POETRY MONDAY: April 3, 2016
John Guzlowski
Yes, as we all know, it’s National Poetry Month, but as many do not know, poetry is not just about trees, flowers and birds. Often, as in the work of some of the greatest poets – and as in the work of today’s poet – it’s about much more than that.
With people fleeing oppression and violence all over the world, there couldn’t be a better time to talk about the contributions made by immigrants and refugees to our literary culture, which is another way of saying to our lives. Today we honor John Guzlowski, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University. Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, he came to the U.S. with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His Roman Catholic parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war and had barely survived. Much of Guzlowski’s writing, both poetry and prose, honors the memory of his parents. His work has appeared in
many literary magazines and anthologies, as well as in four strong poetry collections: Language of Mules, Lightning and Ashes, Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, and the recently published Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded. Reviewing his Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Exceptional … even astonished me … Reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.”
Guzlowski’s many awards include an Illinois Arts Council Award for Poetry, a place on the short list for both a Bakeless and an Eric Hofer Award, and nominations for a Pulitzer Prize and for four Pushcart prizes. His work has
also been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust.
Here now are three strong poems by John Guzlowski.
–Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
What the War Taught Her
My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.
She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.
She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.
She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.
She learned that you don’t pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.
from Echoes of Tattered Tongues
Melon
When I see a melon on the table glinting
in the morning light, why does my heart leap up,
go out to it as it does? Why do I want
to sketch this melon, put it down in words,
or set it down in short melodic phrases?
It can never come closer to me than it is now,
at this moment when I see it before me
on the table like some small world I dreamt
as a child in my sandbox of dreams,
and seeing it as this world, I am taken by it,
possessed by it as surely as the spring
takes the elm, thawing it until the winter
is nothing in its life, until the skin
of leaves it’s lost is nothing. I become
the melon’s then, exist only to admire
its beauty, its lime white skin and cold sweetness,
its Bethlehem and Golgotha, exist only to admire
its otherness, and see my self a part from it,
never closer to it than I am now, never freer
than now of my own place of skulls.
from Atticus Review
Sometimes I Wish I had a Theory of Poetry
I read about Ryszard Krynicki’s
“Linguistic poetry” and Karpowicz’s
“Mallarmean” objectification
Of language and Czerniawski’s
“Specific relativism” that stems
Like a branch from the tree of British
Linguistic philosophy,
And I hide my poems
With their prairie plainness,
Their beets and trains and sparrows
In shame,
And I wonder how I got
To this plain corner, this non-abstract
Joining of plain streets where my words
Are as simple as a handful of raisins
In the palm of my hand.
Wasn’t I paying attention
In Sandra Bartkey’s Philosophy class?
Or was my time for learning these things
In my twenties when too often
I was drunk or hungover?
And clearly it’s too late now
For me to stiffen my lines
With philosophical verve. Derrida
And Foucault are as beyond me
As Bakhtin’s Russian with
Its Cyrillic pagodas.
My mind gravitates
(Oh that heavy, slow word)
To pauses, and I find I like
To sit in a hard chair and stare
Out a window at the prairie
And drink green tepid tea.
from Atlanta Review