Knowing One’s Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig 9781628926804, 9781441116420

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For my parents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Charles Altieri for his support of this project in its earliest stages and for his always constructive criticism. I am grateful to David Frick for his guidance, tutelage, and warm encouragement. I wish that I could thank Michael André Bernstein, recently departed yet still alive in my memory for his good advice and kindness. Thanks are also due to Robert Hass, Eric Naiman, and Chana Kronfeld. Deep thanks are due to Matthew Kay, who patiently watched me work through the original manuscript. I have enjoyed conversations about this project with so many people that I fear a list may diminish the unique importance of each. An interview with Seamus Heaney in 1998 helped to set my mind on a track that meandered its way to this project; his courtesy, patience, and good nature are exemplary. My meetings with Adam Zagajewski heartened me and strengthened my confidence in this project. The conversations I had with Bronisław Maj, Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Ryszard Nycz deeply informed my thinking about Polish poetry while I was a student. Thank you to Clare Cavanagh for conversations at various conferences. The “Miłosz and Miłosz” international conference in Krakow allowed me to have some wonderful discussions and to experience the hospitality of the Jagiellonian University. To my colleagues at the University of Victoria who have given advice on any and every stage of the writing and publication process, I am thankful. I would like to extend special gratitude to Peter Fallon for his kind permission to print portions of Derek Mahon’s poems. I have benefitted from the thoughtful comments of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. I am extremely grateful to Haaris Naqvi at Continuum for contracting this project and communicating with me throughout the editing process. To Kim Blank, for everything. My most intimate thanks are, of course, due to my parents; I have benefitted enormously from their critical acumen and loving care. This book is dedicated to them. “Fire” and “The Self” come from Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators. Copyright (c) 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Translation copyright (c) 2002 by Farrar, Straus and

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Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber. Portions of this manuscript, in revised article form, have appeared in New Hibernia Review (Spring 2010), An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts (2006), The Polish Review (Winter 2009–2010), and World Literature Today (2005).

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Introduction: The margins of Europe—a new comparison “Our poets replace politicians, teachers, and even economists.” BOLESŁAW PRUS

History/Histories Ireland and Poland are located at the margins of the culturally central continent of Europe. At first glance, they are dissimilar. Their languages are located on different branches of the Indo-European tree. Their societies are organized differently. Yet, these margins share uncanny similarities that lead to comparable cultural issues and questions, ranging from the dominance of a conservative Catholic church (in the Republic of Ireland, matched by a conservative Northern Irish Catholicism) to the pervasive sense within each country that it is indeed marginal to the goings-on of mainland Europe. Both countries, also, historically privilege the genre of poetry.1 These similarities may appear too incidental to sustain a comparative literary study, yet the extraordinary, perhaps incredible, fact is that, when we read the works of contemporary Irish and Polish poets, we see that they react to similar pressures and problems, evince similar postures toward certain cultural situations, and locate their concerns in similar ways. This is a generalization, yet four of the most important poets writing today—Adam Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Julia Hartwig—call for such comparison, and the quality of their work is reason enough to consider it. Poets, after all, frequently stay a step ahead of their critics. In this case, the problems motivating career-long explorations of belonging and identity bear comparison and, indeed, such comparison helps bring these poets’ concerns into relief. Despite the complexity of their thinking, the root cause of such exploration is 1

“But why should it be that Ireland has such a strong tradition of poetry? The other country that springs to mind with a similar poetic slant is Poland, and there may be a clue in that. Poland has been, even more so than Ireland, a ‘most distressful country’, as the ballad “The Wearing of the Green” has it, subject to the buffetings of history.” We may compare this comment by Nick Laird (in The Guardian, 23 Oct. 2010) to that by Adolf Nowaczyński, quoted below, claiming the same parallel but stressing the greater sufferings of Ireland.

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simple: belonging can be a problem. Not everyone wishes to or can “know one’s place.” Merely determining what one’s place is can be difficult, even painful. No wonder it is so tempting to cast one’s mind out from the present moment to imagine what one’s place should be or could be. It is, perhaps, not so surprising to hear Seamus Heaney praising contemporary Polish poetry, Derek Mahon admitting his interest in Adam Mickiewicz, Adam Zagajewski claiming that Mahon is one of his favorite poets, or Julia Hartwig showing keen interest in contemporary English-language poetry; their poems evince startlingly similar concerns and take complementary paths in their explorations of those concerns. The poems of Zagajewski, Heaney, Mahon, and Hartwig form a shifting tableau of identifications rather than a unitary representation of identity. They do not, of course, write in the same way. Yet the fact that these poets all flee the confines of static identity, that they write in praise of mutability, and that they glory in being hard to pin down to a particular time and place, has a very deep basis. This basis has much to do with their shared rebellion against the tradition of poetry as a nationbuilding enterprise. This tradition views the individual poet’s belonging in a collectivity as the primary feature that does and should influence that poet’s work. These four poets, contrarily, want to protect the individuality of the voice against coercive historical circumstances and generic expectations. These generic expectations were formed in Romantic Ireland and Poland. Poetry, in these countries, came to the fore as the genre best able to articulate the historical crisis both countries felt themselves to inhabit. A bardic poetic tradition, however, comes up against an ironic strain in the twentieth century, and different forms of lyric voice are used to express different types of cultural belonging or apartness. How to ground these poets’ comparative gestures, however, is a difficult question, one that involves questions of method and relations of fact, and necessitates some historical reconnaissance. The most salient similarity between Ireland and Poland is also the darkest: both have experienced a history of takeover and oppression; both lost their sovereignty for over a century. Both had and have large émigré populations, even while they cannot be called diasporic cultures; both have developed a nomadic aesthetic, which is minoritarian, and a restorative aesthetic centered on the home which is majoritarian. Both were ruled by “outside” powers who sought to abolish the difference between inside and outside, with the result that the shifts of Poland’s borders, the relative Anglicization of various parts of Ireland, and the state of the Irish language became critical subjects of study in the past two centuries. The simple facts of the two countries’ histories make it indubitable that their cultural output should bear the scars of approximately two hundred years of “unfreedom” and foreign domination; at the same time, forcing a “captivity-narrative” upon such national histories can be negative and limiting.2 2

The phrase is Rey Chow’s from The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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The age of revolution proved to be the age of subjugation for Europe’s margins, as the 1800 Act of Union swallowed the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom and the Third Partition of 1795 divided the entirety of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Neither act was unforeseen: the English king had served as the official head of Ireland since the 1542 Crown of Ireland Act, and Poland had suffered its initial partitions in 1772 and 1793, reeling from the disastrous War of the Confederation of Bar (1768–72) against an already invasive Russian presence. Both countries attempted unsuccessful Romantic revolutions. The effect was that the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth was liquidated and Ireland ceased to exist as a separate entity in all but name and geography. Both countries could look back on centuries of sovereignty before their neighbors, gifted with wellmaintained armies and aggressive monarchs, took over their territory; both developed a long, deep, cultural response to these conditions. The question of the nation—how to win back its freedom, how to maintain a subjugated culture—became central to art and scholarship.3

Romantic identity These political conditions, in turn, engender a specifically literary pressure to assume one particular identity, inflected by the Romantic paradigm common to both countries.4 Herein lies another complication: although there are important constitutive similarities between Irish and Polish Romanticisms, there are key temporal and cultural differences (for example, the status of Gaelic) that cannot be elided. Instead of claiming that the two countries share a common literary and political history—an argument that would eventually break down—the poetry of Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig would most benefit from a brief consideration of literary-historical conditions that produce similar kinds of pressure upon contemporary poets within these countries. Much of this pressure results from the continued legacy of Romanticism, the single strongest literary current in Poland. Its inception dates somewhat later than that of its British counterpart. Larry Wolff points to Rousseau’s 3

Gerry Smyth posits, “at least since the eighteenth century, the debate surrounding the ‘function of criticism’ has always been a debate about the function of the nation and the relations between colonizing and decolonizing subjects.” Irish (and Polish) criticism cannot help but tackle political questions, which are also, we may note, questions about the individual as seen within a collective. Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press, 1998) 52. 4 Maria Janion, the foremost scholar of Polish Romanticism, holds that “the loss of independence [is] the most important event in the history of modern Polish consciousness”—see “Romantyzm,” Literatura Polska; Przewodnik encyklopedyczny (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1985) 299. The statement could, of course, easily be rewritten with Ireland substituted for Poland.

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1772 Considerations on the Government of Poland as a text propounding ideas that would later be considered Romantic, such as the function of patriotism as an ideological shield against one’s oppressors; given the weakness of the local military and economy, Poles could not place their confidence in material strength, but must form an ideal conception of Poland to hold within their hearts.5 A political, as opposed to a textual, approach to the Romantic period in Poland may establish its inception in 1794, the date of the Kościuszko Uprising, a failed attempt to liberate Poland and Lithuania from the repressive Russian and Prussian empires, which served as a symbolic fight for cultural as well as political integrity. According to Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka, the third partition of Poland, in 1795, marked the definitive end of Enlightenment notions of progress and humanitarianism. A new strain of revolutionary poetry emerged (called “poezja tyrtejska” after the Greek Tyrteus, whose stirring verse exhorted the Spartans to victory in the Second Messenian War), motivated by the twin desires for revenge and for universal freedom. This represents the most militaristic aspect of Romantic poetry. Polish Romanticism is thus marked by a view of the poet as a prototypical man of action6 and a spiritual leader of the people, giving voice to their desire for nationhood and freedom. The poet may be solitary but his work is linked to a collective. The most extreme form of this thought is a nationalistic Messianism that exalts the martyr and the mystic, situating final historical victory in the far future, prefaced by a series of defeats and humiliations. Although the potential freedom of the spirit opposes the captivity of the social body in this scheme, the spirit in question is that of the nation (naród), a union of past, present, and future generations guided by God. This belief had a Judeo-Christian foundation, and notions of fall, redemption, and Messianism operate in a grand narrative of the nation’s fate, spiritualizing the Enlightenment idea of progress to form a myth of the suffering people, who must plumb the depth of wretchedness in order to eventually undergo a glorious rebirth; the temporal scheme at work is a Viconian spiral. Poland is, in this view, uniquely destined to be the Christ of nations. By transforming the fact of national suffering into the hope for an eventual triumph, this philosophy served the psychological purpose of defending the people against collective despair. This current developed from the later mystical works of Adam Mickiewicz (1799–1855), the foremost exponent of Romanticism in Poland and the most important influence upon twentieth-century Polish poetry. Janion posits that his Forefathers’ Eve presents a powerful archetype in its “private” protagonist’s transformation into a “social” man, “a Prometheus 5

See Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 6 Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka, Romantyzm i historia (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978) 7–8.

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suffering for his nation, [which] became the basic moral and ideological figure of Polish romanticism.”7 It heralds the second wave of Romanticism after the November Uprising of 1830–31, of which Messianism was the paramount sub-ideology. The salient political events demarcating the later stages of the Romantic Movement were the 1848 Spring of Nations8 and the January Insurrection of 1863. As both these revolutions resulted in greater repression, the Romantic Movement responded with a greater emphasis upon spirituality. The last wave of Romanticism is marked by Mickiewicz’s lectures on Slavic literature, in which he postulated that God graces the poet with vision in return for the poet’s spiritual effort for his people. Poetry should be essentially visionary (indeed, one should not write poetry before one performs a miracle),9 and come “à l’improviste,” unbidden; its spontaneity and its prophetic power would take hold of the masses in a way that intellectual reason could not. This belief must be borne in mind when considering the influence of Romanticism upon contemporary writers, as well as Mickiewicz’s correspondent belief that the true poet is created for strife rather than for sweet songs. In other words, mysticism and prophecy should not be associated with effeteness or aestheticism but with leadership, mobilization of the masses, and a realization that spirituality must be used in the world of politics, not just that of imagination. The notion that the past is part of an unresolved historical process that engulfs the present is common in colonized cultures. It connects past wrongs with a future-oriented quest, thus reshaping an ancient Judeo-Christian motif. “Joy did not dwell in his house, when his fatherland knew naught but sorrow,” writes Mickiewicz, explaining his hero’s decision to leave home and fight for the freedom of his country. Fighting, however, can be accomplished through art as well as direct action: “O folk song! . . . an archangel’s sword is in thy hand.”10 Such lines remind us that “Romantic Ireland,” with its concomitant belief that folk literature may serve the purpose of national resurgence, was also a politicized formation. A crucial date for Irish Romanticism (four years after the Kościuszko Uprising) is 1798, when the United Irishmen, a Republican group, organized a revolt against the rule of George III. 1798 marks the 7 Janion 300. The relevant section of Forefathers’ Eve is Part III, composed when Mickiewicz was in Dresden in 1832 (referred to as “Dziady drezdeńskie” in Polish). Mickiewicz’s most Messianic work is Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego [Books of the Polish People and of the Polish Pilgrimage], published in Paris in 1832. 8 In Poland, this revolutionary wave manifested itself as the Greater Poland Uprising, also called the Poznań Uprising (“powstanie wielkopolskie” or “powstanie poznańskie”). Each of Poland’s dramatic revolutions for independence resulted in tighter political control and, often, greater cultural repression by the partitioning powers of Prussia (and by extension the German Confederation), Russia, and Austria. 9 See Wiktor Weintraub, Literature as Prophecy: Scholarship and Martinist Poetics in Mickiewicz’s Parisian Lectures (The Hague: Mouton, 1959) 12–13. 10 Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod, trans. Jewell Parish, Dorothea Prall Radin, and George Rapall Noyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925) 46 (l. 1147), 36 (l. 905).

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beginning of a period whose political life was dominated by the spread of militant republicanism. Particularly important as a cultural figure whose significance carried over into the twentieth century is (Theobald) Wolfe Tone, a proponent of “frank and open war” against British rule and leader of the Irish Rebellion. Upon being sentenced for his part in the Uprising, Tone famously asked to be granted the death of a soldier by gunshot and was denied his request; while awaiting death by hanging, he committed suicide. Tone’s death contributes to a cult of martyrdom, one that is common to both Ireland and Poland. It is in complex juxtaposition with the cultivation of poetic uniqueness (Harold Bloom calls it “imaginative identity”11) of the British Romantics and the displacement effect of “Romantic Ideology.”12 These are differential Romanticisms, overlapping rather than discrete, though the particularity of Ireland and Poland’s politicized, “fighting Romanticism” is worth highlighting; so is the role of spirituality, which is not nearly as separate from politics as it perhaps should be. Both Polish and Irish Romanticisms were tied to a hypostatized belief in a Polish soul or Celtic spirit that reinforced each country’s separateness from its colonizers. Mickiewicz’s archangel is armed, and one of the constitutive features of these cultures is their ability to weave together spiritual belief and political aspiration. The Young Ireland movement gained ground in the mid-nineteenth century and was responsible for the second great Irish Romantic rebellion. The 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion arose from two imperatives: firstly, to repeal the 1800 Act of Union, and secondly, even more pressingly, to seek restitution for the devastating Great Famine. Beginning in 1845, this potato blight resulted in massive disease, death, and emigration; the Irish population was reduced by almost a quarter. The rebellion produced exiles as well as martyrs, among them John Mitchel, who combined his political writing (most famously Jail Journal) with editorship of poetry by other nationalist figures (Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan). Such details reveal the interpenetration of poetry and politics, the depth of which is hard to fathom 11

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 71. Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) is the foundational text for understanding New Historicist “charges,” to use Susan Wolfson’s term, against formalism and aestheticism. McGann provocatively writes that Romantic poetry often “erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies” (137). Such claims could initiate a whole new discussion, one taking us far away from this brief comparison of Polish and Irish Romantic legacies. Interestingly for our discussion, historicists such as McGann or Marjorie Levinson make concerted and influential attempts to replace history into a Romantic lyric tradition that has been accused of (occasional, not comprehensive) escapism, thus showing, inversely, that the British Romantic lyric may be susceptible to such charges in the first place. These are broad and contestable claims, but it is worth noting the centrality of a scholarly tradition re-politicizing the English Romantic lyric at the same time as the inherent politics of other (non-English) Romantic poetries render such efforts less necessary—it would, indeed, be impossible to speak of Irish or Polish Romanticism without mentioning the revolutionary aspirations of these subjugated countries during the Romantic period.

12

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in contemporary North America. In nineteenth and early twentieth-century Poland and Ireland, poets were very much acknowledged legislators of and for their people. Romantic nationalism flourished for many decades in Poland and Ireland after the Romantic Movement had subsided in England: Thomas Davis, often considered the founder of the Young Ireland group, lived from 1814 to 1845; Thomas Moore published his popular “Irish Melodies” in the early nineteenth century (finally collected in 1852); James Clarence Mangan composed until his death in 1849. This time was also fruitful in Poland: Mickiewicz completed his masterwork Forefather’s Eve in 1823 and Pan Tadeusz (Master Thaddeus) in 1834; Juliusz Słowacki composed his greatest poems in the 1830s and 1840s; Zygmunt Krasiński composed his masterwork, The Un-Divine Comedy, in 1833. Crucially important is the fact that all of the Three National Bards of Poland lived in emigration or exile and wrote their most important works abroad. Poles emigrated in large numbers after the failure of the 1831 November Uprising: this was the so-called Great Emigration (“Wielka Emigracja”). The Irish had their own great emigration after 1845, when depopulation began in earnest. The effect is that exile became both a lived reality and, in time, a national myth. These material specifics call up important differences between Romanticisms that cannot be elided in the interest of forming a unified view. Given the differences between singular Romantic figures, their politics and poetics, cultural generalizations will be approximate at best. There is, however, a tenacious general distinction that may be made between British and continental European (or Irish) Romanticism based on the extent to which the former “erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies” in order to focus upon “the ‘universal’ import of personal experience”; Jerome McGann’s quotation marks signal the suspicion with which such universality has come to be viewed, as he focuses upon Byron’s participation in “a complex set of political, social, and world-historical meditations” that aligns him with continental European Romanticisms, as opposed to “a Wordsworthian line” prevailing in nineteenth-century Britain.13 Although the socio-political groundedness of the “Wordsworthian line” has been demonstrated by historicist scholars, the distinction remains a compelling way of bringing together questions of identity and audience with large-scale patterns. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre gesture toward a way of bringing together both “lines” in their argument that a sense of loss motivates “the Romantic critique” of modernity. The general quality of this sense of alienation and longing brings together internal and external manifestations 13

Jerome McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 211, 209; see also his groundbreaking critique of Romantic scholarship, which he believes to be problematically absorbed in Romantic processes of self-representation, in The Romantic Ideology.

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of loss with forward-looking desire. They note that an “active principle at the heart of Romanticism has often been noted in various forms: anxiety, a state of perpetual becoming, interrogation, quest, struggle,” even while “a resigned Romanticism” also exists.14 In its prophetic incarnation, this principle may signal “an anticipatory relation to time, a hastening of futurity,” as Geoffrey Hartman observes, interestingly, of Wordsworth.15 This active principle often takes a political form in subjugated Ireland and Poland, and marks the literature of both countries long past the end of the so-called Romantic or revolutionary age. Despite Yeats’s lament that Romantic Ireland was dead and gone in “September 1913,” its legacy was long-lived, and bears comparison to its Polish counterpart. John Merchant usefully points to the links between the Young Ireland and Young Poland (“Młoda Polska”) movements at the turn of the century, which, although motivated by political aspirations, are also attempts to fuse native cultures with the ideas of European modernism (in other words, to go past the nostalgia described by Löwy and Sayre).16 Both movements, Merchant holds, grow out from a deep concern with identity, as formed in opposition to England (D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith) or as linked to international cultural forces (Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Moore). Poles recognized their own desires in those of Young Ireland, as based on “‘parallels of predicament and similarities of reaction’” (Adam Zamoyski in Merchant 4). The nostalgia for a grand Irish past permeating Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Irish Melodies offered the Polish Romantics a model for coping with their own sense of loss, which was compounded by their position as exiles. Merchant connects Mickiewicz’s activist vision of Poles as pilgrims with a mission to found “the Fatherland of the free” with a conception of the national family held together by filial devotion.17 This will

14 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 17–23. 15 “The Poetics of Prophecy,” High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams, ed. Lawrence Lipking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 15–40. 16 The Polish name for the period is itself ambivalent, dubbed “Modernism” by Ryszard Nycz and “Neo-Romanticism” by Julian Krzyżanowski; this ambivalence maps onto the basic competition between currents of “essentialism and cosmopolitanism” that Merchant sees as constitutive of this period. Merchant quotes Adolf Nowaczyński’s 1907 and 1918 essays “The Rebirth of Erin” and “Irish Theater,” establishing a comparison between Poland and Ireland: “Imagine a nation over three times smaller than ours, but with our faults, comicality, sins, and ugliness intensified three times over; recall that the Irish over 700 years have suffered under torture and oppression, next to which our nineteenth century pales and shrinks in size like a cloud disappearing over the horizon” (167). This is a stirring, albeit somewhat vague, comparison, though Nowaczyński’s nationalist fervor is historically specific and memorable: “the rising emerald phoenix of Celtic Ireland from the ashes of denationalization” is inspirational for a Polish audience (167). See John Merchant, The Impact of Irish-Ireland on Young Poland, 1890–1919 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2008). 17 Ibid 2–4, 16, 60–67.

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prove central for understanding the nationalized ideal of belonging against which Adam Zagajewski and Julia Hartwig eventually rebel. Maria Janion insists that Romanticism furnishes the most powerful cultural paradigm in Poland, shaping modern social consciousness.18 She views Romanticism as an ethically driven movement that champions European “peripheries of culture” as against official, dogmatized centers, and that which persists as a worldview rather than a temporally bounded movement. The archetype of the nationalist poet-prophet, of a brief and heroic life cut short by a martyr’s death, and of the visionary power of folk culture, unite Polish and Irish Romanticisms. These archetypes are also heavily present in the work of Yeats, who saw himself as the elegist and celebrant of Romantic Ireland despite his effort to modernize his own work. His hatred of “this filthy modern tide” impels him to look back at the grandeur and spiritual vigor of Ireland in its most Romantic incarnations, the Ireland of peasant folktales and of political martyrs. Twentieth-century Irish poets struggle with his complex, even contradictory influence, while Polish poets struggle with the late legacy of their own Romantics. Whereas Yeats certainly cannot be generalized as a typically Romantic influence—neither can Mickiewicz—the presence of these poets goads future generations into reappraising their forms and their politics. The “active principle” manifested for both in political struggle, and this facet of their legacies mediates the reactions of contemporary poets to the claims of place. The demands placed upon contemporary Irish and Polish poets reveal the lasting strength of this legacy. Seamus Deane traces the concepts of responsibility and commitment in a 1976 review essay: “it was difficult for an Irish poet of the thirties and forties to see his function as anything less than redemptive,” he writes, as each poet tried to be “major.” The troubles, however, brought their own demands. Deane recognizes those placed upon the poet during his own day, praising Heaney for writing poetry that responds to (if not redeems) the “violent” and “public” world they inhabit. He makes an important distinction in his assertion that “[r]elationship is unavoidable, but commitment, relationship gone vulgar, is a limiting risk,” even while “commitment is demanded during a crisis.” The poet “is called upon to assume responsibility,” yet this may entail dissatisfaction and estrangement—which, in fact, it sometimes does. In the very dilemma he sets before us, Deane articulates the tensions between the aesthetic and the political, “vulgar” and nuanced, unavoidably public yet psychologically estranging roles, in which contemporary poets find themselves.19 These tensions are galvanized by 18

Maria Janion, Gorączka romantyczna (Krakow: Universitas, 2000) 39; also see “Romanticism and the Beginning of the Modern World,” trans. Aleksandra Rodzińska-Chojnowska, Dialogue and Universalism 10.9/10 (2000): 45. 19 Seamus Deane, “The Appetites of Gravity: Contemporary Irish Poetry,” The Sewanee Review 84.1 (Winter 1976): 200, 202–3.

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dichotomized force-fields and yet they are not oxymoronic—herein lies their tragedy (and also their interest). It is not impossible to dwell in two positions simultaneously, to recognize the demand for commitment while upholding more nuanced “relationship” and truly valuing flight from political alignment altogether, as do most of the poets in this study. A similar difficulty underlies Czesław Miłosz’s assertion that in “Central and Eastern Europe, . . . a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a ‘bard,’ that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens.”20 This 1961 statement illustrates the extent to which the need for “redemptive” poetry, which we may associate with the Romantic paradigm, was strong as a generation of poets too young to experience Romantic revolutions or fight in world wars came of age. Now that Poland is independent and the two Irelands have a new level of autonomy due to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Romantic model of poetry appears outmoded. For two cultures at the margins of Europe, who have experienced considerable instability and poverty, the nation-making endeavor of literature has proven to be fruitful; yet in the contemporary era, this tradition of writing has grown oppressive. Writers today face the task of extricating themselves from a restrictive net of expectations without setting themselves up for the criticism of “irresponsibility.” Viewing Polish and Irish literature as private is still more radical than viewing it as communal. Irish and Polish cultures are, in one sense, in exile from themselves—from their long-lost heroic pasts (as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; as the Isle of Saints and Scholars), from their central position in European culture—and this collective exile sets an obvious agenda for the national poet: to retrieve the country’s true character. As Deane points out, “Ireland became a new cultural space when it was refigured as the place that had to be retrieved and reintegrated with world culture through the mediation of art.”21 The same may be said of Poland: the loss of place leads to a quest to retrieve or, equally, to rebuild. A nation’s exile impels a nation’s pilgrimage. Contemporary poets inherit this tradition. They are forced to grapple with it, if only to justify their refusal to fulfill its hopes. Seamus Heaney stresses the “preoccupation” of language—the state of being occupied by English, not Irish, interests—yet he can only write within this occupied territory. Of Polish poetry, Clare Cavanagh writes, “woe to the poet who fails to fulfill his or her obligations as the nation’s unofficial legislator in the face of foreign oppression.”22 Joanna Niżyńska decries the “self-congratulatory patriotism” 20

Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Random House, 1961) 168. 21 Seamus Deane, “The Production of Cultural Space in Irish Writing,” boundary 2 21.3 (Fall 1994): 140. 22 Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 180.

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and “public fetishization of martyrology” that persist with effects of the Romantic paradigm.23 The lyric languages of Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig are saturated with this history and weighted with these literary models. They are, however, apt to place the pilgrim alongside a rather opposite figure, that of the wanderer or nomad, as the quest for home no longer involves a straight journey to a well-defined place. Whereas a pilgrim has a spiritual destination, and a wanderer a home, a nomad may be defined as one lacking a fixed home. The concept has attracted those who dream of defying “the physical worlds that tie us to territory,”24 or even of exploring a “subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity,” expressing “the desire for an identity made of transitions, . . . without and against an essential unity.” Whereas it would be irresponsible to elide the harsh conditions of real nomadic lifestyles with ideal conditions theorized by writers seeking to break free of rootedness and defy administrative forces that would tie us to one fixed territorial identity, the concept is fertile. Rosi Braidotti’s words cited above emphasize the desire that fuels this conceptualization, and this is key for understanding the motivations of Zagajewski and Hartwig in particular, who disclaim and flee an “essential unity” at every turn. “Nostalgia[s] for fixity” are almost programmatically relinquished at key junctures in their work, much as the young Mahon rebels against the un-chosen territorial attachment that comes with fixity and, in a surprising conceptual conjunction, Heaney’s work develops into greater acceptance of unfixed, un-placed areas above or beyond certain territories. Nomadism furnishes a rich means of understanding the desire to subvert territorial and, by extension, ‘identitarian’ conventions. Although the concept involves some idealization, so does that of home when it is associated with a “locus amoenus” whose conservation of traditional values (and the underpinnings of those values), stability, and safety “is a sheer fantasy,” writes Bożena Shallcross as she notes that Polish “topophilic feelings” tend to “deny, resist, and hide homelessness and a mobile type of dwelling.”25 The notion of a strictly delimited home also corresponds to a strict notion of outside, other space, holds Halina Filipowicz, and “[t]he fetishization of those boundaries has produced certain blindnesses that leave Polish studies 23

Joanna Niżyńska, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry,” Slavic Review 66.3 (Fall 2007): 466. Niżyńska points to the contemporary “O’Harist” movement as a very visible, though temporary, attempt to rebel against this Romantic paradigm. 24 John K. Noyes, “Nomadism, Nomadology, Postcolonialism: By Way of Introduction,” Interventions 6.2 (2004): 159. Second quotation from Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 22. 25 Bożena Shallcross, “Toward a Definition of the Polish Home,” Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. Bożena Shallcross (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002) 2–3.

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out of step with advances in theories of identity concurrently developing in many different fields, including anthropology, geography, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.”26 The relevance of this last category, especially, seems indubitable to the work currently at hand.

