George Gömöri: Polishing October

George Gömöri's history shows in his poetry. He was born in Hungary in 1934, fled to England because of his involvement in the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and came to rest in England where he taught Polish and Hungarian at the University of Cambridge. Recently, her Excellency Tuge-Erecinska, Ambassador of Poland in London, presented him with a "diploma," a document of his membership in the Krakow-based PAU (Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci). He is the only Hungarian member of this academy which counts among its members Umberto Eco and Andrzej Wajda.

George Gömöri's poems -- like his essays -- are smart, engaged, and impassioned--a combination hard to turn away from.

 

Polishing October is his thirteenth book of poems, his second in English, and the poet George Szirtes says this about it:

"George Gömöri's lyric poetry is a mix of passion and irony, the irony itself always informed by passion. His political poems learn their lessons from a history where the small get their heads kicked in by the great who use them for footballs. There is a certain wry comedy involved in the process but the stakes are high: defeat and exile are for real, as is the pain."

Many of George Gömöri's poems contain Polish subjects and echoes, but one that I find especially moving is his poem about the Polish poet and artist Cyprian Norwid who came to New York in the 1850s. Like many Poles of the Polish Diaspora, Norwid felt his exile deeply and complexly:


A letter of Cyprian Norwid’s from New York

If it chanced that, defying many a storm,
our sailing-ship crossed the ocean and
I reached dry land again after sixty days,
and if, later, the big splinter that wounded my thumb
failed to cripple me, so I could draw again –
if God had preserved me in these ways, perhaps he has
some other plan for me. In the Crimea, say,
I’d be happy to take up arms against the helots
serving the Frost Colossus, or to aid our cause elsewhere.
Please help me, You or some other wealthy Pole,
to get back soon to that Old World of ours.
There are all kinds of things in the papers here
and you can’t really tell what the truth is.
Kossuth, of course, was splendidly received,
but you’ve got to be defeated and a famous exile
to qualify for such treatment. As for me,
I work as an artist here, but unknown and lonely –
my windows look out on to a cemetery –
above the bushes humming-birds flutter and sometimes
a heavy scent of flowers comes wafting by . . .
In my thoughts, though, I’m wandering in Paris
or better still in Rome, where the past’s alive
and consoles – where you live not just for the present,
not only for the Market.

Translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri

_____

Polishing October is available from Shoestring Press in the UK and Amazon books in the US.

Mirosława Kruszewska: Trapped in Freedom in Exile

Mirosława Maria Kruszewska's W pułapce wolności/Trapped in Freedom is a bi-lingual book of poems that tells the story of her generation. Born in Gdansk, Poland, in 1950 and now living and working as a journalist in Seattle, she grew up in Communist Poland, lived to see the rise of Solidarity in the early 80s, and went into exile with her family in 1981.


In her poems we return to the world of the Cold War. We read about Poland's long queues and hunger, the dehumanizing refugee camps in Austria, and finally an America that offers a frightening freedom that at times overwhelms the immigrant, the person who has no home in this world.

Here's a poem that for me captures that sense of estrangement:

Notification of Death

away travel our loved ones one by one
on a day of autumn on a day of spring
suddenly retreating into shadows
from Poland someone sends a newspaper
from last month
to be found within is an obituary
and in the letter a few words of cheer
so as not to grieve too deeply
that the same awaits us all
sooner or later
but now most important are the children

give it a rest with your consolation
I don't cry for the dead now anyway
I was blown out into the world so far
that I no longer know
who here is alive or dead.

(Trans. by Waclaw Iwaniuk)

__

You can read more about Ms. Kruszewska and other Polish language poets living in the US at the Polish American Poetry website: http://www.polishamericanpoetry.com/

David Radavich's Canonicals: Love's Hours

I've been reading David Radavich's poems for probably about twenty-five years now, and there's something in his voice that has me hoping for another twenty-five years. There's a meditative quietness and seriousness to his voice that draws me deeper and deeper into his poems and makes me want to know what he and his poems have to tell me about love and time, death and joy.

You hear this voice clearly in Canonicals: Love's Hours, his new chapbook, from Finishing Line Press (available also at Amazon).



Here's one of the poems from Canonicals.


MATINS


Words crawl
into bed with me

and speak of you
even though
you are not here

and the morning
shines alone

even then

one is grateful
for gods who appear
when summoned

or not
summoned

wordless
as the bedsheet

I lean against

a world raucous
in bomb-blasts, rapings,
another bankruptcy for greed

even then

words creep in
through the window

thinking of sun
shining equally in your face


("Matins" first appeared in Lisa Siedlarz's Connecticut River Review.)
________________

David is also the author of Slain Species (Court Poetry Press, London, 1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood Press, 1998), and Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2000). He has also published a full-length comedy, Nevertheless . . . (Aran Press, 1989), five short dramas, and a wide range of poetry in journals and anthologies. His plays have been performed across the U.S., including five Off-Off-Broadway productions. Fragments of the Third Planet received its European premiere in 2000 in Pforzheim, Germany as part of their Millennium Festival. America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (Plain View Press, 2007) narrates American history from World War II to the present.

You can read more about him at his website.

