 |
This essay will appear in Artful Dodge 46/47. Enjoy the preview, and look for more reviews in the future!
Leonard Kress
Wszystko lepiej w Polsce (Everything's Better in Poland)
Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Linda Nemec Foster, Louisiana State
University Press, 2001. 56 pages.
Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik, Kent State University Press,
1999. 66 pages.
The Good Wife, Georgia Scott, Poetry Salzburg, 2001. 65 pages.
1: Oh, Poland… so valued when lost…
POLISH LITERATURE, AS it has developed and thrived over the past
500 years, is essentially a literature of exile, a literature of
longing, a literature of elegy and nostalgia. The great 19th century
Romantic epic of Adam Mickiewicz. Pan Tadeusz, both
encapsulates the poetry that preceded it and sets the standard for the
next century and a half of poetry that flourished under its expansive
shadow. It begins with an invocation,
Oh, Lithuania [Poland], my fatherland
You are like health--so valued when lost
Beyond recovery; let these words now stand
Restoring you, redeeming exile's cost.
followed by twelve books and over 10,000 rhymed Alexandrine couplets
that successfully recreate a land viewed through the glaring and
blinding lenses of nostalgia, a land that all Poles throughout the ages
and across the vast Polish Diaspora can swoon over, taking unmitigated
delight in its vision of old Poland-albeit a Poland suffering under
Partition by the Germans, the Russians and the Austrians. Which is, of
course, the point.
Poles don't speak of waxing nostalgic of feeling nostalgic but of falling into nostalgia (wpadac w nostalgie). Nostalgia is a pit, a hole, a depression out of which one does not easily escape--even/especially in exile.
Louis Begley, a prominent New York lawyer, author of the several novels, most notably About Schmidt,
and Holocaust survivor, writes of a visit to his grandparent's small
property in a remote Polish countryside. "I discovered, however,
thinking intensively about the image in my mind of the low,
weather-beaten wood house, a connection between it and my reading, a
year or two after World War II ended, Pan Tadeusz, Adam
Mickiewicz's great verse epic, published in 1834, about the life of
provincial Lithuanian gentry, as the poet remembered it from the time
of Napoleon's Russian campaign….Something in Mickiewicz's elegy, which
haunted me like a forgotten melody, was no more or less, I realized,
than my recollection of the summer and early autumn at my grandparents'
property. The feat of self-aggrandizement or empathy or imagination was
prodigious: What possible resemblance could there be between the modest
manor house of a well-to-do Polish Jew who bought and sold agricultural
produce and that fictional house, the grand domain of Mickiewicz's
aristocratic and superbly fashioned Judge Soplica? But in Pan Tadeusz,
how much is imagination and how much is specific recollection?…What
were the shards from which he fashioned his gloriously detailed and
textured description of the countryside and of a society that perished
along with its hunts, balls, and quarrels? The answer is that for a
poet or a novelist, the distinction between what was remembered and
what was made up is shadowy and unimportant. What matters is the
irresistible, magnetic force exerted by a place, by a language, and, I
will add, by a literature."
Consider the ending of Pan Tadeusz:
And I was there among the guests and ate
Their food and drank their vodka, wine, and mead;
All that I heard and saw about their fate,
I've written in this book for you to read.
2: Chopin weeps into his piano
Thus, a traditional fairy tale comes to a close. And thus, Mickiewicz
ends his history of Lithuania/Poland during the Napoleonic Wars of 1811
and 1812. When we read this, there is a soundtrack, Chopin weeping into
his piano, alone in Paris, longing for home. And speaking of
Chopin-Franz Liszt, who took a special, seemingly avuncular interest in
the young pianist/composer recalled the haunting tales of his Poland
that Chopin would relate. As well as the questions put to him by fellow
salon habitu�s--Do the roses in Poland still glow with so proud a flame? Do the trees there still sing so harmoniously in the moonlight?