The postcoloniality problem From a historical, cut-and-dried perspective enumerating acts and battles, Polish and Irish history can clearly be labeled colonial. Both countries, however, imperfectly fit the rubrics of postcolonial studies, the perspectives and terminology of which could, potentially, be useful for discussing the cultural ramifications of these histories. Critical race theory does not help (although the cultural colonization of Ireland did involve racialization); “three-world” theory does not quite fit these northern European countries’ trajectories. Poland, meanwhile, has its own colonizing history as the center of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.27 Both countries make the notion of postcoloniality problematic as a “Manichean allegory,” particularly when we consider the division of Ireland into “Unionist” and “Republican”.28 The Irish language can no longer serve as an organ of resistance, as the Polish language had for inhabitants of occupied Poland. The history of Polish, meanwhile, prevents it from inhabiting the same rubric as the heavily marginalized languages of other post-colonies. Yet postcoloniality is a useful concept for clarifying the types of historical circumstances that shape Irish and Polish culture and, more importantly here, the socio-cultural pressures that poets must confront. Scholars such as Chris Miller, Clare Cavanagh, Tamara Trojanowska, Hanna Gosk, and Natasa Kovačević discuss the possibilities of viewing Poland as postcolonial; Ewa Thompson makes the claim most stridently. There is a veritable cottage industry of scholarship assessing Ireland’s postcoloniality, whose major figures include Declan Kiberd, who embraces the term and applies Edward Said’s work to Ireland; Luke Gibbons, who questions this enterprise; David 26 Halina Filipowicz, “Home as Desire: The Popular Pleasures of Gender in Polish Émigré Drama,” Framing the Polish Home 280. 27 These points are considered by Tomas Venclova and Hanna Gosk: see Venclova, “Vilnius/ Wilno/Vilna: The Myth of Division and the Myth of Connection,” trans. Tatyana Buzina, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004) 11–27, and Gosk, “Polskie opowieści w dyskurs postkolonialny ujęte,” (Nie) obecność. Pominięcia i przemilczenia w narracjach XX wieku, eds. Hanna Gosk and Bożena Karwowska (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA, 2008) 76–77. 28 I draw on the insights of Ali Behdad in “Global Disjunctures, Diasporic Differences, and the New World (Dis-)Order,” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000) 396–409.

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Lloyd, who fuses the language of post-structuralism with postcolonial concerns; and Edna Longley, who refuses the postcolonial label altogether. Although Ireland’s postcoloniality has been debated for many years, Poland’s has not. German Ritz’s claim that there has been an “American ‘postcolonial’ discovery of Eastern Europe” rests upon merely two citations of books by scholars of Eastern European provenance, though his fear that we “uncritically return [Poland] to the well-known role of victim” is comprehensible from a post-Romantic perspective.29 In nations that may or may not be postcolonial, questions of terminological identity acquire special poignancy. The terms frequently deployed by postcolonial critics—colonization, cultural nationalism, situatedness, hegemony and resistance, alterity and identity, agency of all kinds—remain useful for discussing conditions that are reflected in Polish and Irish literature, even while the self-referentiality of some postcolonial theory renders it less useful than it could be.30 The question of whether one or another country is postcolonial becomes tiresome unless connected to larger questions of self-definition and cultural consequence, and the desirability of this interdisciplinary perspective is itself questioned: Zbigniew Lisowski decries the “chaos” that ensues when other (non-literary) disciplines are “defrauded” of their terminology, and perspectival multiplicity becomes a virtue in itself; he allies himself with Edward Balcerzan, who, two decades earlier, lamented the changing state of literary studies wherein attention to form became supplanted by attention to extra-textual circumstances, so that “in speaking of literature [,] one speaks of everything except it.”31 Włodzimierz Bolecki holds that the foreignness (i.e., Americanness) of postcolonial studies impedes its potentially productive application to countries such as Poland. These Polish critics decry what they view as a tendency to scant the literary in favor of the political or, more dangerously still, the ideological; in such discussions, methodology and terminology become disputed. Such dispute is frequent to Irish Studies, as certain words—even rather basic ones, such as land and soil—become ideologically fraught, so that “soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source, . . . a political notion” sacralized 29 German Ritz, “Kresy polskie w perspektywie postkolonialnej,” Gosk and Karwowska 116, 118, my translation. The two books he cites are Ewa Thompson’s Trubadurzy imperium: literatura rosyjska i kolonializm (Krakow: Universitas, 2000) and Myroslav Shkandrij’s Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 30 Bart Moore-Gilbert deplores the “beauty contest” model of scholarship seeking to affirm postcolonial status as a badge of honor and attractiveness pinned upon individual countries, who vie not for power but for status as victims in need of reparations. He makes this case in Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997). 31 Zbigniew Lisowski, Poznawanie poezji: Interpretacje (Lublin: Norbertinum, 2008) 11–20. Edward Balcerzan, “Zmiana stanu,” Teksty Drugie 2 (1990): 1–6. My translations and paraphrases.

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in the course of nineteenth-century struggles for greater land ownership and political independence. The state, then, is “of the land,” while the nation is “of the soil,” the materiality of which ensures its symbolic status as a reality that “does not belong in the world of ideas.”32 These concepts show how questions of postcoloniality are connected to intimate questions of physical belonging, as expressed in terms that are variously charged. Terminology is dangerous territory, even while it would be naïve to construct a barrier between extra-textual circumstances and textual forms in the interest of staying disinterested. Form, after all, is historically inflected. The closest of textual analyses are inevitably informed by extratextual terms, even while their applicability can only be gauged by extended engagement with texts themselves (as in the chapters to follow). Most obviously, the adjective “Irish” effaces the difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic, not to mention that between “native” and émigré literatures, though this term is used by Heaney and Mahon, both Northern Irishmen. Contemporary Polish scholars have sought to complicate such national labels by encouraging a heterogeneous and multi-locational view of literature, partly in response to the late-twentieth-century fascination with Poland’s ethnically mixed borderlands (“kresy”).33 Irish revisionist scholars seek to correct what they see as a dominant nationalist version of history, focused upon Irish anticolonial struggles, with a view stressing cooperation, interdependence, and parallel development, decrying essentialist conceptions of colonizer and colonized.34 Critics such as Roy Foster and Edna Longley debate the cultural colonization and subjection implied by the postcolonial moniker. At stake are the concrete history of the nation, its cultural mythologies, and political aspirations. At their best, such debates inspire us to pose new questions; their utility shrinks if we are only prepared to accept certain answers. Hanna Gosk takes up this issue in her call to apply postcolonial discourse to Eastern Europe, bearing in mind that the “postcolonial paradigm” was first developed to explicate British colonialism (and, we may add, French). Gosk asserts the relevance of postcolonial studies forcibly and provocatively, deploring a

32

Seamus Deane, “Land & Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric,” History Ireland 2.1 (Spring 1994): 31–34. 33 The essays collected in Między Wschodem a Zachodem: Europa Mickiewicza i innych. O relacjach literatury polskiej z kulturami ościennymi (2007) consider this very phenomenon. 34 The roots of this debate are historiographical, yet its branches reach into cultural space. At question is the perspective with which one views the dominant power; terminology, meanwhile, reflects perspective. Kevin Whelan gives a useful introduction to these debates in “The Revisionist Debate in Ireland,” boundary 2 31.1 (Spring 2004): 179–205; for a book-length collection of essays on the topic, see Ciaran Brady, Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Blackrock; Portland: Irish Academic Press, 1994). Also see Rebecca Pelan, “Antagonisms: Revisionism, Postcolonialism and Feminism in Ireland,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (Spring, 2000): 127–47.

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general lack of attention to colonial relations within Eastern Europe,35 and even less to Poland, even if its fit into this paradigm is inevitably imperfect. The issue raises important questions regarding the discursive patterns that we discern within both popular and scholarly discourse. Whereas her distinction between “post-partition” and “post-dependence” periods (the latter referring to the post-Soviet era) is not elaborated fully enough to warrant supplanting large-circulation terms, to which Gosk herself returns (empire; colonialism; center and periphery), Gosk engages the postcolonial question, as we may call it, with great perceptive energy. Her attention to dominant and oppositional discourses adumbrates the contours of the problem that Zagajewski and Hartwig face: because twentieth-century Polish literature is characterized by an oppositional “counter-discourse” (“kontr-dyskurs”), we must grapple with the dominance of a negatively formed cultural identity. This constitutes its strength—identities cemented by suffering are especially tenacious, she opines—and its weakness once Poland actually gained national sovereignty. The Soviet empire differs from the British, though, in its image in the eyes of the colonized: Soviet Russia, Gosk holds, tended to be viewed as a pit of barbarism rather than a cultural center. Anti-Soviet discourse “degrades the empire, revealing its scorninducing primitivism. A wild barbarian may induce fear, but it is difficult to see him as a civilizational or cultural model. His power does not awaken respect.” Dariusz Skórczewski goes so far as to posit that the Soviet empire lacked a cultural model to impose.36 The brutishness of the Communist empire is opposed to an oppositional discourse idealizing autonomy and creative freedom. Here, however, is the rub toward which Gosk gestures, but which is most fully explored by scholars such as Janion and (in relation to Ireland) Kiberd: the ubiquity and eventual triumph of this counter-discourse actually establishes its own hegemony, and evinces its own blindnesses and injustices. One such blindness—or, rather, effacement—occurs when anti-colonial discourse relativizes the differences between different types of oppression, 35 Gosk only singles out Ewa Thompson for brief comment, as well as a special issue of Europa entitled “Said and the Polish Question” (28 June 2007). The terms used to describe Poland’s regained independence are as various as the terms used to describe Eastern/East-Central/Central Europe/Mitteleuropa. For example, Aleksandra Galasińska and Dariusz Galasiński describe it as a “return to Europe” (The Post-Communist Condition: Public and Private Discourses of Transformation. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, 2). See also Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 1–13. Hanna Gosk, “Polskie opowieści w dyskurs postkolonialny ujęte,” Gosk and Karwowska 75–88. See also Hanna Gosk, “Od europejskiej ekspansji i kolonializmu po doświadczenie polskie,” Teksty Drugie 3 (2009): 121–29 and the book to which this article responds, Jan Kieniewicz’s Ekspansja, kolonializm, cywilizacja (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008). Quotations from Gosk in Gosk and Karwowska 78, 83–85; my translations throughout. 36 Dariusz Skórczewski, “Retoryka pominięcia i przemilczenia, a prawda literatury: o postkolonialnych implikacjach pewnych praktyk dyskursywnych,” Gosk and Karwowska 102.

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a constant danger attending any cross-cultural study. Kiberd notes certain dangers inherent in nationalism itself: “[t]he colonialist crime was the violation of the traditional community: the nationalist crime was often a denial of the autonomy of the individual. Liberation would come only with forms which stressed the interdependence of the community and the individual.”37 In each “crime,” identity is not chosen freely. Kiberd’s statement uncomfortably dichotomizes colonialism and nationalism in a manner that assumes their necessary opposition and interdependence, yet this is also key to understanding the sorts of pressures to which Polish and Irish writers react. Collaboration and nationalism represent a rigid and inevitable dichotomy within subjugated nations, while an equalization of suffering represents a related heuristic danger for transnational comparison. Nationalism is the most obvious means of opposing a colonial government, yet the term can be troubled: Luke Gibbons, for example, insists upon the fragmented, subaltern character of Irish nationalism against state formation.38 There is another, undeniable factor complicating national(ist) striving, namely, the massive waves of emigration that mark the long-term demographics of Poland and Ireland. Emigration is also a form of anti-colonial resistance; it falls into its own patterns and pieties. The mythos of a particular diaspora can be as potent as that prevailing within the homeland, including the mythos of emigration itself. In Poland, it has been challenged (if not dismantled) by great innovators such as Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz. Ryszard Nycz considers their subversions of “the Romantic myth of the geographical and mystical symbiosis of man with his place of origin, the Polish soul eternally rooted in Polish soil,” as they typify two strategies for discussing estrangement. Whereas Miłosz, Zagajewski’s avowed precursor, exemplifies a regionalist approach of “settling in” to a lost home that is subjectified and relativized, Zagajewski himself exemplifies Gombrowicz’s “alienation strategy” to Nycz, focusing upon belonging within the self rather than between self and place. Nycz mentions one such contemporary “alienation strategy” in which the local community and even the self is viewed from an anthropological and ethnographic position, which usefully forms a possible linkage between Zagajewski and Heaney.39 In this way Nycz knits together several critical terms forming a problematic nexus for this study: home and self, rootedness and belonging, and their rather impoverished antonym, alienation. 37 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 292. Previous citation from Gosk in Gosk and Karwowska 87. 38 See Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). 39 Ryszard Nycz, “‘Every One of Us Is a Stranger’: Patterns of Identity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature,” Shallcross, Framing the Polish Home 16–17, 20–22.

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The problem of identity; identity as problem Just as the terms structuring analyses of postcoloniality and spatial belonging have been and should be continuously questioned, so should the term subtending them all, “identity.” As we speak of place, so we inevitably speak of its identity and the identity of groups resident upon it, two factors intimately connected in the late-Romantic mythos. As we discuss postcolonial terminology and its potential relevance to the four poets here under consideration, we must bear in mind their remarkable suspicion of forms of belonging dependent upon a too-easy understanding of cultural and spatial identity. This is one of their broadest similarities. Identity cannot be too strictly tied to belonging. Theoretical attention to hybrid identities, diasporic groups, and cosmopolitanism should not obscure the fact that exclusionary, even violent forms of identification are still very much present, and show no signs of dissolving into a peaceful acknowledgment of multicultural hybridity.40 Theoretical interest in the concepts of diaspora and hybridity carries within it an idealistic hope that these concepts can work against fundamentalism, yet the urge to construct a fundamental identity is still strong. The exclusivity of identity can be situated conceptually, too, in the still regnant, albeit doubted and questioned, view of identity as the essence. It is tenaciously present in the popular imagination, and mobilizes Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig to rebel against the specific demands they feel are made upon them. Yet the term is often used as a stimulus to assertions of agency, as in so-called identity politics, wherein a group’s common ground helps it fight for its rights. Despite her political assertions about the subject’s lack of agency under debilitating conditions, Gayatri Spivak approvingly quotes Jacques Derrida’s linkage of identity, selfhood, and agency within her own discussion of identity politics. The passage usefully complicates the etymological basis of a term that can be variously defined: What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and belonging, in general? 40 Rosemary Marangoly George defends “locational identity” as a term resisting specific claims of rootedness but emphasizing spatial attachment, which she believes may still underlie the concept; “locational,” to her, “suggests the variable nature of both ‘the home’ and ‘the self,’ for both are negotiated stances” (2). Her stress on negotiation is useful for understanding the newly contingent theorizations of identity that came to the fore in the 1990s, often in conjunction with questions of postcoloniality and troubled belonging. See Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ella Shohat productively critiques “hybridity” itself, and its inability to distinguish between “forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political cooptation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence.” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 110. These poets’ work reveals the frequent inability of our terms to do justice to the kinds of attitudes they represent and perform in their poems.

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And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity? The latter is not reducible to an abstract capacity to say “I,” which it will have always preceded. Perhaps it signifies, in the first place, the power of an “I can,” which is more originary than the “I”. . .41 The quotation succinctly sketches out an instability at the heart of identity, namely, its supposed conceptual transparency (how can one not know what identity means?) and the destabilizing division between an abstract, philosophical understanding and a concrete, embodied, and potentially dogmatic understanding of identity. This will be a major point of contention and interest in the poetic analyses to follow. Derrida’s quick backward glance at the root of identity opens up the same sort of questions that a nongrammatological view—we may call it a cultural view or, simply, a popular view—of identity makes manifest. The extent to which identity involves expression, or a non-abstract “capacity to say ‘I,’” is contingent upon the way “an abstract capacity” may itself be complicated by all manner of contingent factors, including the subject’s view of its own capacity and perceived limitations, which will be a major problematic in the work of Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig. The Latin “ipse,” or “self,” is the root of “ipseity,” an important term to translate because selfhood and identity exist as two separate words in English. The relative abstractness of the word is at issue and will remain so. Even more problematically, the relative helpfulness of theory, whether more or less abstract (as postcolonial theorists focused upon real-world struggles sometimes clash with those focused upon the interplay of concepts), is at stake. Conceptual discussions do occur in poems, but they tend to take place through metaphorization. The performative dimension of selfhood, as opposed to an abstract understanding of “ipseity,” will also demand reckoning. When one “say[s] ‘I,’” one projects the concept into a public arena, toward others, in an act of self-identification or self-description. The ability to make this statement does seem to involve an originary “I can,” an assumption of agency. Yet the very slight hesitancy of Derrida’s tone, his use of “perhaps” and his interrogative manner, also testifies to the ambiguity at the center of this issue. Nobody can stand outside identity to separate the “I can” from the “I am.” Identity politics connote a divisive yet active type of agency claim: a group that is united by one type of identity (racial, ethnic, or gendered) can 41

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 14. This work, originally published in 1992, is used by Spivak in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 83. Spivak actually puts forth an engaging argument against identity politics, in which she uses this quotation. The Conclusion will take up this conceptual thread further, asking what view of identity best suits the four authors studied here. For now, it is useful to bring the issues that coalesce around the term to the forefront, with the understanding that they will inform, and be informed by, the poets’ work.

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achieve a political voice by banding together. Arjun Appadurai points out the “paradox of ethnic politics”: the force of so-called “primordia” (language, skin color, kinship, even neighborhood), which are sometimes globalized, is to ignite intimacy into political sentiment, and to turn locality into a staging ground for identity.42 The intimate details of one’s person can serve as the basis for public demands. One’s “identity” may become a matter of political selectivity and cultural sensibility (and/or sensitivity), as certain “primordia” are more politicized than others. The decision to stress one aspect of identity relies at least partially on the sorts of claims that one is allowed to make on the basis of that aspectual solidarity; its corollary may be a decision not to stress other equally primordial aspects. Primordially based identity claims may be affected by the end benefit of such a claim as well as one’s originary sense of self. Such choices are quite subjective, and can be hard to explain: as we shall see, Julia Hartwig does not stress her sex or gender. Should this be viewed as a telling lacuna, or a fact not much at issue in her poetry, which does not seem particularly troubled by gender? The difference between selfhood and identity is intangible, yet there is no doubt that the former is far less politicized than the latter. Yet selfhood is often defined using identity, as if the latter were an inescapable aspect of the former. This chicken-and-egg dilemma is both further complicated and partially clarified when one seeks the motivation behind a definition. Kobena Mercer states that “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.”43 A definition of identity will be influenced by the movements associated with self-identification. The original term is also rooted in the Latin identitas, derived from idem, “the same,” itself abstracted from identidem or idem et idem, “over and over.” If one does the same act over and over, then it becomes one’s identity. There is no transparency to the term because it communicates a repeated action, not a static kernel of truth at the base of the self. The association of identity with physical primordia is, from an etymological viewpoint, perplexing. Non-political conceptions of identity tend to stay closer to the word’s Latin roots. Mathematical “identity” designates an equation expressing equality, one that will stay the same if we solve it over and over. Here, the way we determine whether identity exists is the hard part. Determining mathematical identity involves working through a problem—identity is established through repeated acts working through the possibility of non-identity. This interestingly puts stress on the act of identifying instead of a static essence, in 42

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theorizing Diaspora, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003) 25–48. 43 Kobena Mercer cited by Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) 577.

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which we may query the terms used to put that act in motion. The problem with identity is also the problem of using the right language with which to engage it. Such an issue takes us back to the perennial question of an individual’s ability to define herself against powerful social structures and historical conditions. Who determines adequacy, who recognizes identity, and what is deemed the correct basis of identity are connected questions. None of the poets here unquestioningly accepts rootedness in society; nor do they wish to be history’s fools. Instead of accepting a single form of identity, and a single form of belonging, they tirelessly reconsider and rework these issues throughout their oeuvres. Although the desire to “place” Polish and Irish writing by assigning it a geographical and historical identity is especially strong, it is equally imperative to recognize the forceful manner in which belonging is questioned by Polish and Irish writers. The urge to affirm one’s place, to celebrate home, is counterbalanced by an equally strong urge to reject a single home, to speak from a position in between the defined locations of culture. Heaney, Mahon, Zagajewski, and Hartwig often reject their ostensible “homes” but cannot find a better place to belong. The in-between state, though, is not necessarily disabling—Zagajewski and Hartwig celebrate travel as particularly empowering, even when it proves disorienting and impels selfquestioning. Wandering, travel, escape, and displacement can be attractive temptations, not unfortunate necessities. The voices of these poets purposely, sometimes perversely, complicate our conceptual terminology. They show that there is danger in celebrating a literature’s cultural rootedness because this project tends to be prescriptive and to underscore national, ethnic, or religious affiliation. This is exactly what they find problematic. At the same time, in order to fruitfully bring Irish and Polish cultures into dialogue, we must perform what Michael Malouf calls an act of solidarity, in which a cross-cultural reading practice driven by a perception of similarity (if not identity) is aware of its own contingency and partiality at the same time as it puts forward a transnational, translocal reading.44 In contradistinction to the claims of historical conjunction we may place Seamus Heaney’s statement that “a poem floats adjacent to, parallel to, the 44 Malouf considers the theoretical and sociopolitical dimension of solidarity in a refreshingly positive light, establishing “the strange cosmopolitanism of empire” (6) as the background for his comparison of Irish and Caribbean cultures, while acknowledging that “solidarity has not been part of the political or critical imagination at our present moment” (6). He brings together Paul Gilroy (Postcolonial Melancholia), Jodi Dean, Chandra Mohanty, and Peter Waterman in defense of a type of solidarity we may, perhaps, call “differential,” based on negotiation of difference in the interest of forging alliance (Waterman calls it an “affinity” model, allowing for linkages between people who are not in contact but act “in the same spirit”—Malouf 8); the particular type of alliance that interests Malouf is “interperipheral.” Michael G. Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) 6–15.

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historical moment.”45 This image situates poetry in between the physical earth and the stratosphere of ideas and troubles the concept of authenticity. It begs us to reconsider the strict correlation of poetry with history that the Romantics bequeathed to their successors. This notion that there is something primordially continuous between past and present, something that we can call the essence of a nation or a single literature, influences the pressures which scholars bring to bear upon individual authors. Spivak has eloquently, and fervently, spoken against the idea that a writer can speak as an authentic ethnic representative of his or her culture.46 Essentializing arguments do not allow for much change or variety, and in the Irish context, the choice of an essential identity runs dangerously close to the choice of an ideology. In the case of Poland, the desire to view a writer as authentically Polish may deleteriously combine with the Polish tradition of writing for the people so that a rigid notion of ethnic belonging “authenticates” a piece of literature. Our valuation of a writer would be better served by accounting for the heterogeneity within a single speaking voice. The self may be ironic and contradictory; sometimes it cannot be pinned down to a single home, a single place, or even a single voice. Furthermore, a poetic voice does not always dutifully take its place in its dominant national literary tradition. The readings that take up the bulk of this book will examine what happens when a poet cannot belong, refuses the consolations of easy group identification or restrictive “responsibility,” and tears the voice free from its surroundings altogether. Each poet’s trajectory through this charged atmosphere will be charted separately, in order that their juxtaposition may allow us to discern the ways in which each poet’s work speaks to and answers the others’, providing the richest and, indeed, most nuanced possible commentary upon the central problem of knowing one’s place in contemporary societies upon the margins of Europe.

Lives and narratives An artist’s creative output cannot be explained by the events of the artist’s life, yet art does not arise ex nihilo. It intersects with a number of stories that take place around, through, and sometimes within it: the biography of the artist, the story of her country and region or city, and the historical events of her times. In the best case, a basic knowledge of the artist’s life enriches the reader’s appreciation of the creative work; in the worst case, it leads to the biographical fallacy, the belief that biography does indeed determine artistic choices. These poets are especially wary of historical determinism, of 45

Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) 121. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

46

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which the biographical fallacy may be seen as a benign manifestation, and often wrestle against the stories of their own lives. The biographical sketches below are purposely brief, centering on one major circumstance of each poet’s life that will prove significant for the chapters to come. When Adam Zagajewski writes about his childhood, he emphasizes the historicity of his family’s background. Part of the large migration of Poles out of the Eastern city of Lvov (now Ukrainian L’viv) into Polish Silesia directly after World War II, his family’s experience is part of a historical event giving rise to an important collective nostalgia for Poland’s lost regions as the country’s borders were moved westward. Zagajewski was born in Polish Lwów in 1945 (he refers to it by its Polish moniker, translated as Lvov) but, being four months old when he left, does not “know” his birthplace firsthand, but relies upon a fund of secondhand memories suffused with his family’s nostalgia. He internalizes these memories and this emotion. When he moves to Krakow to attend the Jagiellonian University, he hopes to find a sense of belonging in this new city of art and culture. The young poet’s desire to bask in the “authentic antiquity” of a multi-generational city, as opposed to a city of refugees, is also informed by his interest in the arts and by a certain desire for high-cultural self-fashioning. These two cities focalize his evolving sense of the sacred and the ideal. With the imposition of martial law in December of 1981, Zagajewski emigrated to Paris, though he insists that this decision was personal, not political: his college sweetheart and future wife worked in Paris.47 For many years, his unusual three-country lifestyle took him between the University of Houston, where he taught Creative Writing, and several months of writing in Paris, with extended visits to Krakow. More recently, he accepted a teaching position at the University of Chicago while making Krakow his primary home (since 2002). These details are worth considering in the context of his work, which evinces a fascination with travel and wandering. Chapter 1 begins by presenting Zagajewski’s dramatic identitarian turnaround. He begins his writing life as an angry young man, a decision he later regrets, together with a group of poets who consciously explore “the unrepresented world” of life under totalitarian rule. Unlike the Northern Irish generation of Heaney, Mahon, and Michael Longley (both groups may be called “Sixties Generations,” coming of age in an atmosphere of civil rights protests and anti-government rebellion), these poets—among them Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Julian Kornhauser—begin 47 Jarosław Klejnocki usefully complicates this issue, opining that despite his insistence on the personal, positive quality of his decision to emigrate, Zagajewski takes on the role of emigre or even exile, though Klejnocki holds that there was no other option at the time (i.e., the dark days when martial law was imposed). Klejnocki gives a well-informed, sensitively nuanced discussion of this phenomenon in Bez utopii? Rzecz o poezji Adama Zagajewskiego (Wałbrzych: Wydawnictwo Ruta, 2002) 64–67.

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their careers by focusing upon politics. This chapter considers Zagajewski’s rejection of this poetic mode, which has much to do with his changing relation to his own cultural identity.48 His poems of the 1970s are selfconscious dramatizations of changing poetic intent, as the rooted speaker of his early poems, oppressed and suppressed by the powers-that-be, pulls up his roots and establishes, over the course of works such as “To Go to Lvov,” a sense of agency over his socio-cultural environment. Like Mahon, he begins longing to escape history. The second chapter on Zagajewski, “Figuring Otherness,” argues that his growing dissatisfaction with the specter of a fixed identity is manifested by the figurative work of the poems. Beneath the external and the conscious, within the inner logic of Zagajewski’s poetic form, we find that expository statements praising “wholeness” and unity are, in fact, largely contradicted by the poems. Rather than serving the purpose of unification, Zagajewski’s poetic figures often wrench apart tenor and vehicle, opening a space of otherness and thereby rending the imagistic unity of the poem. The use of such figures corresponds to a shift in Zagajewski’s work, an underground tremor upsetting the poet’s relation to place and memory. His recent poetry will not satisfy a desire for resolution, but mobilize the mind by presenting highly unusual juxtapositions of feelings and qualities that, ultimately, refuse the typical associations (of rootedness with belonging, of belonging with happiness, of stability with rationality) that undergird our understanding of place and self. Derek Mahon, one of Zagajewski’s much-admired contemporaries, does not write much about his childhood. His star rose early, as did that of his friend Seamus Heaney, and the two represent very different modes of troubling one’s place. Mahon was born in 1941 and grew up in a Protestant family in North Belfast, “one of the most closed societies in Europe” in his own words, in an urban yet provincial atmosphere that he calls “almost barren of poetry.”49 Applying such claims, made by Mahon himself, is problematic because of his strong concomitant assertions that nationality and ethnicity are actually factors whose importance is overblown: “the time is coming fast, if it isn’t already here, when the question ‘Is So-and-So really an Irish writer?’ will clear a room in seconds . . . The question is semantic, and not important except in so far as the writer himself makes it so.”50 At the

48 Zagajewski writes about this decision to reject the political mode of writing, and more generally about the interpenetration of poetry and politics in contemporary Poland, in Solidarność i samotność (1986), published in English as Solidarity, Solitude: Essays, trans. Lillian Vallee (New York: Ecco Press, 1990). 49 Mahon’s remarks cited in Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 12, 14. 50 Derek Mahon, Journalism (Selected Prose 1970-1995) (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996) 21.