Polish-American Writers Read in New York City

This coming Friday, January 2, five Polish-American writers will talk about their ethnic background and read from their writings. The session will begin at 330 and go until 530 at the Hilton Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas. The event is sponsored by the Polish American Historical Association, and complete information regarding registering for the conference is available at the PAHA website.

The session is entitled "Writing the Polish American Experience: East Coast."

The featured speakers are:

Stephen Lewandowski who was born in 1947 in Canandaigua, New York, where he still lives in a house built by his great grandfather. He has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently One Life (Wood Thrush Books, 2001). He has recently published a series of poems about his father available at The Scream Online. He is involved in environmental protection.

Sharon Mesmer is a 2009 Fulbright Senior Specialist candidate and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. Her books include Annoying Diabetic Bitch (poetry, Combo Books 2008), The Virgin Formica (poetry, Hanging Loose Press, 2008) and Ma Vie à Yonago (fiction, Hachette Littératures, in French, 2005). She teaches undergraduate fiction writing, literature courses and MFA poetry seminars at the New School. She blogs at Virgin Formica.

Joseph Lisowski grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, near the Heppenstal Steel Mill. He taught for 10 years in St. Thomas, VI., which serves as the setting for his three published mystery novels, Full Body Rub, Looking for Lisa, and Looking for Lauren. He has also published four poetry collections: Stashu Kapinski Gets Lucky , Fatherhood at Fifty, Stashu Kapinski Strikes Out, Near the Narcotic Sea. He currently teaches at Elizabeth City State University, in South Carolina.

John Surowiecki is the author of two poetry collections, Watching Cartoons before Attending a Funeral (White Pine Press, 2003) and The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats (The Word Works, 2006 Washington Prize), and five chapbooks. My Nose and Me: (A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes) won the Verse Drama Award from the Poetry Foundation.

Bill Zavatsky was born in 1943 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In the seventies and eighties, he directed the publication efforts of SUN, an independent literary press, bringing out thirty-five titles as well as several issues of SUN magazine and a two-shot specialty publication called Roy Rogers. He is the author of two books of poems, Where X Marks the Spot and Theories of Rain and Other Poems, two volumes of translation (Valery Larbaud and André Breton), and has published his work in many magazines and in anthologies, including The Face of Poetry, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. His poems have served as liner notes for recordings by jazz pianists Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He himself has been a musician since childhood and specializes in jazz piano and the blues.

John Guzlowski will moderate.

Joseph Lisowski's Letters to Wang Wei

Polish-American poet Joseph Lisowski grew up in the shadow of the Heppenstal Steel Mill in Pittsburgh among Poles and Polish Americans who still remembered the work they did in the old country, in Katowice and Lublin and Gdansk. What they taught him was that a man's life was mostly spent in exile, and much of Lisowski's life has been spent away from them and Pittsburgh.

Since leaving Pittsburgh, he has almost always lived and written his poems and novels near the sea. First in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and most recently near the outer banks of North Carolina. There he is a professor at Elizabeth City State University.

His most recent book Letters to Wang Wei is a series of letters he has written to the 8th-century Chinese poet in response to his poems. Lisowski's poems talk of beauty and loss, friendship and family, and the hope and longing that all exiles feel.

Here's one of the poem from this collection:

RED PEONIES

The peonies you touched
I touched too.
Held them to my face,
blood red in the spring garden
of another life.

I searched as your words told me:
deep in the flower's heart
Autumn was about to break.
I wanted too much then.
In the red lust of passion,
I ached.

Forgive me for bruising your flowers,
for desire I cannot lose or break.

___________

Joseph Lisowski's Letters to Wang Wei is available from Pudding House Publications.

Call for Poetry Submissions

Kritya, an online Journal of Poetry published in India, is doing a special issue on contemporary Polish and Polish Diaspora poetry and is looking for poems and art by Poles or people of Polish descent. The poems should touch on some aspects of Polish or Polish Diaspora culture. The journal can be seen at www.kritya.in. The deadline is February 1, 2009, and the issue is scheduled to appear in May of 2009.

Send your contributions to the co-editors for this special issue: John Guzlowski or Christina Pacosz at jzguzlowski@gmail.com and pacosz@earthlink.net.

Danusha Goska

Dr. Danusha Goska is a writer whose essays, fiction, and poetry have addressed a broad range of topics and have touched many readers. She has written about the complex vision and personality of Pope John Paul II, Polish folk art, the Golem myth, the Holocaust, Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, Islam and Terror, and Spirituality and Ecology. She's also a writer who is deeply committed to uncovering and analyzing the truths that are hidden in popular culture. Her essays have told us important things about such pop culture icons as Woody Allen, Frank Sinatra, and Melvyn Douglas. Many of these essays are available at her website. She is also the author of a novel, Love Me More: An Addict's Diary.

The work that is most important to her has only been seen, however, in bits and pieces. For the last two decades, she has devoted much of her energy to a book-length study of the stereotypical ways in which Poles are often seen. Her study is is entitled "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish Jewish Relations, and American Popular Culture." The chapter called "The Necessity of 'Bieganski': A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a Scapegoat" appeared in an award-winning number of the journal Polin: A Study of Polish Jewery. A review of this article in the journal Shofar described her work as "groundbreaking."

She has started a blog devoted to her work on "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture" and other issues. You can see her blog by clicking here.