Yes, yes, of course, Chopin replied before falling silent in the
"throes of nostalgia." Chopin, in one of his many letters, writes:
I don't think at all of a wife, but of home, of my Mother, my Sisters.
May God keep them in his good thoughts. Meanwhile, what has become
of my art? And my heart, where have I wasted it? I scarcely remember
any more, how they sing at home. That world slips away from me somehow;
I forget, I have no more strength; if I rise a little, I fall again, lower than ever.
3: Not Paris but Cleveland
Where does all this leave Polish-American poets--, clearly Americans of
Polish descent, like Karen Kovacik and Linda Nemec Foster who grew up
in urban Polish neighborhoods? Or a poet like Georgia Scott, who has
become an ex-pat American living in Poland for the past two decades.
And what about Scott, whose relationship to Poland might seem to be
essentially romantic--like Byron and Shelley rushing off to Greece in
support the revolt, going to the heart of rebellion? Scott, who settled
in Gdansk, the birthplace of the Solidarity Movement, the home of Lech
Walesa, the shipyards, what does she have to add?
It's important to note that Poles, unlike many other ethnic groups who
immigrated in huge numbers to America in the late 19th and early 20th
century, were more likely to avoid putting down roots than other
immigrants groups and more likely to view their sojourn to America as a
temporary means of earning money to before returning to the homeland.
Life in Polish neighborhoods--the Lower East Side of New York,
Brooklyn, Hamtramck, Michigan, Detroit, the Southside of Chicago, even
the smaller cities and patches in the coal mining regions of
Pennsylvania revolved around the Polish parish, often a church built in
the twin-spired, Gothic style of Saint Mary's Cathedral in Krakow. My
own family, too, as well as my wife's, fit this model. My father's
family emigrated from Warsaw as early as the late 1860s, settled in
Brooklyn, opened up a waterfront tavern….and then headed back to
Poland. The way my father explains it, they missed the homeland too
much. Almost a hundred years later, my wife's family (all but her
parents) came over after World War 2, almost displaced persons in their
tiny villages near the Russian/Ukrainian border in southeast Poland,
only to return. She recalls a constant stream of relatives,
grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, emigrating, even gaining American
citizenship…and then shipping back to their native villages. My wife,
who grew up in a Polish neighborhood in Philadelphia, a product of
Polish parochial schools, and Polish fraternal organizations, and the
three "P'--polkas, parades and pierogies--joked about the most common
phrase that she heard among her parents and their fellow Poles: Wszystko lepiej w Polsce.
(Everything is better in Poland.) The one time I heard her father, a
retired machinist, who had left his village as a teenager and lived
twenty years in Paris before becoming an American, wax poetic, it was
about the pinewoods surrounding the home of one of their friends who
had built a home in the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey. Ach, sosnowe powietze, najlepsze na swiecie.
(Oh, the pine air / the best in the word.) Little did it matter that
everyone around him was smoking and that meat was singeing on the
barbecue and that the beloved pines were dwarf or scrub pines, barely
surviving the summer drought. (Or that they were located in an area
that had long been well known as a dumping ground for successful mob
hits.) He was in heaven, or at least back in the tiny village of Rudka
he had left more than fifty years before. Wszystko lepiej w Polsce, he said, "everything better in Poland." Like Pan Tadeusz:
This memory of resurrection has stayed
alive in me since childhood; it makes
me hope a homesick exile might return
to wooded hills, green meadows, and the lakes
spread round the River Nieman--that I'd be borne
back to that womb of gilded wheat and rye
turned silver, to the amber mustard row,
buckwheat snow, and clover, burning like a shy
girl's blush--to strips of turf, ribbons that show
boundaries with green. All this I see
so clearly, down to each blossoming pear tree.
4: Is everything better in Poland?