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same time as he places himself, then, Mahon tells us to beware of assuming that placement is relevant to interpretation. Mahon has traveled and lived in Canada, the United States, France, and settled for a time in England; he has worked as a journalist, editor, and translator. In fact, all the poets in this study have worked as professors in the United States. Mahon’s time in New York City brings to an end his decade of silence between Antarctica (1985) and The Hudson Letter (1995). His 1990s poems are allusive, chatty, and loose-limbed, unlike his tightly crafted early work. The 1990s volumes represent a distinct stage in his development, which changes again in our current century, as his recent poems strive to balance the salutary difficulty of balancing strict forms with a colloquial, and increasingly autobiographical, idiom. Chapter 3, “Belonging on the Edge: Derek Mahon’s Outsider Poetics,” discusses Mahon’s refusal to fulfill a perceived socio-cultural obligation in his early work. It is motivated by an idealistic view of language as a mediator between the “perfect” and the “true,” between the identity of the imagination and the external shapes that identity is forced to take. Mahon criticizes the choices that his own poetry makes, and this chapter traces the arc of his early engagement with perceived poetic obligations, from initial rebellion through self-parody to insistence upon a necessary confrontation of the ideal with the real, of imagined hermeticism with forced engagement. Mahon wrenches the self out of its ideal constructions, and even, in his work of the late 1970s and 1980s, flirts with a debilitating notion of art as falsity and appropriation. Chapter 4 conceptualizes the socio-cultural decisions discussed in the prior chapter on Mahon, just as the second Zagajewski chapter conceptualizes the ideational work of specific poetic figures. Mahon often approaches schematization in his deployment of masterful images that have the result of excluding the poetic consciousness from their own intellectual drama (much like Heaney’s do, though in different metaphorical terms). His tendency to dichotomize the lyric speaker’s surroundings connects to his rebellion against belonging, and yet eventually his schemata break down. The matter of social engagement becomes less vexing in his later work, while the interesting question of how temporal displacement affects spatial belonging comes to the fore. Seamus Heaney’s work also oscillates between concreteness and symbolic abstraction. Although he was born in 1939, his childhood on the family farm of Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland, runs its course far from the theater of war, and Heaney states that he always had the sense of having a beautiful “first world” delivered to him wherein Arcadia was his home. This world was left behind when Heaney went to boarding school as an adolescent, from 1951–57. His first “emigration,” he states, was into solitude from family life, and his later travels—into the Irish Republic, to the United States, then back to the Irish Republic—constituted different types

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of separation.51 Like Mahon, he honed his talent early and published in journals while a university student (Mahon at Trinity, Heaney at Queen’s). Unlike Mahon’s, Zagajewski’s, and Hartwig’s, his work is saturated with autobiographical details, and readers must constantly negotiate the fine line dividing the lyric speaker from the actual poet. For many years Heaney, like Zagajewski, commuted between the United States and Europe during the tenure of a teaching job at Harvard University; both poets were teaching writing for several months, and writing full time for several more. Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, an event that established him as the most celebrated Irish writer today. Interestingly, this period, in the 1980s and 1990s, marks Heaney’s shift to a more abstract type of poetry than he had written before, and his return to Ireland corresponds to a renewal of the concrete, descriptive impulse (in direct contrast to Julia Hartwig, who writes some of her most mimetic and autobiographical verse while on extended travels in the United States). The peregrinations, visits, and partial emigrations these poets experience are striking material in themselves, and these changes of place often correspond to changes of perspective. Chapter 5, “Belonging as Mastery,” counters the benevolent image of Heaney’s home by pointing to the young speaker’s fear of his land and struggle to assert his own strength when faced by a threatening otherness. The poet’s early volumes form a developmental narrative that coheres around this problematic central node, this otherness, fear, and instability, which exists in complex relation with the Arcadian characteristics of his home. Place, then, is not always synonymous with home. Heaney’s work is not a narrative of reterritorialization and unification with one’s culture, as often claimed by his critics, but a sustained effort to forge an epistemological system that allows him to belong. This effort is conscious, not instinctive. Whereas Heaney’s early work is often read as a celebration of roots—and several poems lend themselves readily to such reading—this chapter reads in it a narrative of frustrated desire. The unexpected otherness of his natal land frustrates his knowledge of it. Trust and knowledge are the key terms in Heaney’s early work. The first is an ethical act and the second, a sensory one. His early poems come to realize that these terms cannot always be harmonized. The sixth chapter begins by positing Heaney’s Station Island as the inception of a reactive movement against the poet’s previous project to fill space with concrete, sensory entities. In the 1980s and 1990s, Heaney explores the potential of absence in order to directly query whether trust can be located in 51

My source for many of Heaney’s remarks is a personal interview with the poet on 10/19/98 at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, before this project was conceived. See also Heaney’s remarks in Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) 56. Heather Clark provides an excellent introduction to the so-called Ulster (or Northern Irish) Renaissance in The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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the not-seen, the not-known. This is a self-critical project. Although he states that it is politically motivated, we must take this with a grain of salt: the urge is ethical and psychological. Heaney cannot belong without trust, cannot affirm identity without knowledge. His impulse is motivated by a metapoetic desire to come to terms with a reality surpassing the verbal opulence of the wellwrought poem, and one of the most surprising aspects of his development is his revisitation of past poems and places. Such moments are not necessarily integrative, but can reveal the contradictoriness or otherness of place, as well as a sometimes-uneasy interrelation of body and land. Julia Hartwig is the least verbally opulent poet of this group. She is also the eldest, born in 1921 in Lublin, Poland. Her father, a photographer, went to Moscow on business, fell in love with and married a Russian woman, and eventually fled west, as did many other Poles who wished to escape the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Despite her dual heritage, Russia is a foreign place to Hartwig, who does not speak Russian or know Russian literature (by her own admission); her mother’s Russianness is the quality that set her apart from others, both in Poland and within the family circle. Her father reputedly kissed the earth, and made his children do the same, after arriving from Russia; perhaps the contrast between this histrionic display of patriotism and the loneliness of her mother deepened Hartwig’s decision to avoid expressions of rootedness and belonging. She has remained remarkably silent about her childhood, remembering her shameful “sense of self-division” during the traumatic moment of her mother’s early death by suicide.52 This combination of grief, uncertainty, and shame, which coheres around the child’s sense of identity, is a telling biographical detail to bear in mind while reading Hartwig’s poetry. It helps us to assess why, as Hartwig writes, “many poets draw strength from childhood resources, but it seems like I didn’t know how to make use of them.”53 By a great stroke of luck, all the Hartwigs survived the war. The future poet returned to Lublin after working as a courier for the anti-Nazi resistance, and found the city destroyed, its once-sizable Jewish population murdered, and its historic center ruined: this was, in her words, “a crime committed not just against its people but against the myth of Lublin, against my own memories of childhood.”54 She moved to Warsaw and embarked upon a series of travels to France and to the United States, where she and her husband at the time, poet Artur Międzyrzecki, taught at various universities from Iowa to New York, where her daughter eventually settled. Hartwig lives and writes in Warsaw today. 52

This material is contained in Zawsze powroty: Dzienniki podróży (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2001). My translation. 53 Ibid 41. 54 Julia Hartwig, Zaułek Hartwigów (Lublin: Ośrodek “Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN,” 2006) 7. My translation. This unusual book was written when a Lublin street was named after the Hartwig family.

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Chapter 7, “Holding One’s Self Outside: Julia Hartwig,” brings a Polish poet famous for her refusal to write poetry of roots into dialogue with Heaney, Mahon, and Zagajewski. Whereas Heaney and Mahon both seek to interrogate the tie between one’s geographical location and one’s personal character, Hartwig wishes to escape the constraints of character altogether by questioning the necessary coherence of identity, and striving to displace the speaker from the space of the poem. She questions the intelligibility of her own life’s narrative, focusing upon moments of self-abstraction. Instead of corroborating the accepted view of Hartwig as a Classicist, this chapter postulates that Hartwig may be seen as a Surrealist who revels in effacing the distinction between figurative and mimetic language, leading to a strikingly complicated, convoluted depiction of the speaker’s “place.”55 The eighth chapter, “Learning to Speak from Inside,” discusses the forced confrontation, in Hartwig’s later work, between a speaker in permanent flight from memory-based narrative and the dark, recalcitrant material contained in that narrative. Just as Mahon finally queries how the self may take its part in a material, historical reality, so Hartwig finally embodies and historicizes the self by resisting her escapist tendency. Her poetry, which has thoroughly suppressed autobiography, finally “tears down the curtain” hiding the speaker’s life. The result is not reconciliation but a disabling sense of entrapment. Hartwig’s most recent poems, since 2000, deeply examine the speaker’s need to escape the spatio-temporal coordinates that trap her in history. These poems reveal that personal identity is not always formed through a natural sense of continuity with one’s past. Of the four poets in this study, Hartwig most strenuously avoids embodying the poetic self in a biographical, linear narrative, yet the idea of belonging in a state of movement, or even of dis-placement, is taken up by all of their work. The conclusion, “Knowing One’s Self,” discusses how we can conceptualize the sort of identity that these poets seek in unique yet remarkably interrelated ways. It does not appear to be a traditional rooted identity. Stuart Hall’s seminal distinction between identification as a process and identity as a static state helps to elucidate how we can deploy this term responsibly. The concept of identity reveals new internal difficulties when we apply it to concrete literary practices. The work of these poets dramatizes the way in which identity is simultaneously a necessity and a trap, causing both happiness and agony. If knowing one’s place necessitates knowing one’s self, then a redefinition of identity can equally well lead us to ask whether the statement is true vice versa, and whether one must grapple with the problems of one’s place before one can begin to assess the contours of one’s identity.

55 Hartwig has translated French Surrealist poetry and has published an acclaimed monograph on Guillaume Apollinaire (Apollinaire, Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1962; reissued 1964, 1972).

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1 The dynamic ideal and the protean self: Adam Zagajewski Adam Zagajewski, one of the foremost Polish poets writing today, rejects the traditional equation of belonging with rootedness. Instead, he depicts an imaginative home that is dynamic, changing together with the protean poet himself. The speaker of his poems is a traveler who views each new locale as a potential home, even if his sense of belonging to it is momentary. His focus is, therefore, on discovering moments of belonging, most often in the present and the future, not in the past. In this way, Zagajewski’s poetry upsets the common association of home with stability (one may leave one’s home, yet it will remain as a stable point of return).1 His poetry explores the idea of belonging as a temporary relationship of the self to a place that can be found anywhere: any place has the potential to be a home. This fluid notion is based on a constant recognition of otherness and concomitant negotiation between the self and the other, harmony and disjunction, unity and dissolution. The self, meanwhile, is itself unstable. It clings to its surroundings and its perceptions, sometimes on the brink of dissolution. The moment of choice, for Zagajewski, is valuable for its openness—its freedom from the restriction of the already made choice—but this moment cannot serve as a permanent dwelling. Zagajewski has dramatically changed as a poet from the time of his first volumes in the 1970s, yet his early mode of writing crucially influences his development: in particular, his focus on an anonymous, mutable, traveling self may have its roots, paradoxically, in his early political poetry, with its focus on the anonymous citizen.

1

In New Keywords, a book offering dense definitions of key terms in literary and cultural studies, Tony Bennett defines home as “a place of belonging” where one feels a sense of “family intimacy.” Home is “surrounded by movement,” but, Bennett implies, it does not itself change. See New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005) 162.

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Zagajewski’s celebration of dynamism and mutability, however, can be understood as a gesture of rebellion against his previous mode of writing. Zagajewski made his debut in 1972 as a very different poet from the one he is today. Like Julia Hartwig, he was associated with his politics before he definitively came of age as a poet. In his youth, Zagajewski was one of the four main members of the “Generation ’68” (together with Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Julian Kornhauser), a group of young poets who wrote in opposition to the Communist régime. The massive student protest against artistic censorship in 1968 served as a common background for these poets, who were united politically and poetically in an effort to unmask the brutal reality of life under Communism.2 At the time in Polish literature, there were few plain statements about the political here and now; this group sought to fill that gap. In Zagajewski’s words, literature had been “abstract and elegant,” holding itself “above the state” and beyond concrete details.3 This trend abruptly changed. The poetry of this group, also called the “New Wave” (“Nowa Fala”), gave a bleak, yet emotionally impassioned, portrait of life in a totalitarian state. It addressed itself to the consciences of its readers. This poetry focused on the actual, as opposed to Zagajewski’s later work, which frequently explores imaginative states. Although this group shared an ideological program, its poetic output was quite varied and becomes even more so with the passage of time. Krynicki’s work grows increasingly metaphysical, his forms simpler, and his tone quieter. Barańczak combines an almost baroque verbal dexterity with an attack against Communist “new-speak” (“nowo-mowa”; Orwell’s term is frequently used in Polish). Flashes of humor enliven the work of Barańczak and Kornhauser. Each poet eventually chose his own path. Each poet of this exceptional generation develops a recognizable individual style while maintaining a tone of ethical watchfulness in his verse.4 The Generation ’68 2

The main protest in Warsaw was echoed in other cities, where police and military deliberately attacked university communities. Eastern Europe experienced a wave of anti-Communist protests at this very time, including the famous “Prague Spring.” Students, intellectuals, and artists were often active participants; the Warsaw protest occurred after Adam Mickiewicz’s prophetic Romantic drama, Forefathers’ Eve [Dziady], was banned from a theater in March 1968 by a Soviet ambassador. For a brief historical synopsis of this period, see Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For a thought-provoking statement on the ‘New Wave’ as a movement “Romantic in soul and body” see Tadeusz Nyczek, Kos. O Adamie Zagajewskim (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002) 36. Jarosław Klejnocki opines that Zagajewski’s voice was already separate from the Generation ’68 at the group’s very inception in his monograph Bez utopii? Rzecz o poezji Adama Zagajewskiego (Wałbrzych: Wydawnictwo Ruta, 2002) 17–34. 3 For an in-depth discussion of this literary group, see Małgorzata Szulc Packaleń, Pokolenie ’68: Studium o poezji lat siedemdziesiątych (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich, 1997). 4 Maciej Chrzanowski states that the group’s “minor artistic value” limited its influence and surprisingly, Packaleń seems to agree with him. He predicts that the group will be remembered as a short-lived, though powerful, phenomenon. Time has proved him wrong: each of the group’s members has had a successful literary career on his own, while ’68 serves as a touchstone. See Packaleń 315.

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is, significantly, the last major literary movement that took Romanticism as its foundation, and its belief in literature as a vehicle for collective expression, even while it begins to seem anachronistic. Małgorzata Szulc Packaleń notes that “the [single] poet writing in the name of the multitude is the basic Romantic topos” (130–1). Zagajewski interprets this topos in a manner that makes its oppressiveness evident: “Polish culture has a communal character and it is at once splendid and painful . . . Every word belongs to everybody. Every silence becomes public property.”5 His poetic father figure, Czesław Miłosz, takes this sort of criticism further, noting with some rancor that “Whoever writes in Polish must soberly tell himself that Polish readers only pretend that they are interested in various human problems.” What really interests them is what novelist Tadeusz Konwicki calls the “Polish Complex”: the state of the victimized nation.6 The Generation ’68, however, initially embraced this public function. The speakers of their poems are individuals, but speak as members of the crowd. This is why the anti-Communist protests of the Generation ’68 are popularly called Romantic, in keeping with the fighting spirit of Polish Romanticism. It was, after all, arch-Romantic Adam Mickiewicz’s visionary drama Forefathers’ Eve that ignited the initial protests after being banned from the theater by Communist authorities in 1968. The poet was a political rebel and a literary traditionalist. The central change that these poets brought about was a change of speaker. When the Generation ’68 poets announced that their protagonist would be an average man (lit. “szary człowiek”—a grey man, colorless), they declined to present him as a Romantic hero, though their average protagonist invariably carries the potential for heroism. The imperative to serve a greater good is a central component of Generation ‘68’s Romanticism. “Tell the truth that’s what you serve,” writes Zagajewski in the early poem “Truth” (Prawda).7 Man has the tools to do good and to do evil; in “Truth,” he holds love in one hand, hatred in the other. Zagajewski’s claim to eschew abstraction is not entirely correct—love, hatred, truth, good, and evil are present in this poetry as characters (in a direct contrast to Heaney and Mahon’s work, where the abstraction must always be an image). Yet Zagajewski’s abstractions are grounded in situations; the best poems of this time translate the urgency of their appeal into an emotional correlative, a felt compulsion to act. They are objectively based—communicating a situation and holding a reified “truth”—

5

Adam Zagajewski, Solidarity and Solitude, trans. Lillian Vallee (New York: Ecco Press, 1989) 69. Miłosz quoted in Maria Janion, “Zmierzch paradygmatu,” in Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 1996) 6. My translation and paraphrase. 7 Contained in Zagajewski’s first volume, Komunikat (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972) 58. Zagajewski’s third volume, List. Oda do wielości [Letter. Ode to Plurality] (1982) was his turning point away from political poetry and, concomitantly, from an easily-defined notion of belonging. 6

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and differ fundamentally from Zagajewski’s subjectively based poetry, which relies on the imaginative transmogrification of the objective world.8 When Zagajewski turned away from political poetry in the early 1980s, readers accused him of losing his chance to give testimony to the fall of Communism. One must not, however, exaggerate this rift in his oeuvre. Until today, he defends the notion that truth may be stable, and spurns relativism, holding that skepticism is a Western luxury that East Europeans cannot often afford. Zagajewski’s early desire to awaken consciousness becomes aesthetic and ontological in his later work, not moral and political, and the social position of his speaker becomes less discernible—yet he is still frequently anonymous, not a personality. In his transitional volume List. Oda do wielości, the “I” is not yet biographical, as it becomes, increasingly, in his later work. The “here and now” is predominantly a site of aesthetic epiphany, while its unique, ambiguous, and changeable qualities are emphasized. In keeping with this emphasis, Zagajewski’s primary persona wanders and searches; he is no longer a citizen rooted to his sociopolitical situation. This turning point is best exemplified by the forceful “Fire” (“Ogień”) (1982). Probably I am an ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights, the word “freedom” is simple to me, it doesn’t mean the freedom of any class in particular. Politically naïve, with an average education (brief moments of clear vision are its main nourishment), I remember the blazing appeal of that fire which parches the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing those songs and I know how great it is to run with others; later, by myself, with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming and when I touched my head I could feel the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.9 The poem begins on an equivocal note—“Probably I am”—with the effect that, immediately, the reader is alerted to the possibility of reversal or 8

Klejnocki sees this as a difference between “descriptive truth” and “truth to the self” (“prawda opisowa” and “prawda własna”) in Bez utopii 68. 9 Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems, trans. Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczyński, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2002) 101. Original “Ogień” in List. Oda do wielości (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1983) 12.

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recognition. The speaker, however, insists upon his own mediocrity, which makes the poem’s rising tide of emotion almost incredible, yet this is part of its significance: even an “ordinary” and “naïve” man—especially a naïve man—can be subsumed into collective emotion. Does it matter if the fire is stoked by hatred or by a positive thirst for freedom (the poem was written in the early ‘80s, while Poland suffered under martial law)?10 The focus here is on the extremity of collective emotion, its destructive capacity, and its ability to drown individual judgment. The destabilization of the speaker’s position in its opening lines (“Probably”), and the irony that turns into impassioned sincerity, make the reader circle back. The first word, “Jestem” (“I am”) establishes the poem as an act of self-definition, though the second word, “chyba” (“perhaps”), renders it dubious. The first seven lines highlight the banal, even off-putting, character of the very “average man” that the Generation ’68 addressed in its work. The opening is dull, the verbs lack momentum, and adjectives are almost aggressively deflated. “Freedom” is, literally, “without extraordinary class limitations” in the original Polish, and this speaker’s refusal of the extraordinary continues until the pivotal “I remember.” Its tone is conciliatory—he is trying not to stand out of the crowd—and “clear vision” (literally illumination, “jasność”) is tucked away in parentheses. The tinge of self-confidence in this opening voice, of one who doesn’t hesitate to label himself (“I am a --”) and to assure us of his transparency, suddenly gives way to profound, impassioned self-reflection in the middle of the poem. We leap from the banal to the remarkable: the tonal quiver of “clear vision” heralds this change. The poem’s language thickens: dull words give way to dense ones that are sensory and symbolic. The verbs burst into action, as the fire’s momentum (“parches,” “burns,” “chars”) is transferred into the self (“I used to sing . . .”), and its debris, ash, can be tasted physically. The speaker evokes his personal trauma by moving from a description of largescale destruction into intimate sensual apprehension (ashes in his mouth). “Fire” shows how the “szary człowiek,” the colorless man, can be subsumed into a collective mania; how a song becomes a scream and brings about a re-evaluation of the “I.” He comes to terms with his responsibility, which is the price of collective belonging; at the same time, he recognizes the penetrative power of the individual self (the crowd will never see itself as such). The original poem has no periods, no semicolons, and no endstopped lines—it is a continuous utterance, its progression arduous; its tonal 10

A possible intertext for this poem is a comment made by Zbigniew Herbert (greatly admired by Zagajewski) in an interview published in 1973 (hence, available well before the publication of “Fire”): “[d]uring the war I saw a library on fire. The same fire consumed books that were wise and stupid, valuable and sordid. Then I understood that culture is most threatened by nihilism. The nihilism of fire, stupidity, hatred” (18). See Herbert in Jadwiga BandrowskaWróblewska at the beginning of Poezje wybrane (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1973) 5–19.

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shift is, consequently, even more surprising. The voice longs to recuperate from the trauma that his words re-enact, yet his final word—“edge” (“brzeg”)—strikes a dissonant note. It is ambiguous (edge of skull or of country?) and its sound in Polish is hard. It is not echoed by any other lineending.11 The “edge” remains a problem that is unassimilated, thematically and melodically, into the poem. The poem grapples with the boundary between “freedom” as a slogan—freedom for a certain mass of people, or universal freedom, as the speaker suggests—and freedom as an individual condition—freedom from a mass of people, freedom from the state, and from the imprisoning equivalence of skull and country. Recognition of the “edge” or boundary between individual psyche and national psychology would constitute freedom. It might protect the individual from the fire of collective passions. This is a real transformation of the voice. Profundity is reached through metaphor, through imagistic risk, not through confident assertion; the poem uses abstract nouns, but its realizations happen through metaphor. Socio-political categories (class, educational level, party) are superficial, and the poem only gains depth when the phrase “I remember” unlocks the door to a messy and difficult realm of realization, that within the mind, and not in the outside world. Its dissonant conclusion signals a problematic concept—the boundary line between individual and nation, skull and country—that is unresolved. In her essay on Zagajewski’s “lyrical ethics,” Clare Cavanagh asks, “Is a system bent on the eradication of individual personality and vision perhaps better combatted by a voice that embodies precisely those qualities most in danger of liquidation?”12 A voice that insists upon its individuality embodies the ethic that Zagajewski values; in the case of “Fire,” the speaker’s prior participation in the collective earns him the ability to speak both for and outside of it. The poem testifies to the process of reckoning with his singularity and its limits. As Cavanagh states, the poet who purports to speak for the collective may only address himself in multiplicate; when Zagajewski chooses to “dissent from dissent,” he “[sets] his lyric ‘I’ against the defiant ‘we’ that had shaped his poetic generation.”13 “Fire” may be read as Zagajewski’s farewell to the collective voice. The volume in which it is contained (List. Oda do wielości) is transitional. It contains political commentary and poems that point in a new direction, beginning to question identity. The speaker does not always speak as a Polish citizen. In fact, he often wishes to cast out

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Zagajewski does not use rhyme, yet sometimes one can note a partial resemblance of lineending words based on a similar final vowel or consonant. One finds these small echoes in “Fire,” but the last word breaks the melody. 12 Cavanagh, “Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review 59.1 (2000): 9–10. 13 Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics 4.

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history, to step out of the claustrophobic enclosure of politics and national issues.14 His mode is exploratory, sometimes undecided. Must literature be actively engaged in a social project to be meaningful? Zagajewski is afraid that a speaker who “runs with others” also runs the risk of being deluded and harmed by the destructive fire of mass emotion. His later work tirelessly re-imagines the speaker as a mutable individual who cannot be categorized, revealing that knowledge reached by the individual psyche encompasses social knowledge, but not vice versa. For Zagajewski’s new speaker, responsibility begins with an assertion of the “I,” not the “we.” This is not an easy transition: he relates that “[p]eople expected me to give expression to the [opposition] movement. The balance between this and being yourself is so delicate. . . . I was happy as a person in the opposition movement, but I was unhappy as a writer” (Zagajewski in Lubow n.p.); Bożena Shallcross goes so far as to assert that “his solitary position was a condition necessary for creation” (Through the Poet’s Eye 6). “Poems about Poland” and “Fever” suggest that poems explicitly concerned with the nation actually ring false unless they incorporate personal detail, and are part of a sequence bidding farewell to national mythologies. “In the Plural”15 laments that “the I slept/like a child under the blanket/ of an inattentive gaze,” lines begging to be read metapoetically. The “I” is inadequately cared for, yet because of the gazer’s inattention it sleeps peacefully, not requiring interaction and recognition. Underneath these lines lies the poet’s fear that his individual perspective will be callow and unformed due to a lack of proper care, and in the worst case, will be unequal to its subject. At this stage of Zagajewski’s writing, self-revelation brings anxiety, as the restfulness of sleep and the necessity for attentiveness work at cross-purposes. The volume Jechać do Lwowa (To Go to Lvov) takes this problem headon. “The Self” (“Ja”) is devoted to examining and troping the “I.” Because the substance of the “I” is so small and slender, it either dons a mask or clings to its surroundings in order to gain stature. Curiously, it does not have a core: “it lodges between granite blocks,/between serviceable/truths.” In both the original and translated versions, the line break troubles parallelism, implying that the self may not be adequately comprehended through analogy. In this apposition, truth represses rather than enables the self; a “serviceable” truth obscures unserviceable difficulties and offers a utilitarian solution. The poem implies that a static, established, and recognized truth is insufficient for discovering the self, which dwells in a realm of contradiction, change, 14

All of the poets in this study believe that the individual’s poetic voice cannot and should not be subsumed into a group. Seamus Heaney finds this particularly difficult to work through, since he and Zagajewski believe poetry is indeed capable of doing some social good. 15 Original titles “Wiersze o Polsce,” “Gorączka,” “W liczbie mnogiej.” Citation originally reads “Ja spało / jak dziecko, pod płótnem / nieuważnego spojrzenia.” List. Oda do wielości 49.

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and insubstantiality. In other words, Generation ‘68’s “Truth” is not always true to the self. The poem moves among metaphors in its chase after the “eternal refugee” (in Polish, “wieczny uciekinier”): . . . But the self is so lonely, so distrustful, it does not accept anyone, even me. It clings to historical events no less tightly than water to a glass. It could fill a Neolithic jar. ... It wants to taste space without walls, diffuse itself, diffuse itself. Then it fades away like desire, and in the silence of an August night you hear only crickets patiently conversing with the stars.16 The Polish poem begins with soft alliteration, its whisper-like effect (“jak świerszcze/w sierpniu”) diminishing the potential grandeur of its subject. As it progresses, the “I” becomes less concretely defined: it changes into a liquid, then sublimates into a gas. Finally, its absence becomes so complete that no vestige of the self remains in the space between crickets and stars. The shortest lines in the original Polish poem (11 and 10 syllables) are those in which it refuses the “me.” The poem’s conclusion rhythmically expands to incorporate a patient conversation from which the self is prominently absent. There is, the poem implies, a subconscious “I” that does not accept the objective “me,” yet if this is the case, the “I” can never be known. At some point this chase becomes irrational, but the concepts of diffusion and its opposite, “clinging” to events, are crucial for understanding Zagajewski’s oeuvre. The idea of a self like water, spilling out into its surroundings, underlies several other poems (including the important “Without Form”); yet the self wants to be defined, and factual events, like the reality of a water glass, are landmarks allowing better self-orientation. History provides a framework for self-definition, yet the self is mistrustful and untrustworthy, finally evading the words that try to pin it down. The poem reaches its climax with “diffuse” (the Polish reads, “rozproszyć się”), as the “I” spreads itself along a broad surface. The stated intent of this speaker is, here, not to discover his identity (in opposition to the young Seamus Heaney), but to take apart the concept of identity altogether. If identity signifies sameness (an element is identical to itself), then the Zagajewskian self is a contradiction in terms: there is no core to which the self may assert identity. It 16

“The Self,” Without End 103. Original “Ja” in Jechać do Lwowa (London: Aneks, 1985) 29.

