East Meets West: On Polish and American Poets in Conversation

There is no denying that Polish poetry occupies a special place in the United States. Embraced by nonspecialists and critics alike, the works of Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski have played a role in shaping the aesthetic of American poetry in the twentieth century. Anecdotal evidence suggests that today's emerging poets also read the Polish masters, finding the historical and moral context that marks much of Polish poetry available in English not obscure, but germane. Indeed, the poets just mentioned represent only the tip of the iceberg. These authors belong to what has been dubbed the Polish School of Poetry: the lyric voices of individuals manhandled by history, grappling to make sense of the human condition vis-à-vis the world at large. Edward Hirsch, poet and president of the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, says that Miłosz "taught the American poet and American poetry itself to consider historical categories, not the idea of history bowdlerized by Marxism, but something deeper and more complex, more sustaining. The feeling that mankind is memory, historical memory, and that our hope is historical" (qtd. in Jackson). And he isn't voicing his opinion alone.

Much of the Polish-American poetic dialogue originated in the 1960s. Amidst the social and political unrest, both in the United States and abroad, there was palpable interest in writings from the so-called Other Europe, as evidenced by the eponymous series edited by Philip Roth for Penguin, or its poetry-focused sibling, "Modern European Poets," in the UK. In their introduction to an influential anthology, Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, which came out in 1976, editors Charles Simic and Mark Strand echo Hirsch's opinion and locate American poets' attraction to Eastern European poets in the latter's historical consciousness (17–18). When it comes to Polish poets being read in the United States, no book has been met with greater enthusiasm than Miłosz's anthology, Postwar Polish Poetry, which has stood as the best introduction to Polish poetry in English since it first appeared in 1965.

Twenty years after Miłosz's landmark anthology appeared, however, around the time the Cold War had entered its final dawn, the Polish poets coming of age then couldn't care less about their postwar predecessors. In 1986, with the publication of what's known as the blue issue (due to its cover's color) of the journal Literatura na Świecie,¹ John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and especially Frank O'Hara became the most popular poets in Poland. The man responsible for the import was poet, translator, and editor Piotr Sommer (b. 1948). Here's how, in an interview with translator William Martin, he describes the process of putting the issue together:

Anyway, it took a long time to construct this New York School issue. It was close to 450 pages, and had a lot of poetry in it. Then a lot of difficult critical essays that were hard to translate into Polish, more than they would be now, I think, because there seemed to be no language for certain things back then. So it was a lot of work, and heavy editing. I even used my Museum of Modern Art ticket, which I got the first time I was in the States, that was in 1983, and saved it for the cover. I had been thinking about this issue for a long time. And it didn't matter to me, when I was working on the issue, whether it was or was not going to be "important."

(200).

The main revelation to Polish readers, most of whom were unaware of the poets translated by Sommer,² were the ways in which poets like Ashbery and O'Hara eschewed linear narrative and elevated quotidian bric-a-brac. That Sommer chose to focus on Frank O'Hara, whose work was garrulous and steeped in the quotidian, at the expense of, say, the American New Formalist poets, who were very much in vogue at the time in the States, suggests that individual players can...