In many significant ways, the three poetry collections in this review
article support and reiterate my father-in-law's sentiment that
"everything is better in Poland." In doing this they also, though often
not without irony, rehearse the Immigrant Experience in America
(more accurately the white ethnic experience) and the second and third
generation's response to that ambivalent and sometimes traumatic
experience. This in itself is not particularly noteworthy or
interesting or new. The narrative of return to the ancestral homeland
predates the "Roots" movements of the 1960s. Not surprisingly, it began
as soon as the first generations settled into some form of American
life and began to think of themselves as Americans, albeit hyphenated
ones. In some ways, it must have begun as a very personal quest for the
truth-an attempt to verify whether or not there was any validity, any
worth, to the stories and tales of one's parents and grandparents. Is it really better in Poland? Or Czechoslovakia or Ukraine or Romania? Let's find out for ourselves.
It began as a refusal or unwillingness to see nostalgia as
nostalgia-but rather to view the stories and tales and characters as
some sort of truth-claim. On the other hand the desire to visit the
"homeland" must have also contained elements of resentment: If it was so wonderful, then why did you leave? And it also must have contained strong and discomfiting critiques of parents and grandparents: Is it really so great here? The gold pavement that was promised you is certainly tarnished…if not, in fact, fools gold.
One of the earliest and most intriguing examples of "return" literature is Louis Adamic's best-seller of the 1930s, The native's return: An American immigrant visits Yugoslavia and discovers his old country.
Adamic's return is partly fueled by his Marxist view of the America
that lured his parents from their Slovenian village. Writing in various
radical journals during the Great Depression, he tended to see America
and American capitalism as
highly organized criminal terrorism….[which] has its roots deep in
America's national life, in the class structure of our capitalist economic
system built upon the ideals of liberty and democracy. Racketeering
appears to me to be an inevitable result of the chaotic, brutalizing
conditions in American industry, a phase of the dynamic, violent
drive of economic evolution in the United States.
Thus his trip, his pilgrimage back to Slovenia and Croatia, was in his
mind a search for a more humane and authentic life. His search was only
partially successful; he did find a deeply vibrant and viable tradition
in the villages he explored (including wandering singers of epics), but
he also found a backwards region of Europe on the verge of cataclysm
and the inexorable clash of the forces of fascism and communism. For
Foster, Kovacik, and Scott, who grew up and came of age in the America
of the 1950s and 1960s, the paradigm is only slightly different: post
World War 2 prosperity replaces the Depression; communism has been
firmly in place for more than a generation (though in the process of
crumbling), and the "authentic" traditional Polish village and its
peasant inhabitants has become something quaintly immured (as a
pre-historic fly in amber) within a backwards looking and unresponsive
and conservative brand of socialism--for sale at state-run shops and on
view at folk festivals in other Eastern-bloc countries. And the Soviet
Union and the Eastern-Block during the Cold War was, of course, a hot
national obsession.
5: The old neighborhood
Of the three collections of poetry, Amber Necklace from Gdansk fits
the ethnic American immigrant paradigm most unapologetically and most
uncritically. This title itself encourages this reading. An amber
necklace seems to be the sort of trinket one might have purchased at
one of these state-run folk gift shops (valuable, yes, but available
for pennies on the dollar during the not-so-distant black-market
socialist past.) And Gdansk was surely the most recognizable Polish
city in the 1980s-the shipyard strikes, Solidarity, Lech Walesa, etc.
What I find intriguing about Foster's recounting of the immigrant
experience is how much the old neighborhood (in her case a Polish
section of Cleveland) functions as a stand-in or go-between or
intermediary for the old country. The immigrant experience is itself
exotic and foreign, even if it is the world into which she was born.
She writes of her father at age two learning to count in
English-insisting on counting in English, against the will of his
mother who is desperately trying to introduce Polish first:
He is barely two, pale and shy, this boy
who sits at the table in a house
filled with oak and mahogany, foreign words,
the smell of black bread……
….on the table, she places her day's wages and waits
for him to begin. Jeden, dwa, trzy. A chant that lifts the room
to heaven. But she doesn't want heaven, only America: it's sun-
light, shadow, brick streets, thin dirt. He says all the wrong words
again and again until he pleases her. The small boy
with his one, two, three filling the room…..