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may only be discovered by its surroundings, not on its own; yet it is not identical with the “serviceable truths” that we use to blandly explain a presence that may actually prove elusive and even delusory. The concept of selfhood must be linked to the act of individual perception, even while “The Self” foregrounds the difficulty of separating the kernel of the “I” from its perceptions. The self’s desire for boundlessness is counterpointed by the patience of the poem’s discussion: its neat sentences, orderly punctuation, its exposition and search for clarity, are animated by an eagerness that climaxes with the excited repetition of “diffuse itself,” but the formal space of the poem is well-defined and bounded, not diffuse. Aptly, the poem ends with a “quiet conversation” from which the self is absent, but which serves as a correlative to the voice of the poem’s speaker.17 The perceiving “I” places a premium upon attentiveness. Meaning may inhere in the smallest act of perception, and through constant attentiveness, one may discern a truth that allows for a constructive act of identification with the real. The central problem of Zagajewski’s poetry is how to establish a relation of self to place that does not falsify the real in the name of aesthetics or history. The slippery, protean self is a difficult protagonist. It cannot be pinned down in one defining attitude. After Zagajewski stops writing political poetry, he realizes the difficulty of defining or even describing a changing self. “Over America” illustrates how one’s mind imagines its escape from the here and now. The poem draws a parallel between the speaker’s body, rocked by airplane turbulence, and his “unfaithful” ego which escapes his body and dreams of the afterlife: “Again,/and lightly, my unfaithful mute ego flies/above the stairs.”18 There is an obvious connection between danger (the airplane that might crash) and mutability (the ego’s journey into another life), yet most of Zagajewski’s poems celebrate the mutable self, not fear it.19 The vocabulary of fidelity and betrayal reveals a fear that the self may 17 Bewilderingly, Zagajewski has been faulted for putting the self on a pedestal by the group of critics associated with the brulion journal in Poland, who claim that he is constantly examining himself—yet in this assertion they mistake ego for context. These poems constantly negotiate the relation of the self to its surroundings, but it is facile to assume that the ego is authorial or that its negotiations serve the purpose of self-glorification. See the discussion of Zagajewski in Przemysław Czapliński and Piotr Śliwiński, Literatura polska 1976–98 (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), and Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics 228. On the issue of form, it is curious to compare the discussion of Derek Mahon’s formal order (his isometric lines and stanzas, rhymes, and verbal patterns), which exists in a paradoxical or even perverse relation to the disorder and entropy examined (sometimes celebrated) by the lyric speaker, with the orderliness of “The Self.” Indeed, Zagajewski has stated to me that he especially admires Mahon’s formally ordered poems. 18 Without End 128. Original “Nad Ameryką,” Jechać do Lwowa 44. 19 In a rather paradoxical parallel, neither Zagajewski nor Heaney is typically associated with fear. One can see how this might be so: both poets gain fame for poems celebrating homelands real and partially imagined, and give voice to a (complicatedly, qualifiedly) optimistic aesthetic that triumphs over a deeply rooted fear that the self is not integral and therefore not controllable, nor able to comfortably and confidently inhabit an identity. Whereas Mahon and Hartwig develop a rebellious persona that allows for a particular type of oppositional identitarian com-

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come apart, may not form an integral whole; an “unfaithful” ego dissociates itself from the body awaiting its return. The danger is loss of control: as the pilot loses command of his aircraft, and the body and soul come apart at the moment of death, so the human consciousness may lose mastery of the “ego,” which may fly away, leaving the body as a shell without spirit. Zagajewski’s speaker calls for attentiveness because it prevents the dissolution of the self, sharpening the relation of the perceiver to the outside world. The early Zagajewski demanded it in order to live ethically; in his middle stage, the same call is made for a fundamentally ontological purpose, in order to be in the world. Without it, the nonintegral person might cease to actually be what we call a self. Adam Kirsch writes that the “instant of rapt attention to the world is the center of life, and the proper subject for poetry.” Although Kirsch believes that this type of poetry ultimately leads to silence and separation, the opposite is the case here: the instant of attention binds the self to the world.20 As the speaker’s involvement in his surroundings deepens and his attentiveness increases, so does, quite frequently, the pitch of his lyricism. The self clings not only to events but also to social categories (which are not, at this stage, politicized). “A Wanderer” hinges on the speaker’s decision to “join himself” to one of two groups in a train station—“two tramps and a drunkard” but possibly, as he realizes the slipperiness of categorization, “two drunkards and a tramp.” His attempt to order space results in indecision: he feels compelled to affix himself to one group. The poem is, on its most abstract level, about order and belonging: We have always been divided. Mankind, nations, waiting rooms. I stop for a moment, mitment, Zagajewski and Heaney do not. It takes many years for both poets to resolve this lingering fear and uncertainty that marks their early work. 20 Adam Kirsch, “The Lucid Moment,” The New Republic 23 March 1998: 36–40. Bożena Shallcross’s essay on epiphany in Zagajewski’s work usefully extends the idea of attentiveness, focusing on his relation to the world of objects and their epiphanic potential. See “The Divining Moment: Adam Zagajewski’s Aesthetics of Epiphany,” Slavic and East European Journal 44: 2 (2000) 234–52. There are several critical statements on Zagajewski’s conception of time, some of which have points of contact with our current discussion. For instance, the motif of the “eternal moment” that enters eternity through its epiphanic or rapturous character—a motif Zagajewski takes from Czesław Miłosz—is explored by M. Sukiennik in “Czas zatrzymany w ‘bezczasie’. (O poezji Adama Zagajewskiego),” Ruch literacki 1–2 (1993): 40–46, and more thoroughly in Ryszard Nycz’s Sylwy współczesne. Problem konstrukcji tekstu (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1984) 52–54. Nycz asserts that epiphany and epiclesis stand as two types of illumination present in Zagajewski’s work, and traces these concepts back to the work of Miłosz, in which such illuminations allow the poet to gain knowledge of an enigmatic essence that cannot be reached through experience (53); the younger poet, however, does not always manage to attain this knowledge. See also Danuta Opacka-Walasek, Chwile i eony: Obrazy czasu w polksiej poezji drugiej połowy XX wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2005).

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Uncertain which suffering I should join. Finally, I take a seat in between and start reading. I am alone but not lonely. A wanderer who doesn’t wander.21 He concludes with the statement, “The dividing goes on.” The ontological division of reality into different states of being is the closest the speaker can get to a logical ordering of experience. Here, he finds a common term—“suffering”—that allows him to unite the room’s elements and to take a seat. The speaker’s style is laconic, skirting the problematic nature of verbs (uncertain which “to join,” “a wanderer who doesn’t wander”). The poem is an attempt to order the space surrounding him, an order which verbs (improper joining, improper wandering) threaten to disrupt. Its unusual stanza breaks and indentation are atypical for Zagajewski, who favors isometry. The division of people into groups is its subject, and its awkward line breaks and uneven amounts of white space on the page testify to the messiness of this process. The poem’s gentle humor, cognizant of its situational absurdity, is directed back toward the speaker, who becomes increasingly uncertain of his ability to make order. “The dividing goes on” because, in order to be true to the self, he must take apart the very terms he uses for self-assertion—“alone but not lonely,” a “wanderer who doesn’t wander.” These lines engage the reader in a refinement of language. Each term carries a field of associations, which may be disproven: our linkage of “alone” with “lonely” (aurally, conceptually, emotionally) is false to his specific situation. This speaker is uncertain about his place but choosy about his terms. The poem assents to the need for categorization, but declares an independent stance toward language. Here, the speaker finds otherness within his language, not just between himself and his place. His formulations are brief and elegant, each enclosed in a line, not enjambed. They are neat, easily-quoted phrases, yet they also point the way toward a further deconstruction of language (“the dividing goes on”). The speaker refuses the social categories that he attributes to others in the waiting room, but he needs this context to serve as a basis for his self-definition. “A Wanderer” illustrates the chimera of in-betweenness, called by Jarosław Klejnocki as “the sanctuary of ‘pre-concretization,’”22 before definitional terms must be applied, and the uncomfortable choice of identifications made. Just as the presence of others throws the self into relief, so the self can illuminate the nature of its surroundings. The early poem “Key” (“Klucz,” published in 1983) hinges on the speaker’s epiphanic realization that he is the interpretive “key” to the evening cityscape. 21 22

Without End 82. Original “Wędrowiec,” in Jechać do Lwowa 65. Klejnocki 93. His elegant Polish phrase is “sanktuarium ‘przedkonkretyzacji.’”

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I am invisible, lacking shape like a thought being born But it’s just in this quiet ‘like’ in this bold comparison is hidden the key, the cipher of evening It’s me who is the heart of the crowd23 The poem leads to its strong insight through the via negativa of absence: both Polish and English versions enjamb the first cited line on “lacking” (Polish “pozbawiony”), which adds weight to the abstract word and puts space (lack of words) between it and its referent.24 His insight stems from his purported “invisibility”—yet he is only invisible to the observer who expects a strongly assertive self. These lines move from absence to essence, lack of shape to heart of the crowd, suggesting that deep comprehension of one’s surroundings can be gained by recognizing the smallness of the self. Interestingly, a poem beginning with self-deflation moves to an assertion not just of the centrality of a seemingly marginal self but an assertion of poetry’s performative potential. The quiet “like” that heralds a figurative leap is a key unlocking a new view: “It’s me who is the heart of the crowd.” An identification is made, a viewpoint shifted. The voice is newly triumphant. He is realizing how language can be a tool for self-identification, not just a necessary hindrance. Poetic figures can bring a new type of identity into being. This poem differentiates itself from the social poetry of Generation ’68 by beginning with a focus on the individual and containing little information about his human environment. Zagajewski writes, “I grew more and more convinced that a poem, essay, or story must grow from an emotion . . .that is my own, and not my nation’s. They should arise inside me, and not within the crowd, even if I love the crowd (to love a crowd—good Lord!) and passionately take its part. The New Wave . . .drew upon collective emotions, emotions that were at times entirely hypothetical.”25 A focus on the collective, the statement implies, runs a greater risk of summoning “hypothetical” 23

“Klucz,” List 18. The original Polish reads as follows: “Jestem niewidzialny, pozbawiony / kształtu jak rodząca się dopiero myśl / Lecz właśnie w tym nieśmiałym jak, / w tym zuchwałym porównaniu kryje się / klucz, szyfr zmierzchu / To ja jestem sercem tego tłumu. . . .” 24 The subtle moments when Zagajewski’s poetic style hints at lack of fit are important for understanding how his acts of self-definition undercut themselves even while they ostensibly construct a solid edifice around the self. These moments focus the second chapter’s argument about form and disjunction. 25 Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2000) 191–92. The book was first published in Polish in 1998. Ten years later, Zagajewski is impatient when asked to respond to a forum about the significance of the 1968 protests: “let’s not exaggerate—these are long-ago events for me, really, completely finished by now” (my translation). See “40 lat później: Ankieta ‘co zostało po 1968,’” Zeszyty literackie 1 (Spring 2008): 112–15.

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(therefore, possibly inaccurate) emotions than a focus on the “I,” who is the ultimate “key” to attaining a concrete knowledge of the self in the world. “Key” shows how the crowd can be reached from the “I,” not vice versa. Zagajewski’s commitment to an individualized, personal, and concrete poetic is important for understanding this work. “Key” is quite abstract but is based on an individual’s sense- and thought-impressions. It evokes a transition from the personal to the collective that is based on linguistic epiphany, as the speaker hears himself create poetic figures. The “quiet ‘like’” also may be construed epistemologically: the linkage of an abstract with a concrete element creates a new chain of thought. He recognizes himself as a synecdoche for the scene, its representative constituent. The self is, therefore, not important for its uniqueness, but takes its place in a system of signs. It is threatened when those signs carry an overdetermined, overpowering meaning, and self-assertion and individualized life are subsumed into this external system. For Zagajewski, this overdetermined set of meanings is history. History is sometimes imaged as a single actor, sometimes as a system. The goal of Zagajewski’s middle stage is to reveal the variety and change that inheres in the self. He confronts history and accounts for its legacy in the perceived scene, but wishes to present an alternate way of seeing that is not bound and predetermined by history. Individual perception and historical perception are often put at odds. Again, Zagajewski sets himself against a totalizing force. He does not oppose the notion of linear process, but the act of assigning a single meaning to points in time or space. “History” is often a contestable interpretation. His speaker’s painfully historicized relation to his land personalizes it in a manner comparable to Heaney’s personification of the land as a sexual goddess and life-giving Antaean force. Heaney’s land, however, sets its own terms, ensnaring, seducing, nourishing, or demanding obeisance of the humans upon it. Zagajewski’s earth is frequently (at this stage of his writing life) a victim, demeaningly subservient to the events committed upon it. At the same time, both poets are acutely aware of history’s encroachment upon the land, of the passive nature of space and tyrannical nature of the time in their metaphorized histories, which they usually situate with great care. The key difference is in their allocation of agency and their figurations of history. Zagajewski’s “History” is a tyrant. One cannot fight it, but one can change one’s place and mode of perception. In “Autumn,” Zagajewski sets forth the foundational linkage of seasonal change with historical catastrophe (the first and seventeenth of September, 1939, when Poland was invaded by Nazi forces and by the Soviet Red Army, are its referents). It will allow him to link elemental imagery, to which he is partial with poignant—often glancing—recollection of history’s ability to annihilate the individual: just as autumn’s “cold bayonets” destroy lush trees, so does the onslaught of invaders destroy lives, names, and memories. The last two terms are crucial: a name is a marker of individuality, and

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memory is, conventionally, thought to structure identity. The act of naming is an assertion of control; the expulsion or ruination of a name is an act of cruelty. Breathless autumn, racing, blue knives glinting in her glance. She scythes names like herbs with her keen sickle, merciless in her blaze and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror, Red Army.26 The season is thus allied with invasion, forcing the poem’s last lines (cited above) to swerve into historicized terror. “Autumn” begins with summer flowers and, accumulating images of violence, avoids direct historical reference until its conclusion. Once it is uttered, we must reckon with tyrannical fact. Just as the poem’s seasonal imagery is wrenched awry by the poet’s historical knowledge, so also our interpretation must follow suit, “knives glinting” through the knowledge that forces our interpretive hand, running roughshod over the lyric. Rather than evoking sensory seasonal details, this poem concentrates on evoking movement. Its images (knives, sickles, blaze) are set in an emphatically antipastoral framework—the clutches of history will not let it escape. This autumn bears no Keatsian mellow fruitfulness. The reader feels a psychological loss at the end of “Autumn” as sensual beauty is overpowered. The very possibility of writing detached verse appears endangered, perhaps annihilated, a hard fact for a poet wishing to stave off politics. Zagajewski does write ahistorical poems, but certain events—imaged as menacing, tyrannical agents—often lurk in the background. Natural growth and man-made destruction both claim the landscape.27 Whether war is beginning, ending, or being remembered, it remains a powerful actor that forces the poem’s and interpreter’s hand. The speaker wants to run from this specter, to establish his own arena of interest. He does not want to amorally shirk the ethical issues raised by history, but to engage with them is not his primary intent. Instead, he concentrates upon the perceptual moment, 26 Without End 190. Original “Wrzesień” in Płótno (Paris: Zeszyty Literackie, 1990) 63. Julia Hartwig will take up a similar theme in her “American Poems.” 27 See “September Afternoon in the Abandoned Barracks” (Without End 175), which ends with “Autumn fades, / war dims.” The original ends with the word “war.” This brief, casual equation of natural process with historical change is quite terrifying in its implication that there is no separate natural realm where one can escape from history. Original “Wrześniowe popołudnie w opuszczonych koszarach,” Płótno 47. The forceful poem “Russia Comes Into Poland,” whose meter reminds one of drumbeats about to run out of control, is a metonym for the encroachment of the historical upon the personal and timeless. History is an imperialist force here. Płótno 15.

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an instant not yet inscribed into a narrative, which is rich with possibility. Zagajewski asserts that he is attracted by “the idiomatic nature of the world” (“idiomatyczność świata”).28 Exploring the richness of the perceptual moment turns into a metaphysical task: “every moment lasts eternally, becomes/a point, a haven, an envelope of emotion.”29 The word “point” is insufficient because it shrinks the moment’s potential significance; the spatial metaphors of “haven,” “envelope,” and, later, “homeland,” are more capacious and less abstract. The present is a haven from the pressure of the past and the contingency of the future. Spatializing this moment as a homeland, a “haven,” frees one from collective history; belonging is individualized. Spontaneity may seem an odd attribute of home. The word “fatherland” (and the Polish “ojczyzna”) carries implications of solidity, even immutability. In contrast, Zagajewski’s idealized home is always changing. Belonging in this home is predicated on its mutability, not its continuity through time (as home is traditionally conceived). It is oriented toward what we may potentially know rather than the definitively known.30 The present moment’s relationship to an ideal home is explored by the famous and extraordinary “To Go to Lvov,” which demonstrates the power of the imagination to establish the parameters for belonging in the interest of creating its own home. A later poem, titled “Watching Shoah from a Hotel Room in America,” provides a useful counterpart. Here, the speaker watches his native landscape become a historical “subject” on television, as a site of massacre during World War II; he is being asked to view it in a forcibly constructed framework. The land is made subject to the interests of the media—it appears tragic, even horrifying, as the meadows of his native land are shown as killing fields. It is no longer his landscape, and he realizes how a physical place can be psychologically manipulated. As moral outrage (at the Holocaust) vies with childhood memories (of Poland) and the claims of the present moment, the speaker longs to separate himself from all three temporal realms—historical 28 Conversation with Gabriela Łęcka in Łęcka, Salon literacki (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2000) 129–40. 29 “The Generation,” Without End 122. Original “Pokolenie” in Jechać do Lwowa 9–10. In the argument that follows, I take the word “homeland” from his Polish text: “W ten sposób powstaje inna ojczyzna” (“In this way, another homeland is created”). 30 Zagajewski clarifies the relation between the unknown, the potential, and a desired freedom from identitarian commitment in a recent remark: “In my view, the most interesting thing about identity is that which we do not know. Within each of us is something unknown, and everything that we write and create forms an arc between the place we come from, or our given identity, and the unknown. If we orient ourselves toward what we know, told to us by our parents, . . .this can lead to deep divisions between people.” How we deploy and extend knowledge (or, what we think we know, what has been passed down to us from others) can be more divisive than a focus upon openness, potentiality, our ability to prioritize imagination over fact. See Zagajewski in Boniecki et al 43. The point is also applicable to the second chapter’s argument about Zagajewski’s disjunctures and aporias.

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past, personal past, and present—but cannot do this until he has located a desire for effacement in the most ethically troublesome area of the past: he imagines the discarded shoes of the Holocaust victims begging, “now let us sleep, sleep: we have nowhere to go.” There is no direction for them or for the speaker. The poem delicately borders grotesquerie: as war rages on the television screen, the hotel guests next door sing in a friend’s birthday, drowning the cries of the dying just as the program drowns out the speaker’s memories. His need to sleep conquers all, as the only way to reconcile these incompatible levels of action is to leave them altogether. History is manipulative because it uses ethics to pull the individual into a non-neutral interpretation of seemingly innocent natural phenomena. The speaker longs to establish a separate space of perception. A space separate from history must be atemporal. “To Go to Lvov” enacts a marvelous feat: it lifts the speaker out of his current surroundings and sets him down in a place of perpetual rejuvenation. The actual poet is, extraordinarily, not working from memory but from pure imagination. The poem’s genesis, however, is in Zagajewski’s history. His family took part in the large-scale westward migration of Polish residents out of Lvov (an Eastern city now in Ukraine) at the end of World War II, settling in the town of Gliwice in the western Germanic province of Silesia. For the Zagajewskis, the lost city (then Polish Lwów, now Ukrainian L’viv; in English translation, Lvov) became a frequent subject of reminiscence. The young Adam came to know the city by means of the stories told by older family members. He does not know the city himself. By fusing his elders’ tales with his own fantasy, he participates in a truly imagined community. Composing alone in his wife’s apartment, while she is absent, he feels “this combination of solitude and being with somebody . . . The poem just came. I had this idea to write something with motion, with traveling. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” was a distant model or at least an ideal poem of motion.”31 Though far from wishing to exit nature and become a symbol of artifice (hence the “distant” influence), Zagajewski, like Yeats, wishes to evoke an imagined city of art, to reify an ideal state. The city becomes his personal symbol. It is simultaneously insubstantial, an ethereal vision, and a solid bedrock, the fundament of artistic creation. It is a place with a name and a network of streets, and it is a movement, a process of transformation and alliance. Time is neatly conflated with space in the beginning of the poem: To go to Lvov. Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase, when express trains and bullet trains were being born. To leave in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September 31

Lange Larsen, “Interview with Adam Zagajewski,” Literature and Belief 26.2 (2006): 3.

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or in March. But only if Lvov exists, if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just in my new passport, if lances of trees —of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud . . .32 The question of space is immediately confused by time, as “dream” and “dawn” represent liminal times in which space and identity are held in abeyance. Such imagistic obfuscation lifts the place-name of Lvov out of its literal context into a symbolic realm, where temporal position inevitably influences spatial position. Dawn is a time of birth, newness, when objects are born fresh, coated with baptismal dew. Dream is a time of separation from the literal world, an unclassifiable realm where the literal and the symbolic elide. They may both be conceived of as temporal “stations,” portals to the imaginary.33 The Polish fiction writer Bruno Schulz conceived of a lavish, surreal realm where time and space were both distorted.34 If one is capable of discerning the transformative potential of quotidian spaces, such as parks, vacant lots, city squares, even private houses, then one has access to a new dimension of time. Only by entering this new dimension can one glimpse what Schulz calls “the Authentic,” which is closely allied to religion, mysticism, and artistic creation. Zagajewski makes mention of Schulz in his prose, and traces of Schulz’s aesthetic mysticism are present in the evocation of Lvov. Yet he also warns the reader against an overly rational, factual, unmystical approach by stating that this authentic richness will be available “only if Lvov exists,” meaning only if we allow it to exist. If we accept the postulate that a journey to a heightened realm is possible, then the title of the poem becomes a question of logistics—how to reach Lvov—instead of ontology— if a journey to Lvov is possible. The 81-line poem is structured around a few emotional nuclei, often marked by a repetition of the city’s name. Each time the word is given new 32

Without End 79–81, Jechać do Lwowa 35–7. This fresh timeframe pushes away the tangled history of Lvov. The city has been ruled by the Austrian empire, by Poland, by Germany during World War II (when it was called Lemberg), by the Soviet government, and now, well after this poem was published, by Ukraine. References to the city’s name are made in various languages—this translation of the poem uses “Lvov,” although in Polish, for Zagajewski, it was “Lwów.” The censor’s scissors in the poem can refer both to the arbitrary, tyrannical assignment of political boundaries and to the artistic censorship of the Soviet government. When the speaker situates his journey to Lvov at dawn, in a dream, he lets the reader know that the poem will progress as a vision that creates a fresh Lvov. There are specific biographical events behind the poem but the speaker seeks a new view. There are different ways of reaching Lvov and, by implication, different ways the poem could be written. The focus is on the present—how to go, now and always—and on a possible state, not an accomplished action. 34 The short stories of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) were published in the 1930s. He studied in Lvov and lived in southeastern Poland (now Ukraine), and thus may be loosely associated with this mythical region. 33

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resonance and the city is rebuilt. “There was too much of Lvov,” the poet reiterates, pushing his poem to the brink of excess: . . . it brimmed the container, it burst glasses, overflowed each pond, lake, smoked through every chimney, turned into fire, storm The poem works by accumulation, not minimalist precision. Until the fourteenth line (the fourth time the speaker mentions leaving for Lvov), verbs dominate the poem’s language. From lines 15 to 17, nouns dominate, crowding each other in clusters of images that slow the reading process. This maximalist style suddenly turns its passion against its own images in line 58: there was too much of Lvov, and now there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners as always in May, without mercy, without love . . . ... . . . along the line and through the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked diligently. The Polish has a stronger tonal effect: “ogrodnicy i cenzorzy/cięli ciało i wieńce, sekatory niezmordowanie/pracowały.” The short, alliterative “cięli ciało” cuts into the texture of the poem, and “niezmordowanie” (literally, “indefatigably”) includes the root of “murder,” a connotation that is lost in its translation as “diligently.” The mention of “censors” points to a political source of violence.35 The destruction of Lvov is conflated with bodily harm because Lvov is a personal space, not an objective entity. The speaker musters his resources of self-preservation by forcing the poem back into the “now,” insisting that the reader inhabit the present moment, yet his leaps between time frames are disorienting (“people bade goodbye . . .,/and now in a hurry just/pack, always, each day”). The rhythm of the poem also increases our sense of temporal displacement, as its breathless hurry compresses time and space into the crowded instant of 35

Zagajewski published Jechać do Lwowa in a small Polish press in London (Aneks), and the mention of censorship would summon a reality that he himself was no longer experiencing. It is notable here as a repressive force preventing the speaker from “actually” holding a perfect image of Lvov in his mind.

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description. The speaker situates the poem before his birth, thus before “my desire,” a sensory and intellectual trait that is one of Zagajewski’s enduring characteristics. He is re-creating a time that he did not see, and his poem is based on imagination rather than empirical experience. Escape from the timespan of the speaker’s life lifts him out of a stale, processed time into a fresh one, which he imbibes in the course of the poem. Its accumulation of infinitives (“to go,” “to leave,” “to pack”) sets up an abstract, postulated world, neither proven to exist nor decisively experienced. It contrasts with the specificity of the poem’s imagery and holds the poem aloof from linear historical time. The infinitive looks forward to what could happen, to the future. These infinitives serve as reminders of the theoretical basis of the poem’s actions, but their abstractness becomes drowned in the exuberant reality of its descriptions. The interjected “you remember” in line 19, and the entrance of the past tense in line 22 (“my desire which wasn’t born yet”), fuse memory with desire, which takes over: the poem remains in present tense for 57 more lines, until the exhortation, “just/pack.” The poem thus asserts control over its main verb, “to go.” Its breakneck speed carries it through the infinitive, future conditional, simple and progressive past, and present, but does not, surprisingly, produce a strained or disconnected effect. Its dominant tone is joy. The speaker blends past, present and a possible future, and the poem itself cannot be subdivided thematically, tonally, or rhythmically. The reader goes on the fantastic journey to Lvov and suspends his doubt that the actions may not be “real.” The facts of ontology become divorced from desire. Desire is a central force in Zagajewski’s work. It is the motive for knowledge and for imagination. The desirability of this poem’s images underlies our assent to them and our subsequent involvement in the world of the poem. We reach the poem’s conclusion with a certain shock, though it is the logical endpoint of the journey to Lvov. . . . go breathless, go to Lvov, after all it exists, quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere. Lvov is “everywhere” and can be conjured every day, at any time and place, because it is a figment. It is a psychological state. It is an imaginative capacity which retains its peace and purity because of its separation from the actual city of Lvov and from the tyrannical history that threatens to take over poetry. In this poem, the speaker’s focus dramatically swings from the actuality of a place (its socio-historical verifiability) to a place’s conduciveness to imagination: can it serve as a site for the mind to project a sense of belonging, to “find Lvov?” His goal is twofold: firstly, to salvage place from the ravages of history—such as the censor’s scissors—which may create imaginative untruths, cutting against the grain of memory and desire,

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and secondly, to use place as a testing-ground for creative perception, to see what the mind’s eye can visualize. In a poem called “From Memory,” the speaker asserts the duality of the self and of its surroundings. We live, he states, in two dialects, in the jargon of the ordinary and in the language of “great dreams.”36 Language is a charged medium, and a choice of language is also a choice of alliance, either to the ordinary and “actual” or to the extraordinary (Derek Walcott, expanding upon Rilke, writes that to change your language you must change your life). In “To Go to Lvov,” the speaker chooses an alternative temporal and spatial framework, opting for the life of the imagination over the ordinary, allowing that the two overlap. The self is not a concrete presence in this poem but a locus of desire—the imagined desire for a bucket of raspberries conjures emotion disembodied from biography (“my desire which wasn’t born yet”). Just as our desire for the poem’s images leads us to assent to their reality, so also the speaker’s desire for Lvov leads him to insert his hunger as a residual trace of the autobiographical self. “The Self” defines the fluid character of the “I,” and “To Go to Lvov” summons the “I” as an emotional center that lacks strong contours. He creates and perceives his Lvov at the same time so that his sense of belonging follows the strength of his creative desire. The speaker’s emotional participation in a constructed world invites us to reconsider the nature of what we call “home.” “To Go to Lvov” shows how home can be seen as an imaginative (but not wholly imaginary) construct rather than a material structure. The conventional notion of “home” is of a concrete physical place, a point on a map. The vocabulary of belonging— home, hearth, grounding, rootedness—is physical. It is tied to the land or it evokes a solid physical structure and emphasizes the capacity of a home to give shelter.37 “Home” in Zagajewski’s work is a psychological rather than a physical shelter. The concept does not rely on a material image but on an idea of home as an intentional goal. It is both one’s quasi-mythical origin and the endpoint toward which one journeys. The dynamism of “To Go to Lvov,” its dizzying movement, carries us toward this endpoint. Even if we cannot say that Polish Lwów is Zagajewski’s literal home, it is certainly an imaginative one, because it is established as both originary and ultimate state.38 The poem “Without Form” establishes formlessness as a rich state 36

Without End 268. Original “Z pamięci” in Pragnienie (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2000) 7. Duality will prove to be central to an understanding of Hartwig’s poetic speaker, who proclaims her own self-division. 37 Again, it is useful to contrast Zagajewski’s notion of “home” with Heaney’s. Heaney makes much of the physicality of belonging—the mother earth, the “omphalos,” the familial hearth as an emotional focus—and the poems making use of this vocabulary form a bedrock of images. 38 The literary motif of return to one’s childhood home hearkens back to the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz’s long poem Pan Tadeusz [Master Thaddeus], in which the title character returns to his childhood home in the countryside. In this work, the narrator’s own clear desire for return overwhelms the text with emotion, particularly at the beginning and end, when the exiled poet gives voice to his intense wish to see his long-lost home (which is, actually, a

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of possibility, speeding through a collection of images to underscore the shapelessness of both the world and the self.39 “To Go to Lvov” takes this idea further, establishing fluidity of form as a characteristic of the speaker’s goal. As he constantly proffers fresh images, Lvov becomes dynamic and heterogeneous. As such, it escapes the domination of historical events because it cannot be pinned down in one place or time. The poem eludes dates and facts. Even as it comes to rest in “now, . . .always, each day,” these gestures push away linear (historical) temporality. Vision becomes the ability to see the ideal in any time or place. The speaker’s insistence on Lvov’s actuality, however, puts him in a defensive posture—“after all it exists,” he insists. This childlike note disrupts an otherwise triumphant conclusion. It can be read as a gesture of defeat: why would he need to defend something he has just celebrated? This gesture evinces a split between the reasoning mind (focused on what we call the real world) and imagination (which creates images based on desire). It creates a fissure below the structure of the poem. It is the emotive and intellectual fissures cross-cutting Zagajewski’s work that makes the project of defining “belonging” compelling. The poem that creates an ideal relationship between the speaker and the city also contains a hint of its own vulnerability to dissolution. The word “przecież,” translated as “after all,” is a gesture of opposition: “after all/it exists.” The poet is arguing against a critical voice that is not part of the poem, but may easily be construed. This conclusion has a slight quaver of the voice in it, belying a fear that the construction of Lvov is not sound enough, and the city of dreams may be felled by the axe of reason. The tonal quaver also highlights the fragility of the speaking voice itself. Not only is the speaker’s physical situation unstable, but he is himself unstable, not a strong presence. The personal self is a locus of desire yet not a definitive possessor. He cannot even dominate his own imaginative space, as history intrudes on the present and the quotidian intrudes on the exalted. The result is a surreal collapse: “trees/fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,/and the cathedral trembled.” Our acceptance of the poem’s imagistic vocabulary depends upon our belief that desire is a constructive force leading beyond the sensual at the same time as it celebrates the sensual. As Zagajewski writes, every man mourns his lost Jerusalem; every man is motivated by loss and desire to search out Lithuania then under Russian partition; nationalism and nostalgia intermix). It contains “a glance” at the political situation of the day (1811–12), but its main theme is the longing for an unrecoverable home. Zagajewski’s Lvov is a city, though, and his evocation of it is imaginative, not based on one specific time period. Zagajewski moved from Lvov when he was an infant; his idea of Lvov was based on family stories, not actual memory. The borderlands (Polish “kresy”) have long been romanticized in Polish literature, and the myth of lost Polish lands is present in Romantic and post-Romantic literature. This tradition may inform the poem as well as Zagajewski’s direct familial link to Lvov. 39 Without Form 196–7; original “Bez kształtu” in Jechać do Lwowa 38-39.

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the place that he considers “home,” a sacred locus of value and beauty. The poem serves as an induction into an aesthetic program that marries sensual pleasure with a spiritual quest. The ideal home described in the poem is portable. The speaker’s insistence that Lvov can be found everywhere allows it to partake of both the transient and the eternal; it is the site of momentary delight and dwells in a Yeatsian realm of changeless beauty. “The Gothic” shows that the protean self is as vulnerable as the imagined Lvov: Who am I here in this cool cathedral and who is speaking to me so obscurely? Who am I, suddenly subject to a new atmospheric pressure? . . . ... Who am I, interred in this slim vault, where is my name, who’s trying to snatch and hurl it away like wind stealing a cap?40 The speaker’s disorientation is heightened by his inability to pinpoint the agent who divests him of subjecthood. The cathedral is not described with the detail in which Lvov is described, and the lack of humanizing detail creates this poem’s unique sense of disorientation. Zagajewski is a master of the precise image, able to turn a shapeless entity into an evocative sculpture in a few strokes of the chisel. Sometimes a whole gallery comes into being before our eyes. Such is the case in “To Go to Lvov,” founded by an essentially constructive technique: a bank of sensual experiences provide the groundwork for defining selfhood. He is, however, equally adept at evoking formlessness. “The Gothic” is deconstructive, revealing the emptiness that threatens human constructs of place and identity. If a name is like a hat, then it is not an intrinsic facet of identity, yet the threat of its removal induces fear. “Who am I?,” the speaker repeats, with increasing urgency. A name may be merely a denotative marker, but it is necessary for social existence, and this speaker needs a social framework, with its inessential constructs, to form his sense of self. He instructs himself to re-enter a recognizable world: “Go find the height again, and the dark,/where longing, pain, and joy live/and faith in the good God who does/and undoes, kindles/ and extinguishes light and desire” . . . One can hear the voice of Wisława Szymborska here, whose “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”41 40

Without End 177–9; original in Jechać do Lwowa 45–47. See Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998) 18–19. 41

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records the experience of fear and otherness in a cold, lofty world, which the poet allies with the heights of the Himalayas. She, too, calls for a return to the realm of imperfection and humanness. Zagajewski echoes this idea, but focuses on dichotomies within the social realm. The rhythm of the cited lines swings between doing and undoing, light and darkness, creating a sense of dizziness that the speaker overcomes when he attunes himself to darkness: I feel your presence in the bright gloom, a sheet of torn paper, healing, healing again, no trace, no scar. I hear languages, voices, sighs The state of unknowing, of darkness and mystery, is essential for Zagajewski, who often notes the limits of rationality. Silence is no longer absence at the end of the poem, but a cloak thrown over a chorus of other voices. The poem may be usefully juxtaposed with “To Go to Lvov”: despite their apparent discrepancy of style and voice, they are complements. The speaker of “The Gothic” realizes that human community is necessary for giving the self a shape, a name, and a place. Abstraction is an ultimately unlivable state. There is no abstract identity, nor abstract belonging, for Zagajewski’s speaker. Lvov must be given a name, and it must be dynamic, if it is to serve as a workable ideal. The concept of “eternity” is attractive to most idealists, but Zagajewski counters it with an insistence on the richness of transience. Because the “I” is in flux, its imaginary life too is; this is why every place is capable of becoming home. Home is situated in a state of movement. This dynamism creates an ideal that resists the overbearing legacy of history. Instead of taking up an agonistic struggle against history, the speaker of Zagajewski’s poems often prefers to exit the arena of conflict by situating his home in an imaginary, mythic space. This poetic speaker can realize the imaginary, can see his mythic Lvov everywhere, as a means of defending the strength of the imagination. Zagajewski is not a thinker who summarily rejects the un-ideal. Rather, he wishes to accept his present state and to create workable ideals that can be realized on this earth. That is why he creates a form of idealism that does not crystallize a single image, but admits change into its makeup. Imaginative ideals may never be attainable in their entirety, but they are always attainable in part. Zagajewski’s idea of a dynamic idealism departs from the certainties of his early poetry (embodied in lines such as “Tell the truth that’s what you serve”). His focus on the potential of each moment joins with his implicit belief in the mutable self’s ability to attune to the moment (not, as in “Truth,” to judge its truth or falsity). By means of attentiveness to the present, one can arrive at a deep state of awareness, but without imaginative plasticity, one cannot reach the fullest level of potential that the moment offers.

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Zagajewski’s desire for the ideal creates a quest motif in his work, in which the speaker seeks to rediscover the lost Lvov in his surroundings and through his actions. Each examination involves the perceiver in this teleology. He is never content to let a scene rest, statically, but always animates it.42 Tadeusz Nyczek holds that in Zagajewski’s poetry, “the most stable state is incessant destabilization.”43 The poetic speaker backs away from facile answers: I returned to the town in which I was a child and a youth and a thirty-year-old. The town greeted me with indifference and the megaphones of its streets whispered: don’t you see that the fire is still flaming? don’t you hear the bellow of its flames? Leave. Search somewhere else. Search. Search for your true homeland. The poem (“Search,” originally “Szukaj”) is quoted in full. The rhythmic contraction of these lines is dramatic and unusual for Zagajewski. “Search” begins conventionally as a poem of return, but this trope is discarded before the significance of this place has even been delineated. It takes more than an accumulation of years spent in a place to make a “home.” The poem is unusual because a place rejects the speaker; in most poems, the speaker gives significance to a place.44 Its indifference and rejection preempt nostalgia, and its brusque commands temper the melodrama of the (Yeatsian?) undying fire. This is a poem of dichotomies—the familiar and the unknown, here and elsewhere, indifference and fire, true homeland and untrue residence. Its topic is not just one’s homeland but the sort of vision that one needs to find home. There is a tonal break between the third and fourth lines which communicates dashed expectations: “home” will not be found easily but requires an imaginative search. The city’s megaphones speak in a whisper, forcing the speaker to shift attention from boldly stated to implied content and from the seemingly obvious home (the town of one’s childhood) to the hidden, gradually found, “true” homeland. Despite its brevity, this 42 One may contrast Zagajewski’s journey in “To Go to Lvov” with the early speaker who holds love in one hand and hatred in the other. The motif of the quest encourages the self to notice change within and outside the self, not merely to oscillate between abstract absolutes. 43 Nyczek, Kos 194. My translation. 44 The obvious, and important, exception is the cycle of “return” poems in Powrót (Return, 2003), in which the speaker asks a place to enter into dialogue. “Szukaj” (“Search”) is contained in Ziemia ognista (Poznań: Wydawnictwo a5, 1994) 20. My translation.

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brief poem stops itself short twice (after lines 3 and 7) and changes tone. It leaves an impression of urgent concision—no detailed imagery, no verbal dexterity—and closes with the command to move on. It sets itself apart from conventional poems of exile that long to recover the childhood home, encouraging us not to assume that home rests in the past. It must be sought in the present and future. The speaker must learn to “hear” the flames and “see” the fire (Zagajewski’s symbol of transformation) as an urgency pushing him out and onward. The speaker has failed by thinking that this town (perhaps the Gliwice of his childhood) would satisfy his need.45 The call to leave is heeded in “A Quick Poem.”46 Here movement becomes frantic, engulfing the speaker, and giving rise to his juxtaposition of speed with depth: “Instead of a vigil—a flight./Travel instead of remembrance./A quick poem instead of a hymn.” The order of art is opposed to his sense of disorientation. He has left home to “search somewhere else” as he was previously commanded to do, but has done so without the motivating ideal that is necessary for travel to become meaningful instead of being mere escapism. He stylizes his situation by means of an endless series of dichotomies, but they do not hold up under interrogation (travel versus memory; a quick poem versus a hymn). Since “Lvov is everywhere,” any journey can become a spiritual quest. “A Quick Poem” is a rare reminder that travel is not meaningful unless it is motivated by desire, and unless it yokes physical perception to revelation.47 When the metaphoric potential of each new sensation is mined, travel becomes a way to explore the possibilities for finding the ideal in a series of changing perceptions. The focus on dynamism, change and quest frequently finds expression in poems on travel. Zagajewski’s speaker is at times a traveler, a wanderer, and sometimes a nomad whose desire is “an identity made of transitions,”

45 Zygmunt Ziątek points out the surprising absence of Zagajewski’s actual home city of Gliwice in his poetry, opining that Gliwice functions basically as a hyperrealistic counterpart to the mythologized Lvov. These two types of locality can only be reconciled from a third city, Krakow, which comes to the fore in Zagajewski’s later volumes. “Trzecie miasto Adama Zagajewskiego,” Teksty drugie 4:57 (1999): 155–64. Klejnocki qualifies this view, holding that Zagajewski’s “lost cities” are always named (e.g., “To Go to Lvov”), citing Aleksander Fiut’s claim that this reverses Miłosz’s well-known “City Without a Name”; Zagajewski’s “other,” unknown towns are usually nameless (Klejnocki 76–77). 46 Without End 213; original “Szybki wiersz” in Ziemia ognista 29. 47 The same conclusion may be drawn from “Good Friday in the Tunnels of the Métro,” Without End 98, Jechać do Lwowa 40. Transit sharpens one’s sense of not-belonging, but here it comes without any concomitant sense of liberation and potentiality. The poem may be in ironic, melancholic dialogue with Czesław Miłosz’s “Esse” and Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” “Esse” evokes an epiphanic moment when the (male) speaker glimpses a beautiful woman in the Paris metro and is overwhelmed by the fact of her existence; Pound’s two-line poem sees the faces of the metro crowd as petals on a bough; though less exalted and more chiseled than “Esse,” both poems impart a revelation. Zagajewski’s poem ends with the lines, “In the tunnels of the Métro no transformation of pain, / it is there, it persists and it is keen.”

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in Braidotti’s words.48 “On the Road” moves from site to site, while the traveler’s physical self recedes and his voice comes to the fore: “To travel without baggage . . . to forget about the land of one’s birth,/to emerge from small stations at dawn.” The sentence remains unfinished to communicate the joy of being in transit; grammatical closure may be construed as an endpoint.49 Pure attentiveness, with no “baggage” to weigh it down, bears the fruit of insight. The Zagajewskian traveler refuses conversation with others. He forgets his homeland here, banishing nostalgia. He detaches himself from any community. There is an unusual equivalence between solitude and universalism in Zagajewski’s work. His speaker is, most frequently, alone but not lonely and other people serve as symbolic presences rather than flesh-and-blood characters. A sense of unlimited possibility is felt by the traveler externally and internally. Zagajewski meditates on his own feeling of liberation as an émigré: “Paris gave me a certain type of freedom, not the worst type, since I don’t belong to any milieu, to any “church” . . . I feel the joy and calm of an independent person . . .who doesn’t have dependents or rivals.”50 No milieu presses him to assume a mask. At the same time, his strange qualifier implies that there is a worse type of freedom, perhaps associated with a new type of obligation (to an émigré community or moralistic “church,” perhaps). This type of freedom, so consciously chosen by the poet, may seem incompatible with the frenetic movement with which some readers associate him (“Here and there, to and fro [,] always in motion, . . .constantly on the road [,] from city to city, country to country, continent to continent, from one end of the world to the other”51). Instead, he feels “joy and calm,” sentiments more typically associated with home than emigration. To Zagajewski, internal calm is proof of freedom, and life is at its fullest when one can choose: I walked through the medieval town in the evening or at dawn, 48 Braidotti 22. Klejnocki collapses these categories in his characterization of Zagajewski as a wanderer, traveler, and nomad simultaneously, “one who never possessed any space, who never dwells at home” (85, my translation). His tourist persona, however, is even more extreme, an independent observer who can “play with images of space and time,” and experiment with identity (92); this conception is indebted to Zygmunt Bauman’s view of the tourist as an extraterritorial creature (“stworzenie eksterytorialne,” Bauman in Klejnocki 93) who, as opposed to the nomad or wanderer, feels this state as a privilege, as a “manifestation of independence” and freedom of choice (93). Stanisław Stabro associates Zagajewski’s wanderer with the dandy; he roams the world “in search of aesthetic impressions . . .that enter the sensitive soul of the artist.” This view is patently disparaging. Literatura polska 1944–2000 w zarysie (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2002) 91. 49 “Bez bagażu” (“Without Baggage”), Powrót (Krakow: Znak, 2003) 6. My translation. 50 Adam Zagajewski interviewed by Renata Gorczyńska in Portrety paryskie (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999) 245. My translation. 51 Janusz Drzewucki, “Zycie silniejsze niż nicość,” Twórczość 3.725 (2006): 113.

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I was very young or rather old. ... I could begin life, mine or not mine, over, everything seemed easy, ... It was spring or early summer, warm walls, air soft as an orange rind; I was very young or rather old, I could choose, I could live.52 Openness inheres in liminality: evening and dawn are times of change (as in “To Go to Lvov”), and the speaker refuses to fix himself in any one time or posture.53 Early youth and advanced age are times without professional routine, when perception can be freed from constant, numbing obligation. The speaker is, additionally, freed from the obligation to be himself, to continue the logical trajectory of his own life. Extreme porousness is implied by the calm choice of a “life, mine/or not mine,” wherein the choice is not loaded with emotional drama. The ability to neatly step out of one’s identity is neither surprising nor difficult to this speaker.54 Although the tone is quiet and the rhythm regular, this is one of Zagajewski’s most ecstatic poems. Together with “To Go to Lvov” and “Without Form,” it bases its ecstasy upon lack of possession and lack of conventional identity. The speaker perceives the city yet, at the time of the poem, has not decided on the shape of his perceptions. His persona is also unformed: there are no barriers between the self and others, or the self and its surroundings. It can melt into the “soft” air. There are no other voices leading him in or away, as in “Search.” The Polish verbs are mostly imperfective, denoting unfinished, continuing actions rather than discrete points in time. No action is completed in this poem. Actions are either potential (“I could”) or progressive (“I was walking” could serve as a translation of the verb “Szedłem”). There are two distant rhymes in 52

“I Walked Through the Medieval Town,” Without End 278; original “Szedłem przez miasto średniowieczne” in Ziemia ognista 64. 53 Urszula Klatka makes the shrewd observation that the speaker of Zagajewski’s poems prefers “temporal margins” such as dawn and dusk, as well as closed spaces where “vertical” synchronic time dominates. However, the “here and now” does not always tend to be atemporal, as she hypothesizes; it is constantly menaced by the encroachment of the historical. See “Podmiot w liryce Adama Zagajewskiego,” Ruch literacki 34.227 (1998): 205–15. 54 To both Adam Zagajewski and Julia Hartwig, it is actually easier to step out and away from one’s autobiography than to step back in. Acceptance of a single bounded identity, and a linear life-narrative, is the real difficulty.

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the original poem (“świcie . . .życie” and “mury . . .stary”). Zagajewski rarely uses rhyme, and these irregular echoes merely create a quiet sense of concord. The poem savors the moment of indecision, not-yet-choosing, though the speaker is aware of the power of choice. Nothing divests the speaker of form—his conscious decision, for the space of the poem, is to be formless. Our search for this enigmatic speaker’s identity is elegantly stymied as he disappears into the scene.

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2 Figuring otherness in the work of Adam Zagajewski Zagajewski’s poetry constantly grapples with the conceptual as well as aesthetic need for form, which to him signifies both shape and boundedness. For Zagajewski, who prizes mutability, “form” (Polish “forma”) is most often a negative term. In a poem such as “I Walked Through the Medieval Town,” both the nature of the self and its environment are undecided. The speaker savors the moment before a choice is made, a form given. The independent wanderer, imbibing each new impression, dissolving into a symbolic landscape or cityscape, shuns restrictive notions of identity. This is Zagajewski’s most beloved persona. Throughout his oeuvre, we find these paeans to freedom. Yet the ecstatic wanderer is delineated by the patient poet. Zagajewski shuns identitarian restriction but lauds shape and style, as understood in a strictly aesthetic framework. A rift between conceptual and aesthetic definitions of “form” underlies his thought, dividing his essays from his poetry, and hinting at a possibility of rupture beneath the crafted surfaces of his poems. Zagajewski’s lifelong aversion to the closures of identity thinking—in other words, to the idea that one’s personal identity must be a closed, coherent, unified “form” itself—results in some surprising poetic discontinuities. He ultimately refuses to ground himself in a single, stable home. Correspondingly, he refuses to accept biography as the ultimate form of the poet’s life because of his need to feel that the self is always moving, traveling, and escaping. Yet choices must, in the end, be made. The self must take a shape that becomes a form of identity. Zagajewski’s rebellion against poetry that serves one fixed truth leads him to write poems in praise of fluidity. His essays explicate a substructure for his poems and ground his poems in a matrix of concepts centered on the notion of an organic whole. This whole lacks a single form: it is expanding and it is boundless and this notion is in concert with the figurative work of Zagajewski’s poems. His conceptual

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understanding of form views it as delimited shape, boundedness, and restriction—in other words, to be opposed. He values expansiveness and decries limitation. At the same time, Zagajewski propounds a view of poetry that assigns worth to what he calls “high style” (“styl wysoki”). How can one reconcile his choice of high style as the best, most fitting style for poetry with his abstract celebration of boundlessness? The work of the poetry complicates (sometimes paradoxically) the opinions expressed in the essays, and the work of its poetic figures, in turn, sometimes disunifies the poetry itself. This chapter will consider the figural consequences of Zagajewski’s aesthetic idealism, in particular how the disruptive elements of his poetry refuse community with the reader and complicate the concept of identity (which is usually understood in terms of consistency and unity). There is an antinomy between immobility and change that tacitly underlies the definition of form. “Without Form” celebrates mutability, equating it with dynamism and seeing it as a life force. Energy inheres in change. The artistic consciousness behind this poem is a voice recognizing the potential of the poem’s imagery—for expressivity, for change—and inflected with desire. The speaker takes pleasure in shifting syllables, creating brief rhymes and assonances, and then moving on. But he does not want to define himself, and triumphantly writes of himself as “I, myself, mature,/without form.”1 Maturity need not be understood as formal boundedness. This speaker wants to make sure we associate him with mutability and not see him as an order-creating poet aloof from his subject matter (i.e., the formless world). We are led to question Zagajewski’s understanding of individuality: if he wishes to focus on the individual instead of the collective (as his statements against Generation ’68 indicate), then how can the individual’s contours be delineated if one accepts formlessness as the basic state of the “I”? What role does character play—is a formless self also without character, or is intangible spirit separate from the self? The poems published after his political stage— in the volumes Oda do wielości (Ode to Plurality) and Jechać do Lwowa (To Go to Lvov)—keep returning to the notion of formlessness. They are rich, positive volumes, exploring an apolitical, essentialized self. The speaker gradually becomes embodied in the persona of a traveler; each subsequent volume returns to the topos of travel, or wandering. In his most recent poems, though, Zagajewski unexpectedly turns to autobiography, defining the self by places and experiences specific enough that we may simply refer to the speaker as the author himself. This turn has its motivation in an expository framework that glorifies “organic” form and “the whole.”

1

“ja, dojrzały, / bez kształtu.” “Mature” is an adjective, not a verb. One should also note that “Bez kształtu” literally means “Without shape”—the translation is inexact. We are dealing with two different nouns in Polish—“kształt,” shape, in the title of the poem and repeated throughout, and “forma,” form, the term Zagajewski uses in his essays.

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These concepts are united, and Krakow serves as their incarnation. Although Zagajewski writes abstractly about these concepts, they have a clear biographical grounding in his experience of Krakow, his city of ideas: The medieval city offered a ready model of the cosmos, it had everything: the river, the meadows, the houses and trees, the churches and cloister gardens, the fortified walls enclosing the city and the gates that opened it, like the valves of a human heart, in an ageless rhythm of day and night. . . . at times I doubted Krakow’s majesty, hence doubted the very possibility of a tangible, magical wholeness in our day and age (as if the city really had become my model of the world!). I laughed at myself sometimes, at my comic exaltation, my excess.2 The city, then, offers an ideal symbolic theater for the student of philosophy to shape his own rather medieval worldview. The multiple significance of these symbols, however, seems both surreal and even postmodern, as the urban tableau serves its particular purpose based on the subjective need of the perceiver. Yet it coheres into an amalgamation so potent that doubt in Krakow (as opposed to the tremulous doubt of Lvov) upsets the poet’s foundational values. His healthy laughter at his “comic exaltation” and the tendency toward emotional and imagistic “excess” that perseveres in his work mitigates the possible ponderousness of this symbol and is useful to bear in mind when considering Zagajewski’s belief in “high style”—a serious belief that he is, nevertheless, unafraid to qualify and examine from a distance (we may call it an organic and flexible concept, not a stiff and unyielding one). Whether an image of geometry, of biological function, or of magic, Krakow allows him to metaphorize form in a way that is positive because it is organic, not artificial, and therefore superficial. Zagajewski asserts his dislike of poets who have “a narcissistic fascination with form rather than content,”3 implying that form is merely technical; elsewhere, he equates form with aestheticism. If poetry is to be taken seriously, he writes, then we must reject certain works even if they are written beautifully—in other words, if they are all form. We need to combine aesthetic and ethical standards to save poetry from becoming a mere hobby for those without “real” obligations. Poetry must communicate something, have ideational substance. It is necessarily extroverted: the author is alone when he composes, but he writes for others.4 Zagajewski’s meaning should not be taken too literally (many poets’ essays, after all, do not sufficiently “explain” 2

Adam Zagajewski, “My Krakow,” The New York Review of Books 10 Aug. 2000, www. nybooks.com. 3 Another Beauty, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000) 72. 4 A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straux, & Giroux 2004) 197. Original material in Obrona żarliwości (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2002) 183. Following citations also from this translation.

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the poetry). His intent, broadly construed, is to buttress positive values and oppose the corrosive consequences of “irony as a world vision.”5 He begins his discussion of transcendence in art with a citation from philosopher Leszek Kołakowski: “A culture which has lost a sense of the sacred (‘sacrum’) loses sense altogether” (14). Zagajewski opposes spiritual (not strictly religious) value to irony, which, according to him, has gained the upper hand in the course of the twentieth century. He does not oppose the use of irony as “a rhetorical weapon,” but is “against irony as a world vision,” stating, “I see irony as a weapon against what’s low and mean, and not against what’s high. Postmodern culture employs irony against what’s high, against spiritual pursuits.” He separates humor, which does not sabotage the spiritual, to irony, which he fears may be a “saboteur of higher things.”6 Yet “[s]urely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes . . ., [only] vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry” (31; Obrona 36). Zagajewski has a particular type of poetry and criticism in mind here.7 His bête noire is Nietzsche, whom he credits with disseminating a destructive and ultimately nihilistic form of antihumanism. Zagajewski is not antiintellectual (he does, after all, hold an academic post) but is always ready to appeal to the “higher truth of rapture” (“zachwyt”) over dry analysis. He is concerned with the constructive potential of a mental attitude. To him only ardor can build art; irony tears it down. This constructive potential is best served by what he terms “high style” (“styl wysoki”). This is both a certain tone “higher” than everyday speech and an orientation toward “high” subject matter. Zagajewski does not seek to simply reproduce everyday events in realist mode but to open the door to a visionary realm, a heightened sensibility. He dislikes the quotidian and the colloquial. Elsewhere he uses such words as mystery, frisson, and wonder. Poetry encompasses mystery, but the high style in which it is written intends to order reality (40–44; Obrona 42–6). There are nascent contradictions, or at least problems, in these statements. High style is constructive and seeks order, but when does order make mystery visible to readers, and when does it unmask and destroy 5

Zagajewski in Larsen 7. Zagajewski in Larsen 7–8. 7 In his review of Another Beauty, Andrew Rathmann asks with bewilderment whether skepticism was more widespread in Europe than in the United States, since he himself understands modernism as an imaginative, constructive phenomenon, not as the triumph of corrosive irony. He concludes that Zagajewski supports Romantic poetry. This is slightly disingenuous; Zagajewski is opposing skeptical currents within literature and criticism rather than one literary period. If anything, Polish modernism was even more visionary than Anglo-American Modernism. It may be the so-called postmodernism that Zagajewski has in mind; or it may simply be a broad critical mindset that belittles vision and favors clever allusiveness. Chicago Review 46.3–4 (2000): 378–80. Marta Wyka convincingly draws a line between Zagajewski’s artistry and modernist Parnassian tendencies. Wyka, review of Dwa miasta, Tygodnik Powszechny 29. III. 1992. 6

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mystery? It seems as if the emotive implications of “poetry” are at odds with “order.” Furthermore, when does the order-creating impulse result in rigidity, even in despotism, and when does it coincide with the valuation of spirit? Zagajewski opines that it is easier to find form in mockery and rejection than in praise. Here he uses “form” to mean order and shape. He discusses the “form” of constructive poetry and the “form” of irony and rejection; here the term connotes tone as well as shape. The crux of his belief is that form, high style, and praise should be conjoined in art. The poet is impelled by the desire to remake the world in a nobler guise. Zagajewski loathes the idea of writing negative verse. He regrets that he made his literary début as an angry young man. He stresses terms such as wonder, rapture, and ardor, and explicitly constructing a private mythology of sorts. A survey of his oeuvre reveals a basic structure of figures upholding a mythology centered on two cities, Lvov—the lost Jerusalem, and Krakow—the city of ideas. These essays are a highly conscious attempt to style his literary identity, to belong to a certain type of writing. This stylization has elicited negative responses from Polish critics who hold that Zagajewski plays the Parnassian poet. He is criticized for overaestheticism, for sounding old-fashioned and pedantic in his call for high style, and for seeking harmony and not allowing disruption to enter his verse (like Heaney, who is criticized for the same quality by David Lloyd). Piotr Śliwiński holds that Zagajewski believes in the self-sufficiency of culture to such a degree that he essentially lives in a written world, not in the actual world that writing seeks to represent. There is something narcissistic about a lyric directed toward the omnipresent “I,” something fallow and unproductive about this verse; Śliwiński notes that in the volume entitled Return (Powrót), Zagajewski merely mimics the trope of return without truly desiring it, concluding that he truly wants to always “be elsewhere.” This is exactly, of course, the point. As for the first charge, Zagajewski himself has written more leniently about his much-discussed desire for high style (see “Obrona poezji” in Anteny 33); the matter of disruption is more complex, necessitating close readings to show how radical Zagajewski’s disruptions can actually be.8 His aesthetic program is admittedly overdetermined and does not truly account for the complexity of Zagajewski’s actual verse. Zagajewski’s critics, and Zagajewski himself, tend to view a single poem as a unified entity. They search for thematic, visual, and aural echoes within the poem, basing their reading on the premise that the poem is unified by such a network of 8

Piotr Śliwiński, Świat na brudno. Szkice o poezji i krytyce (Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka SA, 2007) 203–6. Literary scholar Jacek Łukasiewicz reads Zagajewski’s poems as an “affirmation of an affirmation of the world.” He believes the major drama of Zagajewski’s later work is that of an artist fighting the “artificializing” function of figuration, in the name of the transcendent; it is a fundamentally “anti-avant-garde” stance. Jacek Łukasiewicz, review of Ziemia ognista, Tygodnik Powszechny 12. II. 1995.

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correspondences. Sometimes, however, an element of the poem does not fit into such a network, or, at times, disrupts it. In “To Go to Lvov,” the slight quaver of “after all/it exists” casts doubt on the poem’s act of affirmation. Zagajewski’s poetic figures disrupt as well as unify. In particular, his unconventional use of simile points attention to the gap between referent and image, not their likeness. This device qualifies his imaginative idealism and, on a larger scale, illustrates the disjunctures that make a concept of identity based on sameness problematic. Simile is conventionally described as a unifying device, but Zagajewski’s similes create an aesthetic of unlikeness within his poems. At times they work against the surface meaning of the poem, undermining its mood and content; at other times they depart from the poem’s logic altogether and lead us to reevaluate its communicative act. Simile is defined as a comparison of two unlike terms that are linked to show their commensurability: they are harmonic complements, and the euphony that results from their skilful deployment contributes to the pleasure of reading. It has traditionally received less attention than metaphor, yet analysis of all comparisons is chiefly concerned with how they establish this linkage of two elements. Ted Cohen considers metaphor (and, by extension, simile) as a pact of intimacy between literary speaker and reader: the speaker issues a “concealed invitation” and the reader expends a special effort to accept it.9 The point of the comparison, that unites tenor and vehicle, is seen as a link.10 Some scholars even point to the grandly constructive potential of such links: the reader/hearer will be impelled to construct a broader system to encompass the particular figure.11 Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates how metaphors link into patterns of symbolic equivalence, which underlie the structure of myth and ultimately serve an organizational function. Zagajewski wants to create harmonies and consciously states his desire for a unified system in his essays. This desire can be linked to his own mythologizing tendency. Simile is frequently considered to be an easier device to deal with than metaphor, neatly setting apart tenor and vehicle so that the reader knows where the literal ends and the figural begins. This view has its roots in Demetrius’ On Style: “When the metaphor seems daring, let it for greater 9

Ted Cohen, “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 10 An important exception is Jahan Ramazani, who discusses the importance of displacement, difference, and alienation in the work of metaphor. The tension between the tenor and the vehicle reorients the reader’s perception and creates the strong effect of a literary figure. Ramazani posits the importance of this tension for postcolonial literary studies. See Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 72–74. 11 Robert Verbrugge and Nancy McCarrell have studied this phenomenon in the field of cognitive psychology. Max Black has considered the same idea from a literary standpoint. Representative essays by all of these scholars are contained in the excellent collection On Metaphor (cited above).

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security be converted into a simile. . . [By adding ‘like’ or ‘as’] we obtain a simile and a less risky expression.”12 By “less risky” one may understand that the vehicle becomes easier to interpret, but the point of the comparison does not become easier to discern. The surface material of a comparison (i.e., the nature of tenor and vehicle) and its import (the nature and consequences of likeness) must be kept separate. In Zagajewski’s work, metaphors chiefly furnish the poem with a support structure of images. They may be striking, but never create the deep disjunction that his similes often effect. His volume Ziemia ognista is full of such disjunctive moments: “I’ve seen sunflowers dangling/their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman/had gone strolling through the gardens.”13 The simile provides a miniature drama, into which the metaphor fits; it implies that death may be merely routine, a matter of carelessness. This becomes an emotional challenge even while it is not central to the poem. Figural eccentricity both inspires interest and creates a stumbling block: Why does your light throw a shadow on the sleepy gardens of reality? Like a night porter, with a lantern, a dog, and full of fear, you walk through unfenced orchards, and branches touch your temples. Oh, indispensable little light, why do you conceal the dark, why do moths, young widows, burn in your cold fires, lose their minds? This short poem is entitled “An Evening Postcard Addressed to the Intellect,”14 causing us to query the psychological division that the poet dramatizes. Its open assertion of the intellect’s power to obscure works against its human details, which emphasize the fearful, awkward steps of a watchman who feels unprotected. The unfenced orchards do not offer comforting signposts; trees encroach upon the space of his body. Does the poet view emotion as so completely divorced from intellect that they can be allegorized as a human holding a light? The “cold” light is still guided by the human porter and one can see it tremble in his hand. “An Evening Postcard. . .” reveals the way in which participation in the image leads the reader to question the work of the poem. Its first question empowers the intellect: by placing the verb (“rzucasz,” you throw) at the end of the line, the intellect’s agency is stressed. In the simile, the “you” is dissociated from the light. The intellect is not light itself, the image implies, 12

Demetrius, On Style, as translated and cited in Sacks 53. “Transformation,” Without End 214, ll.10–12. Original “Przemiana,” Ziemia ognista 6. 14 “Wieczorna widowkówka, adresowana do rozumu,” in Jechać do Lwowa 27. My translation. 13

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but a human entity whose lantern casts shadow as well as illuminates. By the sixth line, “light” has been diminished into a lantern and then a “little light,”15 and the abstract intellect has been associated with the vulnerable physical body (“your temples”). The second question is, correspondingly, posed in a more intimate manner. The paradoxes of cold fire, vulnerable body housing abstract mind, the mind’s incomprehension of itself, and of losing one’s head as one attempts to understand are contained in its images. The relationship between the physical (head, body) and the abstract (intellect, mind) is queried, but the figure of the simile answers the speaker’s questions. The intellect, it implies, is wedded to emotion and sensation, and as such cannot provide consistent illumination. One reads the simile, grammatically separated from its surrounding text, expecting similitude between the intellect (tenor) and the porter (vehicle), but begins to ask whether the figure is actually establishing a space of otherness within the text. By providing a palpable reality, it allows the reader to empathetically participate in its activity. The reader’s sense of sympathy with this uncertain watchman, however, affects judgment of the comparison’s fitness. The speaker’s questions are basically rhetorical—the intellect must speak in and through the body, guided by an emotional consciousness; moreover, humanized darkness or half-light might be preferable to the inhuman “cold fire” of illumination. At the least, one can conclude that the figure does not carry the conceptual message of this poem; one can go further to prove that the figure actually works against it. These moments of disjunction create a sense of disunity, or at least difficulty, within the poem. To Zagajewski, the art of poetry is curiously related to a personal sense of belonging. He writes about this feeling with quiet rapture: “In search of two lost homelands—one a city, the other free access to the truth—I stumbled upon a third,” namely, the homeland of aesthetics.16 Poetry is a space where one can belong as in a city (this idea also tempts Heaney). Tadeusz Nyczek claims that in Zagajewski’s early work, simple language is a counterpart to a simplified life and creates a world separate from his surroundings; later, the poet admits that poetry is only a minor element of the world, and this admission haunts his writing with a sense of insufficiency. Poetry must encompass some realm of experience that the reader unconsciously lives every day or it will not be able to communicate at all.17 It cannot create an alternate world and hold itself aloof from lived experience. Nyczek gives valuable insight into the nature of Zagajewski’s poetic development, yet A Defense of Ardor makes a claim for poetry that surpasses its experiential foundation. The claim that poetry can 15 Polish nouns easily form diminutives that signify small size or connote affection: here, “światło” is belittled to “światełko.” 16 Another Beauty 40. 17 Tadeusz Nyczek, Kos. O Adamie Zagajewskim (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002)12, 55.

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reveal a spiritual reality accompanies the belief that poetry is another reality: it reveals and produces a different plane of being, and this view merges with the realization that the ideal can be seen anywhere, by assuming a different mode of viewing the world—one Zagajewski might call a “poetic” view. Poetry can, in this framework, provide the conditions for belonging. This is a substantial claim. It is, in effect, a claim that poetry can make idealism possible: it can build a construction of imaginative states, values, and images that constitutes a realm above the merely material. By giving voice to an inner life of the spirit, poetry supports, extends, and incarnates ideals. It gives abstract ideas form and movement through its imagery, rhythm, and voices. It gives expression to “the whole.” This is a transcendental concept that Zagajewski takes pleasure in expounding: One word had a magical meaning for me. . .. This was the word “whole.” . . . I wasn’t alone, wasn’t just an atom whirling through cold space beneath the lens of some scientific instrument, wasn’t simply a scrap, a microscopic speck mysteriously endowed with reason, introspection, sex, and intellect. For there existed, right at hand, a rich, full wholeness of life, to which I belonged, along with others like me, a whole that I might someday grasp by way of thought on the written page, though I knew I’d never get all of it.18 The whole is accessible to the “commonwealth of the living,” and cannot be exhausted. It is destroyed, though, by the “prying pettiness” of science, by irony, and by the cruelty of recent history.19 It connotes harmony and warmth, connecting one’s human features to a transcendent, “magical” meaning. He is not “simply” a scrap of humanity but part, he implies, of some higher, more meaningful formation; his individual perceptions have significance beyond the immediate present. The poetic speaker can be alone but not lonely if he recognizes his part in the whole and ceases to require materialist definitions of belonging. The poet serves it because it needs a high style, “lofty voices holding forth,” and this type of style may do justice to “the whole.”20 Zagajewski’s exposition of this whole, though, is curiously one-sided, never accounting for the negative content of this allembracing unity. He holds that cruelty breaks it down, yet an inclusive idea of wholeness would account for the plural, complex nature of the events and persons within it. This is a problematic aspect of Zagajewski’s thought. 18

Another Beauty 64–65. Ibid 64–66. Zagajewski’s critical relationship to the twentieth century is remarkable. His general, often overdramatized statements about “modern irony” and “recent history” should be taken with a grain of salt, because they are primarily emotional expressions, not intended to be historically verifiable. 20 Ibid 72. 19

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This problem creates a rift between his essays and his poems and within his poems themselves. Zagajewski’s poetry does give voice to such plurality even while his essays do not fully account for it. Poetry can prevent belonging as well as foster it; imagistic details may complicate, not clarify, a poem’s surface. They may even move the poem in a different direction, so that the ostensible intent of the speaker and the subjective reverberations of the text work at cross-purposes. In an unusual juxtaposition of images and emotional registers, “the streets are open like empty beer cans” that “sing the same hymn” of their own will, the poet writes in “Escalator,” a lament against the emptiness of banal technology that paralyzes the active will.21 Yet how can his empty cans suitably oppose this degraded world? How can they fit with the statement that “a whisper will suffice” to “burn shrines,” that “laughter, scorn” are the enemies of the spirit? The speaker may be untrustworthy, offering plebeian images while celebrating hymns and shrines. Are garbage and song compatible, and do they both exist in the world of art? We must conclude they are and do, yet the poem as a whole communicates the sterility of contemporary culture, not its multifarious energy. By this point, the reader is unsettled, as the text invites us into a close relationship and then pushes us away. Simile has the potential to yoke discrepant environments, leading the reader to question whether they are linked by complement, contrast, or contiguity. We are led out of the poem at moments of disjunction, as we question the nature of the rift. Ambivalence of tone and image make it difficult to form a coherent picture of the speaker’s identity. Zagajewski’s essays invite an easier formulation of identity than his poems, which may use the very devices (scorn, sarcasm) that they decry. This lack of fit has consequences beyond the realm of rhetoric: his images create disjunction as well as forge belonging, and they fundamentally complicate the goal of finding unity through and in poetry. In a recent poem, “Streams fall endlessly/in white robes of mist/as imagination, like a solitary climber,/battles daily with the force of gravity.”22 Such a moment forms a puzzle, one that adds conceptual density to his imagistically rich work. The metaphor here fulfils an aesthetic task, and is not unconventional; the simile, on the other hand, complicates the thinking that these images are called upon to do. They bring the poem closer to Zagajewski’s expository statements: just as the imagination must battle the “gravity” that pulls it down from the heights it wishes to attain, so does poetry battle the downward pull of contemporary culture and of materialism. Just as high style seeks to overmaster the pull of gravity, so does the poem 21

“Ruchome schody,” Pragnienie (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2000) 45. “The Rhône Valley,” Unseen Hand, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) 92. Original “Dolina Rodanu,” Niewidzialna ręka (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2009) 85. 22

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seek to create an impression of aesthetic power despite its admission of struggle, and the possible futility of a struggle against extrahuman forces that may threaten its very health (as the climber is threatened by air that is too thin as well as by “the force of gravity”). It is a fleeting moment, but holds in embryo some of Zagajewski’s strongest and most controversial beliefs about art. “Sails” (“Żagle”), on the other hand, allows itself to indulge the author’s fantasy by describing particular “evenings, scarlet as Phoenician sails,” that blind and disorient the viewer. The simile takes us into uncharted territory: we are called upon to visualize an imagined quality, a referent we can only imagine. In order for it to work, he needs to establish imaginative communion with his reader(s): one must imagine as he does.23 This image of evening is the emotional summit of the poem, yet it blinds the speaker, as he visualizes his senses being shut down by the image itself. Such an image is opposite to Lvov, which depends on the speaker’s desire to exist. Unable to participate in the initial sublime image, the speaker moves to explication. “This is how epochs end,” he thinks, how life nears its terminus, and “what’s left is dust, smoke, . . .and fear looking like/joy, and the end, which is tranquillity.” His diction descends from exotic polysyllables (Polish “purpurowe,” “fenickie”) to monosyllables (in Polish, “idą na dno,” “kurz,” “dym,” “żwir,” “lęk”— partially echoed by “sink,” “droop,” “dust,” “smoke”). In the eighth line, the words gradually expand (from the disyllabic “koniec,” “cisza”—“end” and “silence”—to “uspokojenie,” “tranquility,” five syllables). In order to find this tranquility, he must move to concept and feeling, away from immediate sensation. This is a new stage of writing: Zagajewski is not focused on explaining the relation between self and others, present moment and history, but on plumbing the depths of visionary perception. This reveals inconsistencies in the speaker’s identity. Here, it reveals an unexpected relation between the perceiver and image, one that may surprise readers of Zagajewski’s essays who expect him to feel at home in the sublime. The speaker’s assertions—“this is how epochs end”—all derive from the original imaginative act and from his attempt to domesticate the image he calls forth; hence, the second stanza moves from simile into metaphor. He wants to keep one foot in the rational world, to draw conclusions from impressions; the extraordinary product of imagination must be reckoned with more soberly. The speaker discovers, with some humor and relief, that this is not apocalypse but “only another/dress rehearsal,” something repeatable and inauthentic. The second stanza uses metaphor as its method of yoking insight with sober realization. The speaker tells the reader what the scene means in another imaginary framework, no longer the space of vision but the space of symbol. One can interpret the original scene only by 23 In this sense “scarlet” is an excellent translation for “purpurowe,” since the speaker is evoking a luxurious and unusual hue. “Purple” would fall flat in English.

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means of a secondary figure, that of the “dress rehearsal.” The speaker sees that everything slips back into place; that the banal and humorous activities of life continue. The poem, however, does not itself slip back whence it came; instead, it moves to a brief conclusion in which its voice rises and reverberates: “How patiently you prepare and inure us,/. . . ./what a teacher of history you are, Earth!”24 This third stanza eschews tropes altogether, providing a statement on the figural system itself, couched in an apostrophe, but directed toward the reader that has accompanied the speaker’s visionary journey. The poem’s division into three stanzas of diminishing length gradually attenuates the claims of vision. The most loaded word here is “inure,” literally “domesticate” (“oswajasz”). The Polish word has “swój,” meaning “one’s own,” at its root: the earth makes us its own, the poem implies, and does not allow us to break free into fully independent identities. The very capacity for vision becomes domesticated, leaving the speaker in the “dress rehearsal” of an event that can only take place in the imagination. Repetition may render us less responsive to extraordinary sensation. We become both pupils and subjects of a history lesson: imagination takes its place in linear time. The same poem that establishes an autonomous visionary space ends up pulling the speaker down to untranscendent earthly existence, forced to reckon with the “history” that Zagajewski has tried to flee. A disjunctive simile creates a space where the poem need not compromise verisimilitude, yet Zagajewski’s poetry occasionally gives voice to a longing for the imagination to take full license. It is parallel to his desire to fill nameless sites with his own perceptions (as in “I Walked Through the Medieval Town”). Allowing for imaginative autonomy necessarily entails homelessness because when he rests in a single, historical space, he is confronted by the burden of memory. Remembrance of the familiar and the historical restricts his imagination. He feels an ethical pull to confront the fruits of memory, yet memory prevents him from living fully in the present and casting off the pressures of the “real.” Zagajewski is not, however, a fantasist. He reveals a way in which imagination is a form of perceiving the here and now. Lvov can be seen at any moment and in any location. “Sails” moves out from sublimity to patience, its shift from simile to metaphor part of this process: the speaker steps out of the extraordinary to reckon with the ordinary, albeit through the lens of symbolic equivalence. In this way, a simile that is eccentric to the text creates its own imagistic space within the poem it inhabits. Here the poet is no longer bound by the logic of argument. In “I Walked Through the Medieval Town,” the speaker’s choice of identity is entirely willed. In “To Go to Lvov,” the speaker’s choice to leave for Lvov is based on intimacy with the contours of this idealized place, and his imagery is based on empirical facts (geography, autobiography). In 24

Without End 14. Original “Żagle,” Płótno 55.

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“Sails,” the simile opens out a space of otherness that cannot be inhabited. It must first be domesticated, made one’s own, and this need leads the speaker (unwillingly, ironically) back to history.25 The figural work of the poem is complex enough that it ends by acting out the destruction of the space that it sought to celebrate. Moments of conceptual disjunction often coincide with tonal disjunction, creating a second line of feeling within the poetry that may work at crosspurposes to the primary one. There is a strong undercurrent of dark energy in Zagajewski’s poems. Many of the images introduced by Zagajewski’s figures are images of madness, violence, or apocalypse. The speaker of “Sails” moves from wonder at aesthetic plenitude to awe at the specter of annihilation: “This is how epochs end, I thought.” He does not disguise his longing for “the end, which is tranquility.” This is a logical outgrowth of the speaker’s desire for novelty. The great disenchantment of the poem occurs when he realizes that history might be a necessary component of belonging. If every new sensation is domesticated by memory and linear process, then only apocalypse can satiate the speaker’s thirst for absolutely authentic, undomesticated grandeur that annihilates history. In “The Close of Summer,” this dark force takes over the poem. It also includes an unusual simile, one that delivers an imagistic affront to the reader. The commuter train speeds through detachments of suburbs like a dagger hungry only for the heart. ... the heat, like a customs officer, palpates each thing in its skin.26 The translation cannot replicate the plosive and sibilant alliterations of the Polish, but it does create the same sense of readerly surprise at the train’s hunger for flesh. Desire is allied with an urge to kill, and the jerky movement of the poem propels it toward a menacing endpoint. Aestheticized images of summer (trees and dragonflies, melting ice cream, “the setting sun’s crimson”) coexist with the dagger, its hunger, the intrusive officer. The speaker is merging two types of artistic sensation, the painterly surface-level touche adding color and texture and the subliminal shiver of premonition that subconsciously registers threat. Agency, planning, and power all belong to the dark force that embodies itself in a train and an officer; we are 25 In my reading I juxtapose the linear, causal process of history with the timeless, transcendent realm of vision. The difficulty of creating any sort of bridge between vision and history is one of Adam Zagajewski’s main themes here. 26 “Podmiejski pociąg pędził przez willowe pustynie / jak sztylet, który spragniony jest tylko serca.” Without End 192, original “Schyłek lata” in Płótno 7.

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compelled to accept its tactile presence, and this force ends up swallowing the poem. A disruptive simile, then, can create a counterpoint that becomes dominant. The startling disjunctions within Zagajewski’s poems often involve his use of a dark, yet endlessly fruitful, fund of imagery that works against the positive, aestheticizing outlook one meets with more often. This dark undercurrent is particularly conspicuous in his unusual similes. Does his insistence upon poetry’s positive function conceal an irrational attraction to destruction that he refuses to account for in his expository prose? Zagajewski clearly crafts a poetic persona in his prose works (especially A Defense of Ardor, Another Beauty, and Two Cities). His poetry reveals that the self ’s relation to place is fluid and that change may lead to destructive as well as harmonious ends; “the whole” is more inclusive in his poems than in his expository definition of the concept, admitting disharmony. These qualities are most visible in the work of his poetic similes. It is therefore ironic that this author allies praise with rhetoric, because it is precisely in the rhetorical figures of the poems that a fascination with darkness shows through. The reader is forced to grapple with these moments of difference when the poem seems to turn against itself. Do we see unity within a poetic text because we think that “fit” is a measure of quality? There is an all-too-common equation of unity with quality, and Zagajewski echoes this sentiment by associating wholeness and praise. This flattens out his work, inviting readers to view Zagajewski as an aesthete, as one who puts his own “poetic” tendencies on a pedestal.27 Desire may ultimately prove a more useful term for understanding this work than “high style.” They are, though, connected: Zagajewski’s positive aesthetic program is based on assent to the world; so is desire, yet his desire moves past a celebration of the perceived world into darker territory. His insistence on attentiveness is based on an awareness that the single moment is always threatened by “shadow,” annihilation: “Poetry summons us to life, to courage/in the face of the growing shadow.”28 Art itself is a response to threat. It responds by affirming its own life and “summoning” us to, perhaps, a more intense form of life, a courageous attention. The dark undercurrent of his poetry also has its source in the poet’s desire for movement. He hungers for images. He is fascinated with transformation and his images always move or change— he never creates still lives. Fire serves as his symbol for both ardor and transformation. His ardor for new and difficult images, for a constantly transmogrified selfhood, is fueled by a passion which leads to “fear looking 27 See, for example, Polish poet Marcin Baran’s review of Zagajewski’s volume Płótno, wherein he faults Zagajewski for writing irritatingly mannered poems of “a sick beauty” (“chore piękno”). Marcin Baran, “Logorea Lorda Chandosa,” brulion 14–15 (1990): 143–6. 28 “Houston, 6 p.m.,” Without End 276–77. Original “Houston, szósta po południu,” in Pragnienie 18–19.

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like/joy, and the end, which is tranquillity.” He is not a sensualist because he does not savor the individual sensation but rushes headlong into another, or pushes himself away from the sensation in order to think it through. This tendency creates a sense of excess in many of Zagajewski’s poems. He is fascinated by the twin poles of absence and plenitude, and his poems fiddle with these concepts, considering the communicative capacity of silence (“The Gothic”) or the need to limit plenitude (“Presence”) in order to create beauty: “Might only the absence of presence be perfect?/Presence, after all, infected with the original/sin of existence, is excessive, savage.”29 Zagajewski’s imagination collapses binaries as readily as it creates them. His categories elide even as he explores one state to its extremity. His personae also change: the sensitive intellectual, savoring fine art and music, feels adolescent glee at the specter of annihilation. The mature poet, admiring form and wholeness, also feels an irrepressible attraction to chaos. The poet who assiduously fought the tyranny of historical interpretation, who planted his feet firmly in the present moment, eventually begins a journey back to the past. This is a journey to his past, not to an “objective” history lesson, and is, as Śliwiński noted, not a factual appraisal but a desire to be yet elsewhere; the poet’s desire for novelty brings him around full circle. Zagajewski states in interview that he tries to find “a type of return that allows one to live further, that is only a phase, a passage to a further, continued life” (originally in Polish, “przejście do dalszego życia”). In other words, he seeks a return that is part of the overarching theme of travel that defines him. In poetry, he states, sincerity can mean only loyalty to one’s own imagination and the effort to go beyond it, despite everything.30 In Jechać do Lwowa, the past was used as a springboard for the exploration of ideals. In Powrót (Return, 2003), the poet reconsiders the relationship of the ideal to the actual: how far may the poet’s character be contingent upon a deep sense of belonging? Is there a limit to his wandering? What happens when the eternal traveler goes back “home”? Zagajewski paves the way for Powrót in an earlier poem (from Ziemia ognista) that self-consciously probes the multiple emotive valances of terms such as “travel” and “home.” “Traveler” is, unusually for Zagajewski, entirely in third person. A skeptical traveler “finds himself” in a “foreign city” and is engulfed by a collection of symbols he cannot explicate. Its trees are blooming, and “foreignness bloomed devoutly” as well, as if in thrall to some higher power or knowledge. Its residents are “full of fear,” a conjecture that fascinates the speaker, who spends the rest of the poem finding ominous, threatening, and apocalyptic elements that may corroborate it. Indeed, 29

“Presence,” Without End 163. Adam Zagajewski in interview with Krystyna Lenkowska 29 December 2003, Zeszyty literackie 86 (2004): 175–77. My translation and emphasis.

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the scenic elements of this place are bolder than its foreign visitor and its residents, who are uncertain of the meanings that surround them, lurking in scarlet shadows and the peals of univocal church bells. Nobody is able to lay claim to this place. The visitor and local residents are united in their sense of threat, yet such community is not empowering, and at the end, instead of feeling a sense of liberation during his visit, the traveler feels relief as he contemplates departure: putting his hand to his chest, checking warily to make sure he still had his return ticket to the ordinary places where we live.31 Zagajewski’s technique of using vague phrases and repetition at the same time builds tension and mystery in an almost cinematic manner. The rich quality of non-native words, such as “szkarłat” and “unisono” in Polish, vanishes as the banal diction of the last stanza brings us down to earth. The extraordinary abruptly ends; it has not enabled a new type of vision but, curiously, threatened the very place where it became visible. In the last line, the traveler broaches a first-person plural, always worth interrogating in Zagajewski’s work. He is singled out from the foreign crowd by his possession of a return ticket, yet upon his hypothetical return he will take his place in another collective. There is, perhaps, a limit to solitude and visionary perception that he has just discovered. This poem relies on a common notion of normalcy. In order to feel thrilled by foreignness, we need a shared knowledge of “the ordinary places” and a shared sense that eccentricity from our “ordinary” orbit may occasion fear. The traveler’s gesture—reaching for his ticket—is also a gesture reaffirming belief—putting his hand on his heart. The ticket reaffirms his belief that he does belong someplace stable, to which he will return. This takes the place of nihilism (at the beginning of the poem, he “believe[s] in nothing”). The extraordinary may not be habitable.32 The poem does not paint a picture or mimetically represent a certain experience, but summons a feeling reacting to foreignness. This represents a transitional stage for Zagajewski, as the liberating quality of travel is put into question in poems such as “Airport in Amsterdam,” in which an empty and soulless space designed for transit through it, with the crowd in perpetual flight among “waiting rooms filled with other people’s dreams/stained by misfortune,” is seen as “a good place 31

“Traveler,” Without End 246; “Podróżny,” Ziemia ognista 40. We may oppose this attitude to that of Julia Hartwig, who relishes the quotidian details of “other” places because, as she realizes, they are only as “other” as we make them. “Traveler” relies on an essentialized “normalcy” that is unusual for Zagajewski, and unthinkable for Hartwig.

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for absence.” This unusual formulation contrasts with the traveler’s elation in “I Walked Through the Medieval Town,” in which freedom from strict itineraries or predetermined roles is allied with richness of life (“I could choose; I could live”). In the later poem, travel is associated with hurry, and hurry is associated with heartlessness, lack of “care”; airplanes, necessary for achieving the liberation of travel, are likened to predatory birds.33 The poem does not end with a sense of the rich potential of emptiness, as did “The Gothic.” The poet feels spiritually eviscerated, not empowered. Zagajewski’s symbol of freedom and epiphany, the traveler, is no longer a creator of imaginative homelands but a victim of homelessness. He is menaced, not enabled, by emptiness. His voice is changing: the speaker of Pragnienie (Desire, 1999) is not a disembodied eye, but a man with a biography and a fund of experiences. The voice that writes such casual, self-descriptive lines as “Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter/ half my day passes” could well be the poet himself. This is a major shift from a universal to a bounded self. Poems that sublimate or even evaporate individual selfhood run the risk of overlooking the necessary individuality of the speaking voice, refusing to reckon with singularity and limitation. Zagajewski’s recent speaker acknowledges a single, grounded home (“my city”) and links the wanderer with a specific personality, but still cannot reconcile himself to a single “actual” home. “To See” illustrates his ambiguous position. The speaker begins by praising a place he knows and loves—“Oh my mute city, honey-gold”—yet ends in transit once again, defending his choice to travel: “I’m writing from the road, I had to see, / and not just know, to see clearly / the sights and fires of a single world.”34 The voice has two personae, a nostalgic poet speaking for the city and a traveler, who wants to see a world in movement. This split voice does not, however, create an ironic tone. The homophonic similarity of certain words—“widzieć,” to see, and “wiedzieć,” to know, as well as (more distantly) “pożary,” fires, and “obrazy,” sights (pictures)—brings together actions, perceptions, and knowledge. The two personae are in separate situations: the nostalgic poet dwells in an “unmoving” town “turned to stone,” while the traveler is active, “writing from the road.” The poet’s mind swings far away from its opening invocation of the “honey-gold” city, as the reader is made to realize the difficulty inherent in a nostalgic subjectposition. He rejects the idea of remaining static, trapped in one place. This poem sets up a conflict between “my city” and “elsewhere” that can only be resolved if the poet agrees to face the past.

