Whether impersonating God or imagining his taste, Krzysztof Siwczyk offers us a rush and flush of pure adventure in A Calligraphy of Days. Instructions like “Cut off the sky with one long / Wink of the eye” in a poem called “Poem for Anne Sexton” nod to Siwczyk’s post-confessional mode of sardonic wit amid the grief and ephemera of life, delivered through the attained renditions of Piotr Florczyk and Alice-Catherine Carls’ translations which keep the lively, rhymed beat of speakers who romp around churches, making mischief enough to witness “[t]he transparent space between His ribs / spoke all the tenderness I remembered.” Such stilled moments disclose a speaker who is more than willing to drop everything and endure what the moment asks of him: pure attention. So attentive is the speaker that he says, “… nothing / ever happened to me. Everything happened outside of me.”
Born in 1977, Krzysztof Siwczyk is one of Poland’s most influential poets. He has published 14 collections of poems, and six books of literary criticism, essays, and prose. He is the winner of the Kościelski Foundation Award, the Gdynia Literary Award in the essay category, the Silesius Poetry Award, and the Václav Burian Award. He has also played the main roles in two feature films: Wojaczek (directed by Lech Majewski, 1999) and Wyexpony (directed by Adam Sikora, 2010.) His debut book, Wild Kids (1995), received high praise for its brazen poems depicting youthful speakers whose disaffections and coming of age stories are set against the backdrop of Poland’s transition from communism to capitalism. Generation Nothing (pokolenie nic) these kids might be called, a cohort not bound to grand historical narratives like their forebearers, but rather free to do as they please with newfound economic freedom and technological developments.
The poems in Wild Kids ruminate on the uneasiness of city life, moral confusion, ugly landscapes, and the tragedies of a misshapen Catholicism. The spiritual highs and lows in the poems are matched by the improvisational energy of Siwczyk’s vibrating lines that contain multiple phrases strung together, where irregular capitalizations pop up in the middle or end of a line, signaling a new thought or sensation. There’s a ripeness evident in lines that move from a scavenger trip to furniture store to snacking on sunflower seeds to deafening silence. The speaker in these poems manages an overflow of perception from his empirical reality by choosing not to get too prosaic on us. We move as freely as he does, from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. Idiosyncratic as well as descriptive, Siwczyk’s style is not interested in epiphanic revelations. The reveries are private and individualized. Siwczyk’s entrance into the literary scene marked an edginess, a freshness that had not been experienced for quite some time. Until this moment, poets in the Brulion Generation, an American-influenced set (think O’Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg) had dominated the poetry world. The Brulion, a quarterly literary journal published in Poland from 1986 to 1999, showcased their scandalous and anti-communist ways. Sometimes referred to as “the barbarians,” (a line taken from C.P. Cavafy), poets in the Brulion Generation stoked their underground status, often challenging classical poetic forms that were intellectual or metaphysical in nature. For a poet like Siwczyk, the invention of his own voice allowed a tremendous lyric freedom to “visit an old lady / to drink raspberry tea” and not be bothered with the machismo of such a barbaric tradition.
This inventiveness would continue with each book Siwczyk published, for the poet simply cannot help but initiate himself each time he sits down to write. From the language-driven books following Wild Kids to the pared-down poems of Krematorium to the performance-based approach of Defense Mechanism (also translated by Florczyk), the restlessness arrives anew. In other words, initiation might be the only constant in Siwczyk’s work. Calligraphy of Days does an excellent job of showcasing the poet’s various inceptions of self. There are beginnings upon beginnings, a state of becoming that never takes itself for granted. The poems work by vigilant observation and the negotiation of the feeling that arises from such worldly evidence. Finally, one senses that the poet wants to belong to the world, to believe in it, yet holds himself against it, resisting communion. This contentiousness is admirable. This wanting to belong, but not allowing for it, makes for thrilling poetry. The title poem, “Wild Kids,” exemplifies this kind of receptiveness and related hesitation:
Wild Kids
Autumn in the church The heat isn’t on yet It’s cold
I am standing before a mud-coloured cross
Polished to a shine by a million touches
Christ’s feet as cold as the handrails
of morning buses
Two kids enter the church rubbing together
Styrofoam they found by a furniture store
Finish eating a sunflower-head End
a dirty joke with a punchline and
go silent before Christ
Suddenly a girl with greasy hair and
swollen lymph nodes walks up
to Christ and starts to tickle Him
from heel to pinkie The boy reports
the facial expression of the tickled one
Not knowing why I join them and
together we tickle the frozen God
this way and that We pause a bit and
decide to continue until
something changes
We wait without speaking to
each other We Listen
I wait
I listen
The poem’s terse diction places us inside a church, but we’re not here to pray. We will not be redeemed. This faux pilgrimage recounts a “mud-coloured cross” and a definite chill, but it’s the metaphorical coolness found in the statuary of Christ, which is “cold as the handrails / of morning buses” that reminds us we will not be saved. When religion doesn’t provide any warmth, what is one to do? The three separate phrases in the first line (“Autumn in the church The heat isn’t on yet It’s cold”) pile up the perceptions without artifice. These lines illustrate an unjudgmental speaker who is receptive to the unscriptedness of city life. Indeed, when a vagabond duo ambles up unceremoniously to the crucified Christ, the speaker joins their inappropriate tickling game of statuary icon. Not exactly knowing why, the speaker says “together we tickle the frozen God” perhaps to effect some kind of change, movement, or proclamation from the scene. When no pronouncement comes, the speaker withdraws from the sacrilegious group activity. Interestingly, the collective voice of these later stanzas (“we tickle,” “we pause,” “we wait”) returns to the first-person “I” of the poem’s opening lines. The speaker waits and listens for a response that will not come. This kind of patience — and, of course, silence — at the poem’s end speaks to other moments of waiting and endurance in Calligraphy of Days.
