And so, then, to the poems – two that I could almost recite from memory.

THE YOUNG BAT

To begin, he circled my neck shyly
and laced it with his singing.
I almost fell in love with his ugly
triangular head, his squinting eyes,
and the sound of his frail bones.

At his first bite
I felt a great relief.
My pulse throbbed eagerly
knowing my blood would flow, diluted,
into another goiter, absolved of sin.

Then I grew weaker.
Clamped to my neck, the vampire
was drinking me, drinking me constantly.
His wings flared wide and free,
His eyes burned like two hieroglyphs—
But I couldn’t decipher the message.

(Translated by Christopher Hewitt)

THE BLOOD

Ah, how well I remember that pain!
My soul taken by surprise
jumped about like a chicken with its head cut off.
Everything was splashed with blood, the street, the café table,
especially your thoughtless hands.
Strewn about, my hair wandered
like a monster among the glasses,
coiled around them as if around suspended breaths
then danced, vertical, whistling,
and fell, executed at your feet.
Ah, how well I remember that I smiled savagely,
disfiguring myself so as to look more like myself,
and that I cried only once,
long after everyone had left
and the lights were out and the tables
had been wiped clean of the blood.

(Translated by Marguerite Dorian and Elliot Urdang)

That’s something, yes?

You can find Life Sentence: Selected Poems among others from Nina Cassian here.

[A note: it has occurred to me that I should ask you, readers – and pass it on to others if you like — that I, and Plume, would love to see you offer your most beloved poem, with a short preview as I have so clumsily done above. If this appeals, send me your piece as a doc or docx file via this email – plumepoetry@gmail.com   –with Poem for Newsletter in the subject line. I’ll try to publish as many as I can, and to further entice you, I can say that this monthly epistle has a healthy readership, for which we are most grateful.]

OK.

Let’s turn now to Brian Culhane’s thoughts on the “underlying reserve” and “tentative” commands in Adam Zagajewski’s famous – and one can say quietly spectacular, even flawless – poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”.

A Quiet Consolation

I am writing this two weeks after yet another anniversary of 9/11. Over the years, I’ve read a fair number of poems about that day, some of which were composed years later, some while the memory was still very fresh. I, like many others, came across “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” when it was first published in the September 24th, 2001, issue of The New Yorker. While he never mentions the twin towers, Adam Zagajewski’s poem was published in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and for many readers, like me, it directly spoke to that tragedy.

I was so taken by his poem that I tore it out and pinned it to the cork board above my desk, again and again rereading it for a long time afterward. Now, decades later, a trick of autumn light (a flash on a skyscraper’s window) or a sudden loud noise from the street (a taxi’s blaring horn) may summon that day, and once again I find myself murmuring his poem. Why? I really can’t say for sure, though there’s something about it that offered then, and still does now, a respite from grief and a measure of solace.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

(Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)

Zagajewski’s poem has rightly occasioned a good deal of attention, so I’ll simply mention two elements that strike me as especially interesting: the speaker’s tone and the way the poem moves forward from one idea and image to the next.

Let’s start with tone. Some unnamed individual is addressed in the second person (to my ears sounding like the French tu rather than the formal vous), seemingly someone intimately known to the speaker (“Remember the moments when we were together in a white room / and the curtain fluttered”). Yet, at the same time, the tone seems detached, oddly aloof from what’s happening in the world that warrants the adjective “mutilated.” The speaker briefly, lightly, touches on the plight of those mentioned who might warrant pity (the exiles, the drowned, the executed), but he does so matter-of-factly. Thus, if the imperatives that structure the poem (“remember,” “praise,” “return,”) are familiarly pronounced, there’s an underlying reserve, too, as though the speaker simply notes, in passing, various human miseries currently besetting the earth. The difference here between the intimate and the impersonal makes the speaker’s attitude difficult to pin down. Perhaps Zagajewski’s poem is hauntingly memorable precisely to the degree the poet refuses a straightforward stance, setting him apart from the many others who write about terrible events with overt anger, astonishment, bitterness or pity.

How does the poem develop? It begins and is carried forward with successive imperatives, the first repeated in the title and the first line (“Try to praise…”), with others that follow: “You must…,” “You should….,” “Praise….”  Now, if these are commands, they are so only technically, being written in a particular grammatical mood; but they hardly sound commanding. In fact, the progression seems to be from more assertive to less so, suggesting a growing tentativeness, as the world’s evils are enumerated and their weight felt. At least, so it seemed to me as I originally came to understand the poem. But as I am now, many years later, trying to tease out the way Zagajewski’s thought progresses, I see that the final imperative in the series may be the most definite of all: “Praise the mutilated world / and the gray feather…/ and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.” In fact, this is the only time the poet says what we must particularly praise, with those two things, the gray feather and the gentle light, by synecdoche standing for the entire natural world, mutilated though it may be.

Beyond its scaffolding of repeated imperatives, the poem builds by way of contrasts and similitudes. For the former, we find obvious ones (spring [June] and fall [September]; wild strawberries and nettles), as well as those less apparent (abandoned homesteads; refugees heading nowhere; joyfully singing executioners). As for likenesses, we have various instances of natural beauty, of peace, of harmony, beginning with drops of wine and dew and ending with concert music and the “gentle light.” These are the minute particulars that this poet sets against the background of destruction. Together, this litany of juxtapositions creates a chastened, almost hushed kind of consolation, akin to the “quartz Consolation” mentioned in Emily Dickinson’s lyric “After great pain a formal feeling comes.” Here’s the last stanza of her poem:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

His readers have lived through Manhattan’s—and the country’s—Hour of Lead, and though Adam Zagajewski never alludes to the towers crumbling, falling, on fire, it’s us, those who witnessed that awful day, whom the poet implicitly addresses. The world is and has always been subject to natural and unnatural calamities, but looking elsewhere, especially within our own memories, we can see how fallen leaves have continually “eddied over the earth’s scars” and how “the gentle light that strays and vanishes” ultimately returns. Beyond the mutilation, scarring, and wreckage of that time, beyond the grief, other autumns—some terrible, some bountiful—will follow that September 11^th morning. Which is why we can draw a quiet consolation from his poem and, in doing so, renew our sense of the injured world’s cycle of restorations. The poet asks us to praise—praise, in this context, being a form of hope. It also occurs to me, and not for the first time, that poetry’s power waxes most in a time of darkness.

Beautiful – and ringing the little bell of truth, again and again, I think. Thank you, Brian.

And, really, that’s all for this month. Except, of course, for our usual list of recent/forthcoming titles from Plume contributors:

Susan Aizenberg             A Walk with Frank O’Hara
Mathew Zapruder            I Love Hearing Your Dreams
Paul Muldoon                  Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
Dzvinia Orlovsky             Those Absences Now Closest
Alicia Ostriker                  The Holy & Broken Bliss
Kimiko Hahn                   The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems
G.C. Waldrep                  The Opening Ritual

And so truly fin. I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume