and doubt. Which remains to this day." She was turned off by the nationalism and conservatism of the Catholic Church in Poland, which has allied itself with the right-wing Law and Justice party, currently in power. Describing herself as "anticlerical" but "religious in a certain sense," she is open to writing about matters of the spirit, but never in a way that feels orthodoxly devout.

Dąbrowska's ambivalence to the clergy appears in her recent poem "Confession," which sketches her memories of playing priest with some other girls from her gym class and getting in trouble for that at school. They use chairs in the locker room as kneelers and compete to come up with the most outrageous sins: "The whole school erupts / in a frenzy of false confessions instead / of confessing falsehoods to that stranger / behind the screen in a dark booth." Dąbrowska is fond of the rhetorical device chiasmus, in which words or phrases are repeated using reverse syntactical order. Such constructions help her evoke ironies: in this case, that a sacrament, which people often find intimidating, becomes an occasion for creativity. The children enjoy participating in this make-believe ritual, and their "sins" reflect real fears that keep them up at night. Dąbrowska sees this poem as "a fable about power and also about how the desire to create . . . can give rise to opposing those in power."

Some of Dąbrowska's best-known poems have come about from her extensive travels, a feature that has inspired comparisons with Elizabeth Bishop. "White Chairs" is the title poem of Dąbrowska's 2012 collection, which was awarded both the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Prize and the Kościelski Foundation's award to emerging writers. An ars poetica, it argues for "ordinariness in poetry" by focusing on the white plastic chairs near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, which, like William Carlos Williams's red wheelbarrow, have come to stand for something more than themselves. People pray in those chairs both on ordinary days and on special occasions, such as a bar mitzvah.

In an interview with the Catholic weekly magazine Tygodnik Powszechny, Dąbrowska recalled how sometimes people would stand on the chairs to take photos across the barrier dividing the men's and women's sections. She said, "Sometimes mundane things connect us with the spiritual . . . such as these chairs, which in their humble way enable encounters with others, with the self, with God. Poetry is also about such encounters."

"White Chairs" ends with the lines "Let ordinariness in poetry be like these chairs, / which vanish to make room / for a circle dance on the Sabbath." Prosaic but iconic, the chairs allow for prayer and celebration, and Dąbrowska implies that poetry, too, can be a vehicle for petition, praise, and ecstasy. For me, the poem hinges on the word "vanish." I love how that verb is intransitive, how the disappearance of the chairs seems to happen on its own without human agency. It's one of those moments where the syntax allows for mystery.

In this cultural moment, where discussions of religion, politics, and power occur daily, Dąbrowska's poems illuminate quieter truths in which ordinary chairs lead to human intimacies and imagination of the divine.

Spowiedź

Trzy z nas w roli księży.Długa przerwa po wuefie. Przebieralnia.Dziewczyny tłoczą się w kolejce, zgrzanepo grze w kosza, w dwa ognie,przekrzykują się, licytują,która ma więcej na...