This preoccupation with time is measured in the book’s many references to horizons. How many horizons are there to imagine? In fact, there is a calligraphy of days. There are “moving horizons” and “narrowing horizons,” but when “the horizon / once and for all loses its power to encircle” we have now crossed into the spirit world. These multiple crossings in the book (of days, of places, of material icons) are breathless, inevitable, and cosmic. For the reader, they are pleasantly disorienting. The horizons in all the poems work by restarting the clock, so to speak. Remember, days don’t mean anything unless there’s someone to love. Remember, all is not lost for tomorrow will come again. And like the sun, it’s only natural to cross to the other side of sky. The poet reminds us “we are all in transit” but no matter the speed, one of poetry’s superpowers is to stop time — to tableau, to corral a stilled image. And like any good creator, the poet is a masterful captor, readily improvising when necessary:
Like your old pope, I too
know how to ski Have fresh breath and
can reshape with open hands
your faded calves the color of white wine
into a madness of shards the color of (true) blood
how good they must taste under your thin skin
“For” begins with this funny simile. Through the comparison to an “old pope,” we come to understand the sanctity (and humor) the poet holds for himself, his job at changing tired legs into “into a madness of shards” with caresses. This alchemical process of turning wine-colored flesh into “(true) blood” imitates the transubstantiation that occurs during Catholic Mass when the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. In these lines, however, the poet starts with real calves, describing them as white wine-colored, then imagines them as revivified and bloody, then imagines what the taste must be like. From the lofty rafters of post-coital bliss, when the speaker says, “Like your God, I too can / be silent I will even be more silent in the morning,” we realize the deep reverence he pays to a quality of silence only found in the morning. The poem’s final two lines (“I can impersonate God perfectly Nothing / more”) function as an ars poetica, where Creator-Poet are named one and the same, but they also revel in Siwczyk’s beautiful existential nothingness.
The translation work of Florczyk and Carls seems to depend on inhabiting this uncharted irreverence, where one wakes to this divine silence of a lover’s daybed or the nightmare of “no history.” This selected edition presents a broad range of Siwczyk’s work, highlighting how the English translations exist as a newly created sequence that is separate from their Polish counterparts. Love, typesetters, amnesia, God, hunger, the blue sea, sex, Tranströmer, marzipan, mineral water, everything in life is to be enjoyed. But then in Part II, the voice changes when Death appears. Clipped, terse, these short poems plainly describe the crematoria and the hospital room; the cancer collected like stamps in book. There’s even a poem called “Meanwhile” that speaks to the elsewhere of death. The last poem in this section, “On Your Way Out,” advises: “Plant a white flag / On the Crematoria.” This boundary, like many in the book, represents a series of final beginnings the poet continually enacts. In each poem, there’s the reassurance that chance plays a huge part in how things begin and end: “It’s no one’s fault / It depends / Which way you look / And at which sky.”
Calligraphy of Days’ final part narrates another tumultuous sky of possibilities and prospects. There are more planted flags. Absurd mornings. Lots of spots with ruinous activity charted as “blooming excavations” or simply poems with a quality of “bloom and decay.” I adore all the human activity among the ruins. Touched as I might be by “a missed chance of a life blooming,” a ghostly nothingness pervades. Titles such as “So” and “Finally,” and “Settling Scores” all ask what is alive, what is left? Because no one’s on the other end of the telephone, the refrigerator’s shelves are empty, the morning newspapers are empty, “empty channels,” and “in place of people / there appeared objects.” For the speaker, this generous nothingness, which begins again each morning at dawn, is a chance to practice his enlightenment. Casually, repeatedly, he reminds us:
The fun begins the moment
one becomes indifferent.
To be indifferent is to live.
[Published by Seagull Books on December 2, 2024, 80 pages, $19.00 paperback]