("Portrait of My Father, Learning to Count")
Of course, as every immigrant child and parent knows, having learned
the hard way, the child will eagerly learn his new language first and
only reluctantly, usually out of some sense of guilt or pity, learn to
understand the parent's language, speaking it only with great reticence
and reluctance and often too shy or self-conscious to use it herself.
(My wife, who was raised in such an environment many decades back still
hears out her mother who speaks in Polish and then answers in English.
Even now, when my wife does speak Polish, she often assumes the sweet
and deferential tone of a first-communion child, not at all like her
usual nuanced, irony-drenched banter.)
As I drifted of to sleep at night, I often heard
my parents talk about the neighbors in hushed whispers.
Kosmarek the Drunk,
Polumski the Wise Guy and the Barking Dog.
Horvath the Creep.
This litany in English would ultimately drift
into one in Polish: dzika, swinia, brudna swinia,
dziki Amerykanin. Wild Pig, dirty pig, Wild American.
("The Old Neighborhood")
Whereas Polish is the language of grand passion, English is, at best, a
translation of that passion, something at least once removed,
watered-down, negligible. In the same way, an old country activity such
as hiking in search of mushrooms in one of the few remaining forests of
northern Ohio becomes a highly charged rite-of-passage, some sort of
primal reenactment when the poet at five gets temporarily separated
from the group.
…my luck was they came back
for me, those large looming men
with their Slavic faces, thick hands.
Their one act of deliverance brining
them luck, bringing my back to my bed,
and the smell of cooked morels, melted
butter, strong onions. Common voices
of men as they reinvented the day.
("Ritual")
This experience of going for mushrooms in fall in Ohio is in itself a
contemporary, less florid and Americanized version of the ancient
custom, here described in Book 3 of Pan Tadeusz:
He spied a multitude of forms dancing about
in strange costumes, like ancient spirits forlorn,
trolling beneath the moon. Some were decked-out
in flowing robes or snow-white gowns well-worn….
….each figure would assume a pose in rapt
attention, joining hands to the smooth ground,
shifting only its glowing eyes, then gazing
straight ahead, dream walking without a sound,
as if treading a tightrope--an amazing
vision, undeviating from the line,
only its arms reached down on either side,
as if regaining balance, or to design
some secret tapping language, new and untried….
Finally, for Foster, it is the inadequacy of not only English but the
American experience itself that will soon lead her back to Poland. Some
of this, of course, is something that all Americans other than Native
Americans must feel when confronted with certain aspects of American
English. All Americans are immigrants and inhabit a land that was
already inhabited and named when we arrived. The act of renaming was
only partially successful, and much of America simply resisted. Take
the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, the river that periodically caught on
fire during Foster's childhood, the river ridiculed by the national
media ("the butt of national jokes./ 'Ha, ha,' laughed Johnny Carson
and everyone/laughed right along.") And by extension those guffaws also
included to those immigrant hicks, Polacks and Bohunks,
who worked in the mills and factories along its banks. And yet,
Cuyahoga was the Indian name for this river in Ohio "when it/wasn't
called Ohio but Place of Green/Water, Place of Tiny Gorges Where
Trees/Come to Be Born." To a citizen of Cleveland in the 1960s, before
the environmental movement and the Clean Water Act and the EPA, this
might as well be Tang Dynasty China. But, then, Poland and its rivers,
was never very far from consciousness, present in very congealed
syllables of ones parents, grandparents, and neighbors--and later just
a cheap airline flight away on LOT, the Polish airline.
Vistula
Who could not fall in love
with the name of a river that sounds
like water? Caressing the air
that leaves your mouth with such moist
nonchalance it takes your breath away.
River that is half woman, half fish:
mermaid that seduces all or nothing.
("The Two Rivers of My Story")
No more burning sludge, no more rusting or crumbling mills, no more
urban blight and school-board battles over mascots-here, or rather
there, in the old country: mystery, desire, love, the erotic.
