Douglas Blazek at Moe's in Berkeley

Janusz Zalewski writes to me about his visit at Moe’s Bookstore, in Berkeley, where he attended a reading by Polish-American poet Douglas Blazek on January 12th:

Douglas Blazek’s public appearances are very rare, so I rushed to Berkeley as soon as I learned he was going to read at Moe’s.  Blazek’s Polish-American background is not that widely known, so let me quote what he said about his upbringing; this is from the second issue of Poetry Now (1974), a magazine published in California. 

“I was born in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Chicago’s west side, on the last day of 1941.  For a while we lived with my seamstress grandmother and my alcoholic grandfather on George Street, then moved to a third floor cockroach-settled walk-up at the corner of Central Park Boulevard and Milwaukee Avenue behind the Wonderland Ballroom where every night polkas would drift in like colored smoke over my livingroom cot. […]  On Labor Day 1950, our family left the Polish ‘ghetto’ for the green country town of Wood Dale…”

A few years later, in The Quarterly Review of Polish Heritage, Blazek is quoted saying this about his Polish roots: “… European ethic marked my life as if I had swallowed a handful of tattoo noodles. Polish custom, Polish language were too far removed to have any immediate influence; but that creed of labor and the necessity to immerse oneself in the apple-urine bath of reality will never leave.  A stoicism and grace in facing adversity, a determination to see things to their end, an acceptance of pain and discomfort, a humble disposition to life; these are the trademarks I associate with my Polish relatives and the community in which I was raised.”

In 1980 Blazek was featured, among a few dozen others, in Victor Contoski’s Blood of Their Blood – an anthology of Polish American poetry.

Blazek has been best known not only from his poetry, which includes All Gods Must Learn to Kill, 1968, with illustrations by Robert Crumb, and Skull Juices (1970, Introduction by Charles Bukowski), but also from publishing others. He published the first two prose chapbooks of Bukowski, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965), for which he was investigated by the FBI, and All the Assholes in the World and Mine (1966). Blazek was a very prolific writer until about the end of seventies, when his writings became much more sparse, with complete silence in the early nineties, and gradual come-back around mid-nineties.  This is according to James Denboer’s A Bibliography of the Published work of Douglas Blazek: 1961-2001 Glass Eye Books, 2003.

Blazek has been always very intimate with poetry.  Here is what he said in the August 16, 1973, issue of the Rolling Stone magazine: “Poetry has not only been separate and aloof from life, afraid to get its hand soiled by it, but it has also been inferior to life, more passive and less inspiring… Poetry is a force that can enlighten men internally, so that what they learn from it can be applied to their external lives.  If it doesn’t do this, it is just another toy.”

Since then, Blazek’s views on poetry evolved significantly.  In his own words, “he has undergone a transformation.”  His poetry has become less externalized and while some of it is still narrative, most evolved into “a language based in consciousness.”  The first poem read at Moe’s, coming from one of his two new books, appears below.  Those books, Gutting Cats in Search of Fiddles and Aperture Mirror, have been published in 2012 by Blazek’s new publisher, Edition Muta, and are available from:  http://editionmuta.com/

The Wall

What do we see in the greening

beyond this language?

Why are we compelled to travel

each of us one by one

stepping over

those who cannot go the distance

only to arrive here

at this unacceptable rest

monastically planting

the pathless map

knowing not why we came

unwilling to stop

yet unable to pass?

It is here where the few of us

who lasted perish

one upon the other

hand and arm woven

like lattice bone

century after century

body rotting to body

making an impenetrable wall

others will spend a lifetime

debating.

And you too are coming

almost mad nearly lame

begging direction

high in mind

measuring for the climb.

The Long Table

We are honored guests

at the long table

swiping what hibernates

in the depths of our neighbor’s plate,

divining prosperity

in the clots of his wine,

staining our hands

in the crotch of his wife,

while a spite of kinds

kickback our tactics

like termites with dynamite.

The host has yet to arrive

but we know he is someone grotesquely old

from whom each of us derives

by testes deeper than the ecclesiastic.

Will we see the geezer

when he is finally here?  Gossip

has it he is grandiose as the cosmos

yet withered to mere semantics.

A laugh passed around

tastes of catastrophy’s history

persisting in masticated meat.

The lady serving says he is damaged,

caught redhanded reconstructing

the flaws of self-salvage.

All we hear is sawing. No hammering.

            Douglas Blazek

_________________________

All photographs are the property of Janusz Zalewski.