POETH..Y IN EXILE
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are either holding or running for office; second, that you consider it a
normal kind of endeavor. In the language of a former East European
"dissident" such as myself, however, politics loomed first as a large and
vague area of involvement in any public matter, as opposed to the ex–
tremely narrow area of one's strictly private life; second, as an area in
which every action was evaluated from an ethical point of view, as if be–
ing involved in politics made one automatically a bastard or a hero. This
automatic moral valuation also meant that, in particular, an East Euro–
pean intellectual was viewed by his society as someone from whom po–
litical involvement - of course on the side of those fighting the hated
regime - was expected. Perhaps the expectation on the part of the emi–
gre community was even stronger and more unequivocal if the intellec–
tual in question happened to live in "exile." The expectation was
strongest, naturally enough, at moments of crisis at home, when the
emigre community looked for someone to express its collective feelings
in a clear and memorable way.
Here, we converge on the three notions I began my remarks with:
exile, politics, and poetry. But I'm not going to embark on a nerve–
wracking East European tirade about how good a poet feels when he
realizes he has a wide and sympathetic audience of compatriots trembling
with anticipation for his every word - I am going to tell you how bad a
poet may feel in this situation. And I will tell you a story that began one
day in the winter of 1982, several weeks after the news about the
imposition of martial law in Poland reached Boston, where I had lived
since 1981. I was still reeling from the shock, which was made even
worse as Poland had been virtually cut off from the outside world, as
news about massive arrests among my friends sometimes included rumors
of their deaths, although only months later they were mostly proved
false. I was involved in trying desperately to somehow satisfY the demands
of my employer, the university where I was just beginning my second
semester teaching Polish language and literature; at the same time I was
trying to satisfy the demands of the local emigre community, whose
members often asked me to take part in some collective demonstration
of protest against Poland's military regime.
Trying to meet these demands, I often felt schizophrenic, catching
myself thinking simultaneously of how to explain to my American stu–
dents the significance of enjambment in the syllabic verse of an obscure
Polish poet of the Baroque period and of how to address the Polish–
American and Polish emigre audience in a speech I was to give an hour
later at a demonstration. This time the demonstration was to take place
in a small square near Boston's Faneuil Hall. Some microphones had
been set up on a stand in front of a building, in the midst of the crowd,
but there was no platform or stage. I am a terrible public speaker, even