33

Without End 256–57; original “Lotnisko w Amsterdamie” in Ziemia ognista 52–3. “To See,” Without End 3–4. Original “Widzieć” in Pragnienie 47–8. The punning climax of the poem reads as follows: “piszę z podróży—bo chciałem widzieć, / a nie tylko wiedzieć— widzieć wyraźnie / pożary i obrazy jedynego świata.”

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The poet is readying himself for another confrontation with history, this time with his personal past. Lvov is and always will be a mythic place where imagination triumphs over historical fact. The other city that Zagajewski views with longing is Krakow. This city carries the weight of personal memory, which Lvov does not. He describes his initial attraction to Krakow as somewhat naïve and idealistic, and for the older poet, the expectations of his youth vie with his actual experience. Here is another foundational issue that troubles belonging: what happens when adult experience dulls the brilliance of youthful experience, and a once-loved place is demystified? Krakow is never demystified entirely, but the central question of Powrót is whether the personal history interfused with a long-lost place can also fuse with one’s desire for a dynamic, changing space, and whether Zagajewski’s compulsive wandering will cease once he wanders back here. His poetic speaker is still on a quest, but he turns it backward: rather than try to discern his ideal in the changing world surrounding him, in Powrót he looks back to a familiar city and asks whether it has the ability to reawaken a sense of consonance between self and place. In these poems he interrogates the link between belonging and identity. The poetic question is whether the voice can fuse images from the past with the poet’s present situation without creating a rupture large enough to destabilize the whole idea of identity—in other words, whether memory can exist in the present moment without forcing him to confront a chasm between the two. Will the speaker find links between the previous and the current self, and will they result in the establishment of one, continuous poetic identity? Will the self diffuse itself, reject the past, or find a meaningful way to link the timeless present of the epiphanic moment to a sense of history? This self is still protean. It still clings to events like water to a jar, but the events (and places) are culled from memory, though memory is no guarantor of belonging. The volume’s opening poem begins with uncertainty, as the speaker arrives in “his” city. Late in the evening, you drive in to your city, to dark streets, to the dark stains of windows, ... you don’t yet know if the city is absent, if this is a city of plague or a city of shades, if maybe it harbors a grudge against you, if it is so indifferent you might as well not exist. Emphasis is not placed upon the joy of homecoming but upon absence. There is an ominous atmosphere of ill-health (stains, plague, “shades” meaning revenants) that registers, perhaps, the traveler’s urge to move on, even before he has actually come to rest in the city (the same feeling will

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trouble Hartwig as she enters a foreign land). It is dark and silent, qualities underscored by the whisper sounds of the Polish “ciemnych,” “czarnych,” “ciemnej ciszy.”35 The long, calm lines, repeated prepositions (“to . . ., to . . .” in English), and the parallelism (“if it is. . . if it is”) are attempts to create regularity in this uncertain situation; the lines shrink with fear as he asks (rhetorically) if the city is indifferent to him.36 This lack of reciprocal emotion leads him to hypothesize his own absence—“you might as well not exist.” This reads differently from the ecstatic diffusion of the “I” in “The Self”—this effacement is unwilled. The rest of the volume addresses the self ’s presence, its physical and psychological interaction with the city. The “I” is now embodied. He speaks in the second person in several poems, revealing that the focus of his gaze is not Krakow but himself responding to Krakow. He comes to realize that absence may be viewed as openness: the unexpected silence that greets his return can be filled by his own voice. He does not find an immediate reciprocal bond between person and place but also does not find a history that forces itself upon him. This idea of filling the mysteriously “absent” city is another incarnation of Zagajewski’s focus on potentiality. The project of “return” is, again, a project of forging rather than finding identity. The volume’s perspective is different because this speaker no longer feels ecstatic at the prospect of absolute novelty. In “Nieznana” (“Unknown”), he finds an unknown street outside his map37 and finds it threatening: “[it] dips sharply downwards/like a hawk upon a mouse.” The emotional turn of the poem takes place, once again, in the simile, as his place becomes predatory (yet Zagajewski is too subtle a poet to belabor the parallel of self with prey). The speaker’s loss of control over “his” city occasions a disproportionate fear. The street disappears, but “for sure it will return/perhaps it will return/ in an unknown time/and in an unknown place.”38 The vulnerability of his creative effort is underscored. The attempt to formalize his return to Krakow is threatened by this irruption of the unknown, unplanned, and unaccountable; his larger attempt to rethink belonging is baffled by a force that does not allow him to belong. The unknowable will return, he muses, and leaves his poem unpunctuated. Its repetition creates a portentous echo, but his attempt to exert formal control is submerged by the gradually rising 35

“Późnym wieczorem wjeżdżasz do swojego miasta,/do ciemnych ulic, do czarnych plam okien, / do ciemnej ciszy, do kotów, które się chowają. . .” 36 The Polish preposition “do” and interrogative “czy” are repeated in these lines. The speaker worries about presence and indifference: “jeszcze nie wiesz, czy to miasto jest nieobecne, / . . . / czy też jest tak obojętne, / że mógłbyś nie istnieć wcale.” From “Wieczorem” (“In the Evening”), Powrót (Krakow: Znak, 2003) 5. 37 Zagajewski puns on the dual meaning of the Polish word “plan,” which means both “map” and “plan”: he writes, “nie ma jej na planie / i nie ma jej w planie” [it isn’t on the map / it isn’t in the plan]. The poem constantly repeats words and constructions, forming itself by accretion. Powrót 21. 38 “ale powróci na pewno/być może powróci/w nieznanym terminie/i w nieznanym miejscu.”

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pitch of fear in the speaker’s voice. The known time of his past gives way to the unknown time of the future, and the known city breaks apart to reveal a substratum of the unknown. The speaker’s initial “for sure” is qualified by his growing realization of his disoriented state. He is not asserting his will upon an amenable space, but is being preyed upon by a space that refuses to fulfill his desires. This speaker is troubled by a lack of reciprocity between eye and scene. There is something juvenile about his clamor for recognition and worry over the parental city’s anger or indifference; much of the time, though, he receives the recognition he craves and harmoniously fuses willed memory with present perception. As a volume, however, Powrót cracks along this faultline between memory and the changing present. The two cannot be seamlessly joined because the Zagajewskian speaker’s need for movement renders anything static uninhabitable, and memory is, frequently, static, closed-off, and complete. There is an artificiality to the programmatic mining of memory for the ore of epiphany. The tension between mimetic loyalty (accurate description) and will (constructing images according to desire) is hidden under the surface of Zagajewski’s poems. The static and often threatening nature of memory must be reckoned with, and Powrót reconsiders the poet’s previous fear of historical tyranny by consciously summoning his own history, however disempowering he fears it may be. The past is allowed to speak, fill poems with images, and animate them with bygone events. The poet’s mind concentrates on a single, “real” place—Krakow—in order to see whether the claims of the past can furnish a basis for his sense of belonging. The city is consciously put forth as an example of wholeness. Because it is an organic whole—not an imposed form—it allows the poet to enter into mimetic relation with it without compromising its reality. On both the figural and the ideational level, however, Zagajewski rejects every closed form. The poet refuses to dwell in one image; the self refuses a single subject-position. I returned to the city of sweet cakes, bitter chocolate and lovely funerals (a grain of hope was once buried here), the city of starched memory— but the anxiety that drives wanderers, and turns the wheels of bicycles, mills, and clocks, won’t leave me, it remains concealed in my heart like a starving deserter in an abandoned circus wagon.39

“Stolarska Street,” Eternal Enemies 10–11, Powrót 27. 39

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Here, truth to the self does not entail sinking into Yeats’s rag and bone shop of the heart, but recognizing the basic urge to change and move on, to create one’s own spectacles, and, at the cost of not-belonging, to refuse a single home. Krakow offers the sensual lavishness that the aesthete would seek and the inspiration that a visionary would need, yet even Krakow cannot be home. To Zagajewski, a symbolic ideal can never be complete and at rest, because even during a strenuous pursuit of belonging, the poet’s mind keeps running farther. This is partly why the traveler of his poems always appears anonymous and featureless, a man with emotional but not physical qualities—Bożena Shallcross calls him “seemingly devoid of all physical attributes.”40 She notes his invitations to the reader to function as co-participant, and this point can be expanded ever farther: his desire to assume and shed identities, to define himself between groups and, indeed, between definitions (a wanderer who does not wander), results in this featurelessness, and his address to the reader allows for recognition (we recognize the voice, the personality) without manifesting a physical presence. The spatial interactions of Powrót continue this project of avoiding “physical attributes” while exploring identitarian possibilities, even while, as Shallcross points out, the traveler allows his descriptions to be guided by the creative imagination more than fact or sensory verifiability (18). “The anxiety” speeds the traveler, leads him through the fearful interrogations of Zagajewski’s middle period, and comes to a head in two poems from Anteny (2005). The motif of the refugee, wandering exile, or “deserter,” is picked up in both, first as a term of disparagement: Who should you have been, who knows. ... Why in this era, why in this country, which hadn’t been born yet, who knows. Why among exiles, in an apartment that had been German, amid grief and mourning and vain hopes of regaining a myth.41 Derek Mahon will also be tempted by a return to myth, as an alternative to the traditional return home. He takes his desire for re-enchantment seriously, and so does Zagajewski, but not in this guise—he has lived too long with the “myth” of Lvov, perhaps, to have patience with its more banal repercussions, “grief and mourning” (Polish “żal i narzekanie,” or “grief and 40 Bożena Shallcross, Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002) 17. 41 “Walk through This City,” trans. Clare Cavanagh, World Literature Today 80.1 (Jan.–Feb. 2006): 38; originally “Idź przez to miasto,” Anteny (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2005) 15.

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complaining”) among people he sees as, literally, refugees (“uchodźcy”). “Walk through This City” is not an especially dark poem, but its questions have a desperate edge: never truly posed in the interrogative, they serve as admonitions, as doubts, rather than queries seeking answers. Their effect is acceptance—the speaker knows that identity is irrational and perhaps unknowable (as earlier sensed in “The Gothic”), that personal fate is a possible yet maddening notion in face of this irrationality, and that “high style” and sublimity are notions more credible in auspicious circumstances than in aesthetically impoverished ones—yet he does not speak in the guise of an angry rebel. The confusions and betrayals resulting from the Yalta Agreement are not, here, the main subject of the poem. The anxiety so stunningly figured in “Stolarska Street” is cresting in “Walk through This City,” as the anxiety compared to a “deserter” becomes doubly incarnated in the literal “exiles” or refugees in post-German Silesia (including Zagajewski’s family) and the figurative “exile” of a poet who is (in 2005) allowed to go everywhere but belongs nowhere. Whereas the “hungry deserter” of the previous poem is a not unattractive figure, desperate yet possessing an outlaw glamour, propelled by a constructive energy that turns the physical world (as opposed to “starched” memory, the repressive stricture of history), in the later poem exilic status is disparaged. The speaker’s birth in a country not yet “born” is implicitly associated with the “grief and mourning” experienced among refugee exiles, who own their “vain hopes” more than their country or dwelling-places. He associates exilic status with lack of ownership, not a liberating sense of possibilities gained but a disabling sense of something lost and something unattainable (a futile “myth”). In “Night is a Cistern,” refugees “tread meadow roads” with an audible and “endless grief.” Again, the speaker is not quite fully connected to these mournful figures: “[w]ho are you, walking in this worried crowd,” he asks.42 Once more, questions of identity fuse with expressions of lost belonging. The tone is melancholic, less desperate than the previous poem. What becomes clear despite the ambiguous imagery and tone of both is that Zagajewski’s earlier correlation of not-belonging and liberation is no longer evident. The “unrest” that had always provided constructive motivation has become a burden, similar to that carried by refugees on an endless walk. It is a necessary oppression, without which he cannot construe the questions or plumb the “cistern” of images that lies before him. The ecstasy of “Without Form,” though, has long passed, and these interrogations (“who are you”) do not result in the thrill of potentiality, of feeling that choice and desire go hand in hand. The sharp thrill felt upon encountering the unknown as it enters a poetic figure has, likewise, been muted.

42

Eternal Enemies 68.

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In his most recent volume, his previous unrest is finally happy to accept its pacification. In “The Last Stop” (“Ostatni przystanek”), a teenaged speaker thinks that the world will come clear to him at the end of his journey, that “the meaning of it all would stand revealed,” and yet his discovery that “nothing happened, nothing” is curiously muffled.43 The poem dips easily back to the everyday, as our teenager settles back to observe ordinary life taking its accustomed course. His search for meaning reveals nothing, but he does not feel the hunger of Zagajewski’s earlier wanderer, for whom return will never be enough. The questioning of this expectation connects Anteny with Niewidzialna ręka (Unseen Hand)—the plaintive interrogations of the former lead to mixed conclusions in the latter. It seems as though the melancholy matter of imperfect belonging and uncertain identity has become accepted—“You consider how not to be yourself,” the speaker relates (99)— with bemusement and wonder. The sight of a bright new hotel, far from reminding him of the soulless airport in Amsterdam or the fate of homeless refugees, suddenly turns epiphanic, only what the epiphany reveals is, simply, happiness: “glass, concrete, / amnesia—and suddenly, I don’t know why, / a moment of penetrating joy” (3). This moment is brilliant but exceptional, and the strangely pokerfaced quality of Zagajewski’s most recent poetry is worth mentioning: one wonders whether the desperate search for Lvov, the sense of menace encapsulated in his similes, and the compulsion to grapple with various histories have been stilled, hushed, and smoothed over. Zagajewski does not offer a resolution to his lifelong pursuit of an ideal home, nor does he finally crystallize the water-like self into a firm form. Thematically, his poetry continues to celebrate mutability and formlessness, as represented by the scattered group of poems about rivers (which, to Czesław Miłosz, signify eternal return, but to Zagajewski signify transience). Again, the speaker does not need or wish to know the mystery of their speech. Zagajewski summons the unknown as frequently as he has in Powrót, but now the unknown is seen as mystery rather than threat. The speaker approaches this mystery in a spirit of mystical subsumption rather than negative capability: we do not know and we cannot understand, he reiterates. Yet the very repetition of this phrase creates the effect of a choral refrain rather than an angry outcry. This is Zagajewski’s manner of finally enacting the triumph of the lyrical over the rational and of formlessness over stricture. Our terms of reference are being stretched to their utmost: “form” must be here understood epistemologically, as an impulse to shape and determine knowledge as a result of our contact with the world’s phenomena. In order to accept and to celebrate, we must rid ourselves of our compulsion to formalize. This is not a religious impulse in Zagajewski’s work, but an epistemological one, because this type of formlessness will allow a deeper sense of belonging to become manifest, 43

Unseen Hand 43, Niewidzialna ręka 43.

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even if it remains unuttered and not-understood. The “unrest” and hunger of the speaker in “Stolarska Street” will not find resolution. This is the deep knowledge undergirding Zagajewski’s work after Powrót. Not-knowing, however, can occur in a daylight world where identity is not threatened (as in “The Gothic”), but where the world’s “impassive” silence is almost salvational: No one saw, no cameras, Only an azure eye: absolute ignorance, serenity, glory, bliss. ... Is it a memory or the promise of new life?44 The final question, despite its rhetorical quality, hearkens back to Zagajewski’s earlier work. Can the bliss of going to Lvov be recreated in such deracinated terms? Can a scene without history and without future history (“no cameras” will hold its image) possess the radiance that allows the self to forget questions of form and knowledge in the “absolute ignorance” of bliss? The question is aimed toward the poet himself, who is constantly tempted by the position of elegist yet whose aesthetic constructs an emblem of future-oriented belonging. Is “the promise of new life” what the hungry refugee seeks in “Stolarska Street,” hiding in the circus of ordinariness, and is this the promise what Lvov originally offered—not “honey-gold” nostalgia but the driving impetus to escape into a novelty that will retain the hue of nostalgia but allow for complete severance from public history? “Foreignness is splendid” but it is “a cold pleasure” (10) unless enlivened by such a “promise” of novelty as “glory.” This scene exemplifies Zagajewski’s new focus upon a tranquility that is not an apocalyptic endpoint, but a compact between self and place that is overseen by a pantheistic “azure eye.” The scene is ahistorical, marked by an absolute “ignorance” (“absolutna ignorancja”) that leads, in one quick movement, into “serenity, glory, bliss.” The “I” is barely embodied, but its embodiment no longer matters—this is not the main problematic of Zagajewski’s latest work. Viewed from this perspective, “foreignness” or otherness may well be “cold” because it no longer worries over specific forms of identification. Specificity of place will suffice; as for the formerly diffuse, restless, self, it is now content to raise formlessness to a symbolic power, to disappear into the absolute.

44

“Impassive,” Unseen Hand 67, original “Nieczuła,” Niewidzialna ręka 63.

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3 Belonging on the edge: Derek Mahon’s outsider poetics “We could be anywhere but are in one place only,” writes Derek Mahon, yet much of his poetic energy is spent wishing himself out of his current place. Mahon does not flee the issues surrounding the concept of “home,” but assesses the insufficiency of this concept throughout his entire oeuvre, looking toward a placeless point apart from the sound and fury of his immediate surroundings and using this distance to measure a transcendent ideal against a real situation. In his early work, Mahon’s speaker addresses his perceived confinement in a network of social obligations centered in Belfast. His early poems struggle to find a space of freedom for the poet, both semantically, in the verbal simulacrum of the finished poem, and symbolically, in a highly stylized space apart, where “apartness” becomes an excessively valued concept, almost a fetish, for a poet who tends toward escapism; this is quite different from Heaney’s early desire for mastery motivated by fear, though each poet ends up contemplating a sort of impasse, an entrapment and a sense of being “lost and at home,” in mid-career. Mahon opens his Collected Poems with the early, point-blank “Spring in Belfast,” its concluding chiasmus counterpointing social interest with poetic worth. The worth and purpose of language are thought through in the contemplative “First Love,” a poetic argument for viewing language as mediative yet self-fulfilling, a “blind” that can conceivably be closed so that the speaker inhabits a purposeful isolation. Mahon’s early poems find their strongest visionary revelation in “Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.,” where the possibility of transmuting natural material into stilled movement, and eventually into a “perfect print,” is evoked in one chiseled stanza. This vision serves as the basis for the figurative process of “The Snow Party” and “The Last of the Fire Kings,” in which Mahon poetically thinks through the consequences of refusing social belonging. Yet one can only refuse so much. This line of thought, in which Mahon obsessively re-figures the poet’s alienation, reaches its crisis when he questions whether writing

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itself can be viewed as an appropriate, aggressive act (“Ovid in Tomis”). The crisis is never fully resolved in Mahon’s work. This is the logical endpoint of one chain of symbolic meditations on belonging in words, in culture, and in the physical locale of his home city.1 Mahon was raised in Belfast, spent several years working and traveling abroad, and, after a considerable period of work in England, finally settled in the Republic. His travels and work abroad link him to the other poets in this study and their significance runs deep as it conditions the way in which Mahon conceives of belonging. His sense of separation from one place must be compared, if not conflated, with his awareness of separation within one place: Mahon’s “dual residence” in a divided Irish culture often turns into “a virtue of non-residence.”2 Duality, a concept that will be important (albeit more abstractly so) to Julia Hartwig, comes close to separation: a dual resident is one who escapes the stranglehold of singular rootedness, of identity essentialized around a single quality. This concept is important for understanding Mahon’s signature sense of homelessness, which is his thematic and attitudinal trademark. In this way, Mahon goes against the grain of a literary tradition that valorizes belonging. The dinnseanchas tradition of place-name continues to be strong in contemporary Irish writing in English, yet Mahon’s place names do not signal belonging. The organic bond between land and writer, who has a special ability to comprehend the essence of his place, underlies this quintessentially Irish tradition, yet Mahon openly states his incomprehension, dissociation, and alienation. “Mahon will agree to be an Ulster writer only if Ulster can comprehend the world,” writes Justin Quinn, an opinion pushed farther by Bruce Stewart: “Mahon identified the true artist as an outsider and with this stroke he repudiated the autochthonous version of Irish culture associated with the theme of ‘sense of place’ soon to be expounded magisterially by Seamus Heaney.”3 Stewart usefully dichotomizes Mahon and Heaney’s relations to a stereotyped Irishness, yet his “sense of place” seems to denote acceptance of place. The equation is not quite true to Mahon’s work: an outsider may be obsessed with the “sense of place” s/he cannot embrace, as is the young Julia Hartwig’s speaker. The young Mahon voices 1 This chapter will consider Mahon’s poetry until The Hunt By Night (1982) and the slender volume Antarctica (1985). After these volumes Mahon began his ten-year poetic silence; his next new volume was The Hudson Letter (1995). 2 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland (London: Routledge, 1997): 131. Kearney goes on to qualify his statement: “But Mahon never fully subscribes to this vocation of absentee wordlord.” His neologism distorts Mahon’s emotional relation to Northern Ireland, though it accurately accounts for Mahon’s periodic re-entry into the space of the political. His persona, however, is self-castigating and uncertain, not lordly in the least. 3 Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 121; Bruce Stewart, “‘Solving Ambiguity:’ The Secular Mysticism of Derek Mahon,” The Poetry of Derek Mahon, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002) 158.

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an acute anxiety over the claims that place may make upon the individual talent. His early “Spring in Belfast” tensely assesses the city’s claims against the speaker’s capacities, as he walks among “his own” in an atmosphere of “conspiracy” with his own interior. “Once more, as before, I remember not to forget,” he admonishes, asserting a “perverse pride” in refusing uplift at the same time as he contemplates how “[w]e could all be saved.” On the one hand, his blusterful assertion of nonchalance refuses assent to the conditions of belonging; on the other hand, he evinces a piercing awareness of others, of the “formulae” and “knowing” gestures they use to forestall direct action, deep communication, or positive action. Over the whole scene, there presides a cold and “sanctimonious God,” troubling the very notion of salvation, of action or feeling that lifts one above the sordid common lot. The best he can hope for is salubrious distance from the city he “must” know as his own: One part of my mind must learn to know its place. The things that happen in the kitchen houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.4 The poem’s title changes from “In Belfast” to “The Spring Vacation,” thus diminishing the city’s claims by noting that the speaker resides elsewhere (Mahon’s persona travels and wanders as much as Zagajewski’s), then finally “Spring in Belfast.” Peter McDonald notes Louis MacNeice’s grim portrayal of the city in the 1931 poem “Belfast”;5 given MacNeice’s strong influence upon Mahon, the “devout and profane and hard” Belfast of “Valediction” also lies behind the tough disclaimer of deep emotion ending “Spring in Belfast.” Just as the latter poem laments that a “woven figure cannot undo its thread,” as the self is wedded to its past (including “things that happen” in the depths of its home), so Mahon’s assertion of tough casualness belies a concern with his own life’s “thread” as it passes through Belfast.6 The poem fuses three levels of diction: the personal meditative lyric, the language of politics and rhetoric (“conspiracy,” “formulae,” “knowing nod,” “desperate city”), and that of Protestant Christianity (“fallen angels,” “saved,” “salvations”). They are not harmonious: “we” are seen indifferently 4

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Loughcrew; Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999) 13. Unless otherwise noted, all poems will be cited from this edition, since it contains the most recent versions of his poems until 1999. 5 Peter McDonald, “History and Poetry: Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin,” The Poet’s Place: Ulster Literature and Society: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 1907–87, eds. Gerald Dawe and John Wilson Foster (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991) 196. 6 Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) 15, 12–13.

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by a cold God, “I” is weighed down by contradictory obligations, and “formulae” displace values and ideals. The “knowing” gestures the conspiracy menace and displaces personal vision, however “spurious” their mystery may be. The “I” dislikes the social gestures he must perform, yet conceals his interior, which may hold the truest “mystery” that the poem refuses to reveal. Its sarcasm is itself a “humorous formula,” as it were, masking the speaker’s mind. As with Zagajewski’s “Fire,” the refusal to “run with others” dominates the poem, yet the reluctance to penetrate the mind’s interior precludes a sense of communion between the poet and his reader. “Spring in Belafast” gestures toward the first-person plural but ends in the singular, even while the poem’s interest lies in the turns of the speaker’s meditation. How ironic is the speaker’s voice? How representative is he of the “desperate city” that echoes within and about him? The prescriptive quality of the poem (“must,” “should”) is typical of the young Mahonian speaker, who repeatedly affirms his inability to live up to such prescriptions. He takes pride in perversity, forming his own “conspiracy” with the unwieldy and recalcitrant in a manner almost reminiscent of Philip Larkin. He is, like Larkin’s speaker, painfully self-aware, as the redundant “Once more, as before” makes clear, and the slight cheekiness of “I remember not to forget” is tempered by the critical self-admonition that underlies and undercuts his glibness. His self-awareness functions as a stumbling block, as it will for the older Mahon. The neat rhymes of this poem evoke closed emotional circuits that must be broken, implying an insecure self-contentment. Although Mahon’s generation is famous for its early formalism, his poems choose to highlight the speaker’s self-enclosure in a manner that reflects back on their own formal structures. This will be an exemplary feature of Mahon’s work. Stan Smith’s infamous criticism of Northern Irish poets, and Mahon in particular, centers on this very sort of skepticism, which takes a “finally uncomprehending stance” toward civil violence, showing its hands clean and speaking with “the tone of a shell-shocked Georgianism that could easily be mistaken for indifference.”7 Mahon’s own literariness becomes a distancing technique, purposefully thwarting the subject’s identification with the actors involved in the violence of its surroundings (189–90). Similarly to David Lloyd in the latter’s critique of Heaney, Smith perspicaciously notes the identitarian root of this situation: what is at stake is the subject’s willingness to plunge into a deep collective identity that would reveal its complicity in the collective politics of its home. Whereas Lloyd faults Heaney for an inability to adequately represent the identitarian ruptures, Smith faults Mahon for an inability to adequately inhabit a personal identity that is, at root, part of a collective. This is, of course, the very foundation of Mahon’s 7 Stan Smith, Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1982) 188–89. For a bibliographically rich account of the Heaney-Mahon-Longley group, see Heather Clark’s The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962–1972.

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poetry, its initial problem, its guiding issue—his poetry is motivated not by a desire to express belonging but a difficult need to express what precludes belonging. An insurmountable pull toward privacy is countered by the speaker’s sense of obligation to his place. It bears resemblance to the young Zagajewski’s desire to engage in a menacing reality; although he will not cast himself as a socio-historical moralist, he grudgingly recognizes the necessity of being a participant. His terms of obligation—“must” and “should”—are attached to the unspecified “things that happen,” yet such vague phrases cannot convey the exigency that would countermand his protest. The poem is not occasional. First published in 1964, when Mahon was twenty-three, it is tempting to read “Spring in Belfast” proleptically, as a response to critics who would later accuse him of escapism.8 Yet the Northern Irish Troubles had not yet officially begun; Mahon had not acquired the sort of stature that would cause people to make socio-political demands of his verse. When the poet writes, “One part of my mind must learn to know its place,” he uses a phrase whose repressive colloquial significance (“know your place”) contrasts with the project of finding comprehension (“knowing” as intimate understanding). A person who knows his place will not venture beyond it; he will be denied the freedom of placelessness. One part of his mind must “know his place,” and if knowing Belfast is equivalent to being pigeonholed as a poet of merely one place, then the rest of the mind must remain at large. For a young poet, knowing his place would entail pulling in his horizons. The financial metaphor of the last two lines—in which the “things that happen” should “engage more than my casual interest/Exact more interest than my casual pity”—achieves its strength from the inexactness of the chiasmus, as the preceding phrase creates tension through its dual meaning. “Casual pity” is not full engagement. The metaphor is ironic: the soulless figures of interest rates should not correlate to his emotional state. Although “the things that happen” in the back streets of Belfast are capital that exacts a low interest rate, “casual” emotion must also be opposed. The worth of his poetic investment depends on the manner in which he conceives it. Pity must be genuine or not at all. Mahon’s use of irony and self-critique will be elements that continually complicate his considerations of belonging, and his placement of “Spring in Belfast” at the beginning of his Collected Poems (1999) establishes a challenge. On the one hand, his language gains openendedness through its self-ironizing tendency; on the other hand, epiphany and irony rarely come together. 8

The poem was written before the period of violence called “the Troubles” (which began in October, 1968, with a violent clash between civil rights marchers and police in Derry, Northern Ireland) but the poem implies that violence is constantly present in Belfast. Individual historical events are less important for Mahon’s work than for Heaney’s; the general atmosphere of violence and the expectation for the poet to engage current events is important for “Spring in Belfast.”

