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PARTISAN REVLEW
drives them to leap like salmon confronting an obstacle. Precisely that,
this "having nothing to write about," is, in my opinion, quite a universal
problem to be studied. But in the meantime I'll turn to something else.
Oscar Milosz trained me to dislike contemporary French poetry in
1934-35, accusing it of noting down skin-deep impressions, that is, of a
passivity of perception. Half a century later, I think he was right. I may
once have mentioned, unfairly, my sensitivity to Paul Valery, when it is
Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire who deserve my homage. But
there's little to be gained from the later writers. Either there's a leap or
there isn't; that great poem of compassion for the modern metropolis ,
Cendrars's "Easter in New York," was a leap . It dates from 1912.
Our timidity in the face of incomprehensible sentences and violated
syntax gets in the way of evaluation. Many incomprehensible poems and
paintings turned out to be exceptional works of art; that's why people
are afraid. For my own usc, I simply say, "I don't understand," and I
don't worry about a given poet's rating on the literary stock exchange.
He doesn't speak to me, I don't understand, he bores me, and that's the
end of it. I don't have time to dig deep. I assume that there are many
levels of incomprehension and that mine is sufficiently refined. Somehow,
rejecting a great many poems because of their incomprehensibility has
not hurt me, although it's a delicate matter and our profession does not
like to admit out loud to such simple criteria, so as not to embolden
ordinary people.
Who can guess what convoluted nonsense may be brewing in the
minds of our fellow men, sometimes along with deep intuitions? In po–
etry, various hallucinations have earned the right of citizenship ever since
the control of logic disappeared; that is the price paid for novelty, but
also, because of it, it is difficult to draw the boundary between excep–
tional and inferior poetry....
November
21, 1987. In trying to rediscover several years of my life, I shall
not avoid simplifications; one month was one way, a second was differ–
ent, an evolution was taking place inside me. Only the tone was the
same: leftist. I did not belong to any party; I had not joined the offi–
cially sanctioned Polish Socialist Party; they probably knew about the
socialist Freedom organization during the Occupation, but that wasn't
an obstacle. One of the first volumes of poetry in Poland after the war
was my
Rescue,
which also included poems from the time of the German
occupation. My entire system of references was there; in America there
was nothing at all. In addition, I was sufficiently intelligent not to con–
fine my observations to the smoothly oiled machinery of democracy but
