Wednesday Poem

Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012)

The End and the Beginning

 

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

 

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

 

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

 

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

 

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

 

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

 

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

 

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

 

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

 

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

 

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

 

 

 

Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist and translator, and the recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She lived most of her life in Krakow, Poland. She died in February 2012.

Wednesday poem

E. E. Cummings (1894 - 1962)

 

In The Rain-

 

in the rain-
darkness,     the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you

the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles

your eyes half-
thrush
half-angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss

and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then

your dancesong
soul.     rarely-beloved
a single star is
uttered,and i

think
       of you

 

 

New Russian poets

While looking for contemporary female Russian writers to include in the Summer 2013 issue of Chtenia, which I'll be guest-curating in June, I came across one of the best poets I've read in a while: Polina Barskova. Originally from St. Petersburg, she lives and works in the United States, as a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College.

She calls St. Petersburg "the home that I have left, the home that is absolutely impossible to leave." I like that a lot. It's how I feel about Moscow. She also studied abroad in Prague as a graduate student at Berkeley (she talks about her experience here). I like that too, for reasons everyone who knows me, knows.

Barskova has been publishing poetry since she was nine, and is acknowledged as one of the best contemporary Russian poet under the age of 40. Many of her works appear in English translation, but the best, in my opinion, remain untapped by the English audience. I hope to change that just a little with the upcoming issue.

For now, I'll share a video of Barskova reading a Russian poem by Vsevolod Zelchenko, another young(ish) poet of incredible talent. It's called "Ballada," or "Ballad," and in it the astute listener will hear allusions to many of my favorite works: to Bob Dylan's winding songs, to T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and even the first line of Nabokov's autobiography.

Just listening to her read the poem is an experience in itself. She's not merely reading the words; she's savoring them out loud. I'm starting to think that the best way to learn how to read poetry is to listen to another poet do it.