6: The Cold War and Nixon
If the America of Foster's Amber Necklace from Gdansk,
consists primarily of childhood memories of city neighborhoods with
names like "Ducktown, Slavic Village, the Flats," and people who speak
a macaronic language that consists of sentences like, "Look, Leenda, ladna dziewczyna, pretty girl…," then the childhood America of Kovacik's Beyond the Velvet Curtain is
consumed with the Cold War, the threat of it heating up, the unlikely
prosperity it created, and the comically ambiguous figure of Richard
Nixon. However, Kovacik's take on the America of the 1950s and 1960s is
far from the Cold War that was reported in Life Magazine.
Consider the iconic middle-American coffee-klatch meeting between Nixon
and Krushchev. Kovacik avoids the media-moment with all of its kitschy
overtones peace and American superiority and domesticity--the notion
that the farm wife in her kitchen might single-handedly overpower their nukes with her state of the art rotisserie and Bundt cake. Instead she lets Nikita have the last word:
But how can he persuade this slender American,
this shy stranger who probably has never laughed at a party,
except when a camera is pointed his way?
Nikita waves his arms but no sound comes out.
He imagines Nixon late at night, lonely under a circle
of kitchen light, with a wife and appliances
spinning in the background. He sees Nixon
hunched over a pink teacup, blowing on his fingers,
afraid of everything he can't admit he fears.
Lev Tolstoy had it right, he thinks: It is difficult
to tell the truth and the young are rarely capable of it.
("Nixon and Nikita in the Kitchen")
The immigrant America that Kovacik writes about is highly nuanced and
complex. The immigrant experience that she describes (but doesn't dwell
on) does not consist of catalogs of tasty ethnic treats and fond
remembrances of grandparents; even her own family seems anything but
quaint:
….Then all glided up
to the Communion rail, Grandpa
with his hat at his waist like a soldier--
he once wanted our mother to scram
but he said scream and when she did,
he taught her a lesson with a maple branch--
("Babel")
This is a world in which "sad adults/echoed like children" the words of
the priest who was "Sweating like a calf in his purple dress." It is
also the world of hardship and degradation, worse even than the
Romanticized realism of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
….I wonder if
Dorothea Lange, that brave woman with her eye
to the viewfinder, ever shivered on the clay
floor of a sod house, her bladder steeped
in bacterial emulsion. Did she fear
implosion, the dry cyclone within? Did she feel
she was Kansas itself, all alkaline flats
and dust devils, hot wind and sod, the gray scale
between black and white?
("Dust Devils")
And then there is Nixon. In the first section of her book, slyly called
"Statecraft," surely a nod to the Machiavellian aspects of the man,
Kovacik features Nixon in no less than seven poems. We have Nixon
undressing a woman, Nixon snoring, Nixon, Nixon having a nightmare,
Nixon tossing a Frisbee, Nixon with his dog Checkers, and Nixon's
briefcase as an assemblage of junk and refuse and personal object--as
if it were a one of Joseph Cornell's drawers.
Nixon makes sure that all is in place:
The world Tocqueville once imagined,
A compass, a clothes-brush, a clean shirt
And change of socks, canned sardines branded
With the portrait of a Danish king, an oval
Norelco shaver with rotating heads.
("Nixon's Briefcase by Joseph Cornell")
Nixon, the American exceptionalist, the sweating-like-a-pig wannabe
monarch with five-o'clock shadow. Always for Kovacik, in these poems
that display longing for the old country, the desire is highly
mediated. Poland and Eastern Europe are viewed through the
mock-terrifying lenses of the Cold War, distorted and distant as the
tiniest Russian stacking doll, "absolutely empty/but for silence,
longing, a residue of perfume." The destination, not for some second or
third generation American on a student visa, but for "B-52s with heavy
payloads…"
For Kovacik, the Eastern Bloc is not only mediated--primarily through
media images (that kitchen meeting between Nixon and Khrushchev)--but
also through language and desire. This is most clearly evident in a
short poem called "As My Husband Translates from the Polish," where the
two are neatly conflated.
