MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
35
Edward Hirsch:
But both things are true: human reason is human and
invincible and yet poems are not only written out of human reason but
come fi'om some other force. These are poems wri tten as a kind of dia–
logue between history and transcendence. They're not philosophical essays.
It seems
to
me that they're in tremendous quest of beautiful reason. They
are also powered by the deep recognition that poetry doesn't entirely come
from reason. It seems to me that both poems acknowledge the truth of the
actual nature of what it is to make poems.
Tomas Venclova:
Poets in general are instruments of language, probably the
main area which gives us the idea of transcendence, of something
immutable, of some eternal link, let us say, between Homer and ourselves.
At the same time, language gives us the possibility of questioning every–
thing, incl uding language itself. Poetry brings that to the 11th power.
Adam Zagajewski:
I think that here we are touching on one of the main
contradictions of Milosz's poetry, his ambivalent relationship to modernism–
which he both admires and hates. He admires it for its aesthetic beauty, but
I suspect he sees some kind of a narrowness in it, and this conflict, among
other things, is a conflict between wisdom and aesthetics. I think the cun–
ningness of modernism makes Milosz both happy and unhappy.
Seamus Heaney:
There's another poem that I love for the ruthlessness of
the energy of its truth-seeking and its desire to hack away everything that
is beautiful but also fake-"Child of Europe." [Reads from poem.] It's
thrilling because it is a kind of flame-throwing.
Robert Faggen:
Robert Frost once said that poetry is a very rural thing. Of
course, it has great pastoral roots. Many of you have touched upon this
sense of rootedness, that sense of origins in the pastoral. And yet there is a
sense too of the powerful influence of the cosmopolitan city, as in the case
of Wilno. In "Bypassing Rue Descartes," there seems to be a rejection of
the ultimate longing for a cosmopolitan utopia. How has this negotiation
between the rural and the urban , the pastoral and the problem with recov–
ering the pastoral, appeared in his poetry?
Tomas Venclova :
I feel very lonely among Li thuanian poets because all of
them have those rural roots and I don't. For me, the ci ty is nature and
architecture is grass or trees. So I don't have this feeling of rootedness,
which Milosz has to a very large degree. Not everybody has this binocular
relation, which in his case gives us a profound stereoscopy of sight.
