Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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knew everybody else, they read to each other, there were clandestine poetry readings and publications and so on. After the War, when the Communists came in under the new system, the communal life of writers was enforced. They simmered in the same kettle of The Writers' Union. Writing classes do not exist in Poland. This is not a European tradition at all. There are sections of young writers, various local divisions of The Writers' Union, which amounts to a sort of pupilship on the part of the young writers. There are probably 10,000 poets in Poland now. While abroad, of course, the isolation is great. Due to the peculiar situation of Americans of Polish descent in America, there are completely antiintellectual, blue-collar communities of Polish workers. There is no contact. When I give poetry readings in Polish, in Paris for instance, there are so many young people that my readings find a very enthusiastic audience. And I noticed here yesterday after my reading that many young people from Poland, who had first read my books in Polish, were in attendance. That's the question of isolation and community, but I wrote my poetry mostly in complete isolation. C: In the poem 'Mag-piety' you say ". . . my muse is Mnemosyne, mother of the other muses" [Selected Poems, Seabury Press]. In a section of 'From the Rising of the Sun', there is a young boy turning around to look at things from a wagon, because he knows that everything will be changed by memory. M: This is a very touchy thing. You know that William Blake fumed against memory and opposed imagination to memory. I have to remain somehow true to Blake and at the same time be aware that memory for me is very important. I guess the answer is there are various kinds of memory and in general imaginative memory is very selective and very purifying, which is why Blake was for line in painting, clear line. This is also connected with his praise of the imagination. Line makes for clarity and clear delineation between what is contained within and what is outside, so I guess I understand memory as extremely selective; not just retain- 84 ing what happened but transforming it slowly until something very clear is distilled out of, let us say, the landscape. The boy looking at the landscape eliminated various things so that it was practically already an act of imagination and creation. He created a certain picture which remains with him for life. There were many other elements in that travel. I know, of course, to what travel that poem concretely referred and would be able to talk on the circumstances of that peculiar travel. It was usually a trip that lasted three days, by horse-drawn wagon. C: I guess in that case it would have to be selective. M: Yes, Indians are not mentioned (laughter). But there were Indians . . . Did I answer this question? I wonder. I don't know whether it was translated, but (reads) 'Memory and Memory': "Not to know. Not to remember. With this one hope:/That beyond the river Lethe, there is memory, healed" [Bells In Winter]. C: Mnemosyne is also the other river in the underworld. We were wondering if you had been thinking about that. M: Beyond Lethe. I was not aware of that. C: Did you find that there were special problems or difficulties in writing a long poem, perhaps sustaining a poem over so many pages? M: You know, very often I feel that it is very commonplace, that a writer has a vision of some large unit, of some large, long book or poem and then he makes sketches for it, and time and other preoccupations change, shift his attention, and so the longer poem doesn't come into existence. And very often short poems, sometimes good poems, are by-products of the larger plan. And sometimes poems which are just poems, by their inner necessity grow, and a longer poem grows. I don't know how I wrote the longer poems, they grew gradually. First from fragments, and later coagulating by themselves. C: So it is not a linear process. M: No. At a given moment the impetus is already felt and there is a necessity to continue. The poem develops into a special logic, and then calls for sequence, 85
sequence and sequence. Not in the beginning. The beginning is hard. C: 'From the Rising of the Sun' is going to be compared to 'The Waste Land' and also to parts of Pound's 'Cantos', because it again makes use of many different periods of history. One of the great differences in your poem is that while all periods of history are called upon, the experience is not fragmenting. There seems to be a unity running through all this. Was that your intention? M: To tell the truth, I don't know what my intention was. You mentioned that there are so many voices, so many personalities, and basically the intention was more or less the same as it is now when I am writing. I try to understand something, and I cannot. But I try very hard to unify and to understand. C: Have you ever had trouble writing? Have you ever stopped for long periods of time, been blocked? M: Yes. C: During the periods when you were blocked, was material being distilled? Did you break out of them to find that something very important had been united? M: I don't know. You see, being blocked can be provoked by various circumstances, either personal or not. In the years before the outbreak of the last war, in the late Thirties, I was locked, at an impasse. I was in the dark, let us say. It is not that I did not write, but I was writing things which I do not particularly like now, and those things bear, in my opinion, the traces of my impasse. That was a result of personal complications and historical complications. The situation in the late Thirties in Poland was so ugly that the outbreak of war for some of us was greeted as "ah, at last." Because sometimes you cannot bear the whole upset. Let it be ... the worst. So that was one period, one very strong period, of impasse. It continued, I should say, for the first two or three years of war. I could not find a formula. I felt that everything which existed until that time in my poetry was somehow false, inadequate, to what was happening. And suddenly, when it was over in 1943, something new opened, a completely new vein, 86 precisely those poems which were translated during the War, and since that moment I started writing. And then I continued, and there was another impasse, when I lived in France. It was also personal, very profoundly personal, and historical. Of course in 1949 they enforced the doctrine of socialist realism in Poland, and 1950 was an extremely ugly year. I broke then with the government, stayed in Paris, and I was at an absolute impasse as far as poetry was concerned. Then I wrote "The Captive Mind" because I was cornered, so to speak. For a couple of years I was unable to write poetry. But then suddenly it opened, in 1955, at the end of '55. So I looked for a cure in that period. When I couldn't write poetry, I wrote a couple of books of prose. 87
Page 1 and 2: ROBERT TAYLOR, JR. Union Street Sta
Page 3 and 4: espect for those who supervise him
Page 5 and 6: In bed, on the verge of sleep, she
Page 7 and 8: They sit together in the turret, on
Page 9 and 10: RICHARD SPEAKES Scrimshaw The man t
Page 11 and 12: ELAINE FORD Whin I met Ivor in a pu
Page 13 and 14: I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, an
Page 15 and 16: etween the gravestones and the pape
Page 17 and 18: in the street." "How do you know it
Page 19 and 20: CLEOPATRA MATHIS Journey in the Sno
Page 21 and 22: STEPHANIE STRICKLAND RICHARD HENSLE
Page 23 and 24: cloth from a New York mill, the col
Page 25 and 26: JANE MILLER The Heart Climbs Devili
Page 27 and 28: URSULE MOLINARO The Chemistry of Mi
Page 29 and 30: now. Any day now, perhaps. Perhaps
Page 31 and 32: silhouette on the historical balcon
Page 33 and 34: Where she had perhaps planted the t
Page 35 and 36: JAMES BRASFIELD The Stringer Called
Page 37 and 38: C: You have translated Whitman into
Page 39: also describe my high school years

Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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