Unconscious as a statue,
he sits heavily on a thin green chair,
the dusky bunch of genitalia
hanging between his opens thighs….
He translates poetry in the nude,
in the raw…..
Even poems in the collection (and there are many) that avoid the new
world/old world model seem more highly charged when some part of Poland
or Eastern Europe enters the picture. In a cycle of four sonnets,
"Sapphic Sonnets," the gloriously stormy relationship between the poet
and the woman she is attempting to "gild…in this form," Russia and
Eastern and Central Europe are never far from the charged narrative in
each of the four sonnets.
….pink otter with sleek arms
awash in dreamy waves, your eyes shut tight…
when you played Mrs. Malaprop from Minsk--
…………………………..
….You draped me in your stoles,
taught me to flirt, to dance, to cook with mint,
daubed wine on my earlobes, cologne on my heels.
And when your Catholic belle enjoyed success
you lavished her with matzos and a kiss.
………………………………
Your first were furious in Berlin, you cried
outside the phone booth in a rage…
……………………………
…..Together in my bed
we're chaste as saints, I in my Kafka shirt,
you in your floral gown, a pillow tucked…
Kovacik's poems clearly avoid the conscious fetishization of language
and people and place that is so essential to Foster (The Doppelganger
"smoking a cigarette in a Krakow bar, Mickiewicz Street "meandering
like the poet," the mazurka [Chopin's of course] that "cut your heart
in two. Her Poland is not necessarily better than America, but it is certainly a lot more sexually charged and dangerous.
….Ah Natalia,
even though I have broken in a new wife--
a good worker who carts arm-loads of beets
on her bicycle, an angel who soothes the bruised
skin under my eyes when I'm sad-I miss
your rouged Cleopatra lips, your lovely
nylon thights.
("Wedding Song")
7: From Amber to Velvet to Ration Cards
The common destination for all three collections of poetry is, of
course, Poland. They vary only to the extent that the ultimate
pilgrimage is prepared for, delayed, or dreamed about. In this sense,
their titles are especially intriguing. For Foster, Poland is the amber
strand, both precious and precious,
elegant, dramatic, traditional, and beautiful. Kovacik's Poland is
cloaked in some sort of velvet curtain( no longer iron), much more
sensuous and perhaps decadent, something that also recalls the
"Bloodless Revolution" in neighboring Czechoslovakia, also known as the
"Velvet Divorce." When I was searching for more insight into the exact
meaning of velvet curtain, the first hits were those advertising a
baby-sitting service for swingers in Texas. The word velvet seems to
carry with it a very complex set of meanings and associations for
Americans (more so, I suspect, than it does for eastern Europeans): one
can't help but thinking about the song, Blue Velvet, as well as
the David Lynch film. Kovacik's poems certainly expand this range of
meaning. The title of Georgia Scott's collection, The Good Wife,
seems baffling at first. After all, the poems are almost exclusively
about life in Poland after the War and before the fall of Communism.
And yet, for Scott, who is living as an �migr� in Poland (Gdansk),
unlike the other two whose grandparents emigrated from Poland, everyday
Poland is the good wife. No longer viewed nostalgically, no
longer the quaint vestigial remains in midwestern industrial centers,
no longer the object of erotic desire-Scott's Poland is, simply,
Poland. It's theme could easily be summed up by the character in
Stanislaw Wyspianksi's highly fantastic and patriotic and modernist
drama, The Wedding (Wesele), who in the midst of a mad orgy of
drunken nostalgia, longs for the day when a Polish village will simply
be a village where people live and work and die--and not a training
ground for permanent insurgency and spiritual meaning.
I show him the full length of my legs,
raise them up like a bridge.
And I let him make love,
spurting into my hand.
In this I am faithful to my husband.
("The Good Wife")
This sort of bleak realism and honesty pervades the entire
collection-decidedly anti-Romantic, in spite of the fact that many of
the poems take place during the time of Solidarity, and many of them
take place in Gdansk, the very birthplace and home of the movement.
Even the amber in Scott's world seems to come from a different world--a
world a smuggling and desperate attempts to raise cash, displayed not
at a dollar store but in some grimy flea market along with the sellers
other pathetic wares. Ultimately, though, the amber is not precious,
even as some sort of repository of prehistoric life, but turns out to
be something troubling and dangerous, an albatross strung around one's
neck.
The amber sellers shut their doors
having cleared he beads
from the scales like sausage
Off a hook on the wall.
They lean over their bowls
of freshly smuggled stones…
mapping the inclusions
of insect wings and roots,
sulfurous clouds and seas
of each problematic earth,
soon to be chained round someone's neck.
("Providence")
In Scott's world, Poland under Communism, the good wife does what she
needs to do--to keep going, to remain alive, to feed her family, to
find toilet paper and batteries. She views the Polish society from the
perspective of an insider avoiding the secret police, scowling
disdainfully at the peasant/workers' paradise presented in so many
banners and billboards and festivals ("the ribboned dancers"), the
lines for food and other necessities, the twenty-year waiting list of a
studio apartment in a poorly constructed concrete block building. Her
stance is decidedly anti-Romantic-she is no Byron or Shelley, posing,
then rushing off to liberate a captive country. These poems are fierce
packets of stoic disillusionment, what Philip Hobsbaum calls in his
foreword to the collection, poems that are "black and white, apparently
straightforward in imagery, but in fact, shrewdly angled to allow for
emotion." They are poems that during an earlier period of Communist
rule, throughout the Eastern Bloc, would lead straight to a
re-education camp.
You know
(she said, taking a sip from her glass)
the littlest things can matter--
when a colleague goes to lunch
or takes a break.
The littlest things.
More coffee? Or was yours tea?
("The Witness")
And always, the sardonic humor necessary for survival.
Watching the official marches,
the ribboned dancers,
the wreaths in Jaruzelski's hands.
This time, police charged the sidewalks.
a boy was knocked down by a car.
We did not put the TV on.
("News Hour")
Jaruzelski is, of course, the Polish Prime Minister, the General with
the impenetrably dark sunglasses, who declared Martial Law in 1981,
claiming as justification, that he was saving the country from an
imminent Soviet reprisal.
Jaruzelski makes several appearances in these poems, as does the Lech
Walesa, the Solidarity hero. Their competing views of Polish society
are both steeped in the same whistling kettle of Polish
Romanticism--old Romantic Poland, the failed workers' paradise, the
fate of Poles in exile, whether that exile is Siberia or 19th century
Paris or modern Europe.
In the lesser towns outside Warsaw,
where the lilacs grow wild in old gardens
and the mothers are tyrannical to their son's wives
(girls in pointed boots who speak other languages,
work in embassy offices,
and would leave for Glasgow given half the chance)…
…….
Fetal on the couch, we later watch
the sun from the balconies above
slip down and go lost,
while in a cartoon Jaruzelski walks
on Lech Walesa's bridegroom arm.
("Polish Television 1989")
Although Scott's perspective is decidedly different from that of Foster
and Kovacik. Her longing is not for the Poland where she currently
lives (teaching at the University in Gdansk), and not for the Poland of
nostalgia (there are no Slavic Babcias and Dziadzios
in her poems telling her tales of the glorious old country), and not
even for the America that she left behind. If, in fact, there is any
longing in Scott's poems, it is to provide witness and solidarity.
I am not in prison
I have no cause to lie awake
refurnishing rooms as I remember them
the positions of cushions and toothbrushes
smells of sink cleaner, sausages, flowers
the graffiti in the hall
"Dead Kennedys" and "1984"
schoolboys singing soccer and Solidarity songs
roller skates whirring behind the rag 'n bone man's cart
the bows on the little girls' heads like the blades of helicopters
a tank left in the park, children swinging from the gun
the cries of mothers to come home
("In America")
Everything is better in Poland!
|
|
