360
PARTISAN REVIEW
issue of
Tworczos'(
(Creative Writing), and written by Kazimierz Wyka,
one of Poland's few literary critics. This issue reached me in New York
after a two-month delay, which explains my belated response. The ques–
tions it raises are of continuing and immediate concern, however.
I.
Is journalistic poetry possible?
I pose this question while recalling the unpleasant shudders that
poetic journalism elicits in people of good taste. I also know that this
question has often been answered with a yes, citing Whitman and
Heine, and often with a no, citing good poets who destroyed their tal–
ent by harnessing it
to
the service of problems pronounced upon
expres–
sis verbis.
Every question, however, acquires a slightly different sound
amid new experiences and circumstances, and new people repeat old–
but only apparently old-words.
I used
to
be an opponent of any journalistic concerns in poetry, and
I was not unique in that regard. The frequent attempts at vociferous,
unmediated protest (and there were plenty of reasons for that) left a
feeling of bitterness, shame, and betrayal with regard
to
the rules of
good craftsmanship. How did it happen, then, that poems filled with
invective and employing the stylistic methods of pamphlet writing, of
persiflage, and even of a philosophical treatise wound up in
Ocalenie?
And how did it come
to
pass that, despite what Wyka has
to
say, I do
not consider them merely "rhymed documentation of reality" or a
departure from my true path?
Two explanations are possible: either the author, having written those
poems, grew attached to them thanks to the particular events sur–
rounding their creation (which often happens) and is evaluating them
subjectively, or the sensitive, wise critic possesses a range of sensibility
which does not register certain combinations and instead of music hears
rasping sounds, whistles, and inarticulate noise. Both explanations are
possible and either person may be right, but the question of two differ–
ent evaluations, two different types of argumentation in relation to one
and the same work, still remains-as, for example, in judging the cycle
"Voices of Poor People."
Let us start right in. The main problem with contemporary poetry is
what someone has called
peu de realite,
a detachment from reality
caused by remaining inside the chalk circle of rigidly defined ways of
reacting to the world. This should not be confused with "living in an
ivory tower," "art for art's sake," or the like, because the problem is in
fact a technical one. The poet, heir
to
the heritage of recent European
poetry, finds himself, like the contemporary painter, obligated to employ