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In the poem’s earliest version, the speaker commands his art rather than himself: “Poetry and fluent drivel, know your place—/Take shape in some more glib environment.” The brunt of his criticism falls on Belfast itself here, as a space where, it appears, language cannot flex its rhetorical muscles. Again, the comment is double-edged: fluency and glibness may preclude depth. Poetry must know its place apart from the city. In the later version, the poet must learn to know his place, must allow the city to exert its claims upon him. The difference between both versions reveals a tension, in Mahon’s early work, between the fault of place (which expels poetry) and the fault of the poet. The question of whether poetry must flee the confines of place in the abstract or one particular place antithetical to it underlies “Glengormley,” a poem that proclaims the poet’s attitude toward “this desperate city” in a different key,9 one that reveals its dependence on an “unreconciled” idealism as well as a corrosive irony: Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge And grasped the principle of the watering can. ... The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain, Dangle from lamp-posts in the dawn rain; And much dies with them. I should rather praise A worldly time under this worldly sky— The terrier-taming, garden-watering days Those heroes pictured as they struggled through The quick noose of their finite being. By Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.10 This voice, like that of “Spring in Belfast,” defines itself through twists and turns. “Glengormley” provides the clearest image of the young Mahon’s lyrical personality, which is less settled than the term “identity” implies.11 Mahon is a poet for whom identity is formed ironically, through a stylized 9

Glengormley is a suburb of Belfast; Mahon’s family moved there when the poet was seventeen. He writes that the “suburbs of Belfast have a peculiar relationship to the Irish cultural situation inasmuch as they’re the final anathema for the traditional Irish imagination.” Cited in Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 8. 10 Collected Poems 14. 11 Hugh Haughton reads the poem as a critique of urban expansion in “the new era” of housing estates, which are constructed upon the ruins of the archaic past. Although this narrow reading diminishes the poem’s rebellious power, Haughton realizes that much more is at stake and takes painstaking care to enumerate the poem’s references to Viking ships, the linen industry, and alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse, though he shies away from defining the “tragic metaphysics” that the speaker idealizes. Haughton 35–37.

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rebellion that complicates the seemingly simple task of creating identity (or “finding one’s voice”). His escape from creatively unconducive social conditions is figured through a tone that fears a commitment to identity, at the same time as it idealizes “the unreconciled,” whose suicidal opposition to knowing their place appears an inevitable sign of the end of an era. Spatial and temporal belonging are conflated, as the speaker’s sense of residing in the wrong place is also a sense of living in the wrong time. There is a time for belonging and a time for refusal, and we reside in the latter. This personality is in many ways the opposite of Zagajewski’s dropletlike self—instead of conforming to the world’s surface, he holds himself askance — yet the unceasing unrest of the Polish poet’s hungry refugee resembles the unrest of this poet’s mind, concealed in a banal domestic enclosure as devoid of metaphysical ideals as the refugee’s abandoned circus wagon. Yet “tame” himself the poet must, and his initial sharpness softens into a more nuanced contemplative tone. His cutting edge comes and goes as he moves from rebellious bluster to a displacement from his own perspective, moving between sarcasm and pathetic sincerity. This drama of voice, pitch, and register is crucial. The poem has been criticized as a retreat into wordiness from worldliness, a simulacrum of authentic being, and a “secondhand textuality.”12 Yet it is the struggle to make wordiness into personality, and to make text into identity, that the poem dramatizes. Quotable phrases— “Wonders are many”—come quickly to the tongue but do not communicate the authentic, “unreconciled” thought that the speaker admires. Writing will always involve him in the construction of a simulacrum that is one step away from authenticity; “Preface to a Love Poem” will discuss this issue explicitly. Mahon attempts to forge a voice that escapes the banality of worldly times under worldly skies. The poem espouses an aesthetic of refusal. The last line of “Glengormley” sets up a dichotomy of necessity and choice that is dear to all four of the poets in this study. Its speaker admires “the unreconciled” yet is hampered by the necessity of reconciliation to his time and place. How much agency is available to this sort of rebellious speaker—must an acceptance of identity involve diminishment of agency through the act of reconciliation, as choice becomes overborne by necessity (i.e., the necessity of identitarian self-situation overbears the choice to remain “unreconciled” to one’s place and time)? Is there a way of conceiving identity that allows for greater choice? The final irony of “Spring in Belfast” and “Glengormley” is that their speaker ends up defined by the very culture he derides. Lack of reconciliation leads, apparently, to death; there is no way to live in accordance with archaic values of heroism and spirituality, no way to discern more than a spurious mystery, or to grasp a principle that will lead up to the spirit instead of down to earth. He is not Yeats. He cannot 12 Stan Smith, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005) 172.

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piece together a metaphysical system of his own or revive an alternative culture to the worldly one that he inhabits. He can, however, emigrate, and use a decentered life as a real-world fund of metaphors (again, similarly to Zagajewski). “Afterlives” continues to mine the young Mahon’s refusal to belong for its emotional and cultural interest. The poem presents him returning to Belfast, and derives its force from the lack of psychological congruence between person and place, its inability to express a triumphant nostos.13 Edna Longley notes that the name of the city gains an eerie resonance as “a trail of sound integrates the hills with the city”:14 But the hills are still the same Grey-blue above Belfast. Perhaps if I’d stayed behind And lived it bomb for bomb I might have grown up at last And learnt what is meant by home.15 The soothing internal rhyme of “hills” and “still” is harshly offset by that of “bomb” and “home.” There is an unsettling continuity about the city’s landscape and its violence, which becomes a perennial aspect of Belfast’s local color. Mahon is not an enemy of the “sense of place” as some of his critics opine, but its elegist.16 These poems postulate a sense of “home” based on knowledge and involvement. The negative charge placed on this knowledge (“lived it bomb for bomb”) partially explains the speaker’s decision to separate himself, but the rueful quality of his sense of obligation and possibility (“Perhaps,” “I might have”) critiques the choice. “Afterlives” describes an emotional diminuendo. The speaker initially wakes to the “roar of the world” on a “rain-fresh” London morning, and, studiously rejecting optimism and uplift, moves into a diaristic account of the journey home: ecstatic verbs (“dreams,”“exult”) turn distressing (“trembles,”“shuddering”), moonlight on the open sea becomes a “bare bulb” in the port and, eventually, a uniform rainy dimness, and the speaker turns from describing positive agency (he is going home “for the first time in years”) to unachieved action (“I might have grown up . . . And learnt”). The poem ends with a knowledge that is not achieved, a mental act not accomplished. The ruefulness of this last stanza can well be described as elegiac and self-critical.

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“Afterlives” may be contrasted with Seamus Heaney’s sense of “gravity” that pulls the poet towards his childhood home. Mahon rejects the nostalgic consolations of the homecoming motif, while Heaney embraces them (through tenderness of tone as well as explicit statement). 14 Edna Longley, “The Writer and Belfast,” The Irish Writer and the City, ed. Maurice Harmon (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) 65–89. 15 Collected Poems 58–59. 16 Stewart 70.

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These poems refute Andrew Waterman’s criticism of Mahon as a poet whose perspective is “too disconnectedly from outside” which is, to him, the main factor “vitiating his achievement.” Whenever Mahon looks at his human surroundings, his gaze “skids off” to the “otherworldly, spatial, and temporal frontiers” that fascinate him.17 This view of Mahon’s work (written well before The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book) accurately critiques the extremity of desolation that is found all too often in Mahon’s poems, yet to metaphorize it as a mistaken “skid” off the right track is dangerous, assuming that an intentionalist critic can discern a poem’s properly intended track. Waterman’s obvious preference for “this-worldly” phenomena, indisposes him to identify the structural and substantive role of the otherworldly in these poems, which may be an early sign of Yeats’s legacy (which will be confronted much more directly in later work). “Spring in Belfast” and “Afterlives” defend, however ambivalently, the poet’s decision to set himself at odds with contemporary actuality. They establish a specific relationship of the speaker to place that grounds the poems to come. The Mahonian speaker possesses an uncanny ability to dwell in literary allusion and in the imagination while staying grounded in a specific geographical place: “Sometimes, rounding the cliff top/at dusk, . . . I pretend not to be here at all,” he writes in “The Sea in Winter.”18 It would be a mistake, however, to call such acts escapist. Mahon’s poems are sprinkled with names and geographical minutiae, so that the physical geography of Portstewart offers a vaguely objective correlative to the poet’s psychic geography. “The Sea in Winter” does not exit the sensory arena, mining the tension between unconducive perceptual material and the urge to make poetry in a more meditative manner than “Glengormley.” The “distant northern sea” of the Atlantic can serve as a “soul-landscape”19 for the poet because it makes no demands. There is no sense of obligation here, as in Belfast. When the speaker states, “Let me never forget. . . or ever again contemptuously refuse its plight,” the reader does not feel the pressure of unmet obligation but the satisfaction of decision, of achieved insight. There is no sense of emotional incapacity. This speaker’s attunement to the external as well as the internal world is based on voluntary participation, not guilt-inducing social obligation. The Mahonian speaker’s sense of social and identitarian rebellion is a matter of language as well as of geographical and cultural belonging. He needs to free his language from its entanglement in formulae and knowingness so that it becomes an instrument guided by his will. Irony is 17

Andrew Waterman, “Somewhere, Out There, Beyond: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon,” PN Review 8.1 (21) (1981): 39–47. 18 Collected Poems 115. 19 The phrase is Mahon’s. When Terence Brown, in interview, tells Mahon that his poems about Ireland always use lonely, desolate imagery, Mahon replies, “I love all that stuff! Yes, well that’s what Beckett . . . calls ‘soul landscape.’” Transcribed in Frank Sewell, “Derek Mahon: Coming in from the Cold,” in Kennedy-Andrews, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 196.

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a problematic device, since it uses the very words it mocks. The sarcasm of “Glengormley” prevents the poet from moving from critique to creation. Instead, it ends with another statement of obligation: “By/Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.” Mahon’s early poems finally exit the banality they mock by separating the poet’s language from the stultifying social formulae that preclude profound communication. The speaker wants to belong in the language he chooses to delineate his soul-landscapes—we will see Heaney express a similar desire—but this linguistic belonging can only be established by reckoning with the social pressures that prevent language from becoming a perfectly private medium. These pressures are faced directly in “Jail Journal” and “Preface to a Love Poem.” The former presents a poet under “house arrest” who voluntarily shuts out the world and refuses to explain why. It does not justify itself, thus ironizing John Mitchel’s vitriolic Jail Journal, in which the exiled and imprisoned Irish radical expresses his hatred of the British. Mahon’s poem, however, is not a rebellion but a quiet shutting out of the world. The speaker views his own isolation with good-hearted humor—“With wise abandon/ Lover and friend have gone.” The speaker candidly admits that “It is taking longer than almost anything,” yet knows that when “it is over,” the arrest shall be forgotten, “like a childhood illness/Or a sleepless night-crossing.”20 The poetic resonance of this final line imparts seriousness to the speaker’s “house arrest” even while his final aim stays ambiguous. His dark night of the soul is a time of learning and “crossing” from one state to another, even if its endpoint is obscure. It is both instructional and cathartic. By banishing the noise of the world, the speaker grows stronger through suffering. This poem is purely evocative, setting the stage for future explorations of self-abnegation and apophasis (culminating with the suicidal dream of “Antarctica”), refusing to engage the reader in communication, to offer a message. “First Love” further purges language of the compulsion to communicate a message by “circling” around the notion of language as medium rather than content. This is a circling of itself and you— A form of words, compact and compromise, Prepared in the false dawn of the half-true Beyond which the shapes of truth materialize. This is a blind with sunlight filtering through.21 20

The phrase “night-crossing” is the title of Mahon’s first complete volume of poetry. This is the poem’s last line. 21 Collected Poems 18. The fact that these poems are written and published does, of course, make them communicative acts. The poet is not rejecting communication, but he is seeking a way out of the predetermined and stultifying formulae, sarcasm, and knowingness that he hears in the outside world. When he isolates himself in “Jail Journal” and meditates upon language

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The ababa rhyme scheme encloses each stanza, and there is no line-ending that breaks free. The anaphoric repetition (“This is a—”) creates a parallel circling, as the poem returns to where it began. Similarly, the nature of the poem is its own subject of consideration. In its formal structure as well as its subject, the poem disproves the idea that words must or even can “go somewhere.” They are a medium through which we receive illumination; they form a compact with the source of light but necessitate compromise, as one must admit the impossibility of reaching absolute truth. The poem is not deconstructive—“the shapes of truth” are visible and material—but it does establish language as a space “at one remove” from the true. Language mediates truth but does not embody it. This poem is a response to the crisis of “Spring in Belfast.” The poet-speaker can only cleanse the language of the detritus of formulae and knowingness by accepting that language has a fundamentally mediative, not performative, function. Even if “the things that happen” were to engage his full interest, his poetic investment would pay a linguistic but not political interest. Ultimately, any consideration of politics would still be a circling of the event, not direct participation in it. “First Love” was previously titled “Preface to a Love Poem.” The former title is suggestive in its statement of nonidentity—it is not a direct statement of love, but a verbal act connoting this statement. The poem communicates a cathartic moment when the poet recognizes that language is not identical with truth. It is “a substitute,” yet this does not nullify the poet’s quest: “the wise man knows/To cleave to the one living absolute/Beyond paraphrase, and shun a shrewd repose.” The poem is significantly free of irony. This speaker believes sincerely in an “absolute” that is living yet cannot be transformed or “paraphrased.” Language must be used actively, he argues, as “shrewd repose” implies epistemological laziness. Language is not an endless series of simulacra, even if the speaker cannot verbalize absolute truth. The poem argues both with deconstructive views of language and with ideological critics who accuse poets of refusing participation in history. A poem is an attempt to see the “shapes of truth” which lie beyond it, and in this sense it is idealistic, quest-like; it shuns the “shrewd repose” of ideological formulae as well as engagement in historical action, an engagement that may well be illusory. “First Love” can thus be viewed as a break from the haunting “should” of “Spring in Belfast” and “Glengormley.” Mahon’s belief that language is in a quest for “the absolute” implies that it negotiates its own space, seeking an absolute to which it may cleave, which will guide its sincere (not shrewd) quest (refusing repose). This does not mean that his poems refuse concreteness in “First Love,” he does not admit this world. The voice is solitary and its conditions of utterance are the main subject of the poems. There is something purgative about these poems—they are a descent into the depths, a reckoning with the poet’s relation to words and images. The speaker of Mahon’s poems is literate and intellectual, often explicitly a poet. “First Love” is an important moment in his search for an adequate type of self-expression that realizes its own limits and capabilities.

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or spatial specificity—the poems make many specific, if subtle, geographical “placements” (we can name the towns and visualize the landscapes); the actual places of the poems are rarely abstract. Mahon does not, however, assert his belonging in one named place. Rather, by indirection he finds direction out, as certain scenes become soul-landscapes: “That night the slow sea washed against my head,/Performing its immeasurable erosions—/Spilling into the skull. . . . ,” he recounts in “Day Trip to Donegal” (25). Belonging is not always associated with constructive beauty. Here, the union of self and place is accomplished when a sibilant hiss (“slow sea washed”) bumps against the Latinate bulk of “Performing” and “immeasurable.” The intellectual speaker cannot put up a defense against the waves’ strong and subtle violence, which insinuate his environment into his psychology, so that the mind begins to be overmastered by place. He moves from a position of control (accomplishing his “things to be done”) to helplessness (he is alone at sea with “no promise of rescue,” composing “vain/Overtures” to the “vindictive” elements). The precision of the titular location is drowned in the turbulence of the recounted journey. The poet’s relation to his place is mediated by such changing positions of mastery: rather than viewing Donegal as a site on which to impose his poetic rage for order, subservient to his personal biography and desire for form, he views Donegal as a site with its own power over the observer. “Day Trip to Donegal” may thus be viewed as a poem that repudiates the poet’s confidence in his ability to wrest control over his perceptual material. In this case, the formal shape of the poem is opposed to the desperation of the “immeasurable erosions” it describes, just as many of Heaney’s early poems evince a formal orderliness at odds with the fears, anxieties and disruptions beneath their surfaces. It would be simplistic to assume that a poem “about” helplessness must reflect it through formal disintegration or disruption, yet Mahon is consistently drawn to an ideal of form that represents a space apart from the world’s strife (congruent with, if not corresponding to, the state which “the unreconciled” wished to bring into being). Poetic form does, for Mahon, have emotional significance that reaches beyond its particular embodiment. His poems ceaselessly circle around the idea of a space apart, where the mind’s desire for formal control would be in harmony with the perceived order of its surroundings. The poems that illustrate this space apart are not abstract, but conceive it in terms of grounded images and situations. “Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.” presents a natural scene that serves as the “measure” for future judgment: A dream of limestone in sea-light Where gulls have placed their perfect prints. Reflection in that final sky Shames vision into simple sight; Into pure sense, experience.

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Atlantic leagues away tonight, Conceived beyond such innocence, I clutch the memory still, and I Have measured everything with it since.22 The scene is organic and contains traces of movement (the gulls’ steps), yet it is carried onto an abstract level by the speaker’s separation from it and consequent idealization (“perfect prints”). The poem is often read as a statement on art in the light of Mahon’s interest in painting, thus implying that “prints” are produced by an artist’s hand. Such an interpretation, however, erases the important boundary between the natural motions of gulls and the viewer’s reaction, which transforms the organic into the ideal. Nature’s prints are not the same as the poet’s, a point that will gain resonance in “Ovid in Tomis.” The poem is not an icon. Its words mediate the light that filters through them but do not create it and contain it only indirectly; Mahon believes in transcendence rather than immanence. The “perfect prints” refer to a Platonic form above and beyond the speaker himself, and Mahon’s metaphysical imagination depends upon this distance. The gulls produce organic shapes that the viewer interprets aesthetically in his quest to establish an ideal that will ease the metaphysical pain of living in a merely worldly place. The limestone, sea-light, and gull-prints form an organic scene that is transformed into an idea of order by the perceiving mind. This act of mind is crucial to the poem’s effect. It hinges on the neat division between the viewer and the perceived scene. The “picture” itself lacks a verb—it exists beyond change. The speaker, on the other hand, is fallen, shamed, and vulnerable. The desperate tinge of “clutch” implies the necessity of possessing this image: he needs the memory epistemologically (to learn by “measuring”) and perceptually (to bring about “simple sight”). In this conceptual framework, the specific geographical place becomes symbolic of a certain form of aesthetic perception. The memory of Inis Oírr becomes a synecdoche. In an often-quoted interview, Mahon states that the location of his poems is less important than the type of knowledge summoned by that location: “Seamus [Heaney] is very sure of his place; I’ve never been sure of mine [;] . . . the place that my poetry occupies is not a geographical location; 22 Collected Poems 29. An immediate sensory opposition is apparent between the clear light of Inis Oírr and the confused hiss of the encroaching sea in “Day Trip to Donegal.” Terence Brown points out that Mahon is poet of “visual epiphanies,” one demonstrating that “consciousness. . .is a visual construct” in which light and vision synthesize otherwise chaotic experience. The other side of this synthesis may be Mahon’s turbulent soundscapes, including the rising vocal pitch of certain poems (“Spring in Belfast”), which may be counterpoised with the relatively quiet pitch of “First Love” (in which light figures prominently) or “Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.” For Brown’s argument, see “Derek Mahon: The Poet and Painting” in The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 199–209.

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it’s a community of imagined readership.”23 Although he has asserted that his “soul landscape” is Irish, Mahon dismisses the notion that he may be a poet of one specific landscape, instead, stressing another ideal, of a non-national imagined community. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews reads this as a statement of “a recognizably modernist exile poetics in which displacement becomes the prerequisite of creativity,”24 usefully situating the poem’s aesthetics, yet scanting the shadow of Romanticism of the poet’s self-placement. In a Wordsworthian style, “Thinking of Inis Oírr” gives shape to emotion that is recollected in tranquility; it is also, however, marked by an un-Romantic dislocation between the mind and its current physical location that is typical of Mahon’s work. His poems are not placeless but repeatedly combat the claims of the speaker’s present place, overtly or covertly, even when his current placement is unclear. They reveal the speaker’s desired mode of interaction with his perceptual surroundings. Humans are often absent, silent, or abstract in the poems that present idealized spaces apart. It is difficult to speak with confidence about such spaces, though, because the speaker’s voice is so often inflected by irony. “Thinking of Inis Oírr” is exceptional in its avoidance of this tendency. “The Mayo Tao,” in contrast, presents a dream of simplicity that may be taken either seriously or parodically. It opens with a tone of calm intimacy: “I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire/and a prescriptive literature of the spirit”.25 The poet’s abandonment of creative intensity for a prescribed spirituality is plausible given the threat of instability lurking behind even Mahon’s calmest poems. Its simplicity has the ring of sincerity. The poem describes the speaker’s solitary life in nature: the mountain “paces” him as he walks, animals converse with him, salmon doze as he watches, a stone speaks out its history, and in the midst of this idyllic scene, the poem’s slow, steady impetus almost imperceptibly pushes it into comical bathos. The poem destabilizes us into sudden indecision, leading us to query the sense of its final stanza: I have been working for years on a four-line poem about the life of a leaf; I think it might come out right this winter. The near colloquialism of this phrasing (“come out right”) could be moving or risible, as the quatrain either roots this poem in a tradition of visionary nature writing or uproots it, forcing us to mock the sort of aesthetic it proposes. Edna Longley believes that “The Mayo Tao” “parodies the quest for ‘immanence’ by measuring the western timelessness sought by the urban poet against a meager 23

Mahon quoted in Stewart 58. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008 (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2008) 156. 25 Collected Poems 68. 24

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outcome,” yet it “treads a fine line between self-irony and self-epiphany.” Longley herself parodies “immanence” by placing the word in quotations. She implies that there is a conflict between western and eastern ideas in the poem, taking the speaker as an Irishman (in County Mayo) who tries to construct his “Tao” yet cuts a slightly ludicrous figure.26 In this case, the echo effect of “life” and “leaf” may be humorous instead of resonant. Perhaps he cannot get Taoism right; perhaps there is a cultural conflict at the base of this poem that blossoms in irony, as a citified European searches for transcendence in a tradition alien to him, and cannot produce the volume or quality of work he desires. This is not a “solving ambiguity” (to borrow a phrase from Mahon) but one that puts into question the act of vision and the idea of depth in simplicity. A companion poem, “The Snow Party,” is set in Japan, its main actor the haiku poet Bashō. The cultural self-enclosure of “The Snow Party” may lends this poem credence and banish irony, even as it measures the tranquil Japanese party against the witch-hunts occurring “elsewhere.” The poet, however, is not a full participant; he is separate from the party. Such separation is necessary for idealization. Mahon’s speaker renounces egotism to the fullest possible extent, requiring his own absence from the idealized scene. The “prints” of Inis Oírr are “perfect” because they are not made by him. “The Mayo Tao” is his fullest attempt to place himself in a “perfect” situation. In contrast, “The Snow Party” opposes his familiar legacy of violence with the quiet Japanese landscape: Elsewhere they are burning Witches and heretics In the boiling squares, Thousands have died since dawn In the service Of barbarous kings; But there is silence In the houses of Nagoya And the hills of Ise.27 The poem remains serious, refusing the parodic effect of “The Mayo Tao.” The final image rests in chaste perfection. The haiku tradition undergirds “The Snow Party,” but its three-line stanzas are not haiku. The poet is not Bashō. He remains apart from the scene, a foreigner and outsider, composing small stanzas according to his own model. The poem describes a spiritual vacation away from the “boiling squares.” Taken together, “The Mayo Tao” and “The Snow Party” illustrate a quiet 26 27

Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) 128. Collected Poems 63.

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space separate from historical violence and represent a sequence of poems that rebel against history. The Northern Irish Troubles are a sort of shadow presence in these poems, summoned only by indirect allusion, as a condition the poet does not confront. How to reach this peaceful place is the central question of “The Last of the Fire Kings.” Haughton holds that its speaker is kin to the “barbarous kings” of “The Snow Party,” preferring to die by his own hand rather than perpetuate a “barbarous cycle” and famously asserting, “I am/Through with history.” The poem moves from the present (“I want to be”) to an assertive future (“I shall/Break with tradition”). It ends, fittingly, with an ambiguous projection into imaginative and social space: I have lain awake each night Perfecting my cold dream Of a place out of time, A palace of porcelain ... But the fire-loving People, rightly perhaps, Will not countenance this, Demanding that I inhabit, Like them, a world of Sirens, bin-lids And bricked-up windows— Not to release them From the ancient curse But to die their creature and be thankful.28 Poetry is a means to record the “palace of porcelain.” Dissimilar to “The Snow Party,” this peaceful scene is not allowed autonomy, but is connected to the mayhem that threatens its survival. Art is not merely an escape route for the fearful aesthetic; it is an organic product of the idealistic mind that is (however reluctantly) rooted in the social world. The poem does not “refuse history”29 outright, but moves between longing and resolve. It begins and 28

Collected Poems 64–65. This poem has been roughly construed as a refusal of history. This interpretation underlies Seamus Deane and Stan Smith’s criticism that Mahon shirks his historical responsibility. Deane connects formal mastery with dangerous notions of poetic autonomy, yet not only is this poem in a relatively loose form, it is ambiguous and self-critical. These positions are well discussed in the introduction to Kennedy-Andrews’ The Poetry of Derek Mahon 8–16. Andrews gives a concise overview of this politically-motivated critique. See also Joris Duytschaever, “History in

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ends with the desire to be someone or somewhere else. Mahon’s critics often overlook the fact that the speaker is a king reconsidering his role, not a Northern Irish poet. This is not the same young speaker that wrote “Spring in Belfast.” This king wishes he were more of a Brahmin than a commanderin-chief, feeling his obligation as a task fulfilled but not chosen. He longs both for “commonness” (walking to work at dawn) and luxury (reclining in “rich fabrics” with the peacefully “frugivorous”). He does not wish to be set apart. The point is broadly relevant because of Mahon’s later attraction to fin-de-siècle decadence in The Yellow Book. “The Last of the Fire Kings” is a poem in search of an alternative to violence, not a definitive refusal of “history” in the abstract. The history that is summoned is, meanwhile, a more accurate evocation of sectarian violence than we have seen in previous poems. To “die their creature” will be to participate in the violence that the speaker has seen at close range; it will entail a descent to the “boiling squares.” The reward will be a sense of belonging, of plurality (“their creature”). Like Zagajewski, Mahon is wary of living “in the plural.” He cannot “be thankful” for a sense of belonging exacted at such a price. The poem engages in some subtle self-criticism, most potent in the opposition between “cold” and “loving,” the interjected “rightly perhaps,” and the humorous intellectualism of “frugivorous” and “will not countenance.” John Constable holds that the two simple words, “rightly perhaps,” are the fulcrum of the poem, “at once admitting and resisting the claims of the world.”30 To take the point further: they admit the speaker into the world making those claims, while maintaining his meditative consideration. It is implied, as in “Spring in Belfast,” that there may be a “right” way to act. At the same time, the delicacy of the “palace of porcelain,” and the sweet homophony of “place” and “palace,” makes his vision eminently desirable. Its “cold” quality is the same cold as that of the snow party, in opposition to the “boiling squares,” but it is not the cold of apathy. The opposition between cold order and hot violence can be somewhat schematically deployed within Mahon’s poems, yet it results in a rich imagery of violence and of peace. This dichotomy works on temporal, psychological, and cultural levels. “The Andean Flute” and “The Dawn Chorus” are a pair of villanelles, printed side by side, that evoke the dichotomy between worship of the old gods and participation in history: “He dances to that music in the wood/As if history were no more than a dream./Who said the banished gods were gone for good?” “History” seems to be a generic word for the passage of time, and the ecstatic dance is implicitly predicated on unawareness of “history.” There are several problems in this situation. “History,” of course, encompasses the archaic world of “banished gods” the Poetry of Derek Mahon,” in Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1988) 97–110. 30 John Constable, “Derek Mahon’s Development,” Agenda 22.3–4 (Fall 1984): 113.

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as well as the modern unmetaphysical world of “Glengormley.” The “Inca frenzy” of the dancer’s blood is conceptually available to the poet through his knowledge of history, as is his recognition of an “ancient theme.” The poet uses his temporal and spatial distance from this ancient culture to evoke a buffer separating “then” from “now” (underscored by the cliché of the “primal scream”). Ecstasy, the poem implies, is not possible today. The gods have, presumably, been washed away by the filthy modern tide. The poem’s rather typical oppositions (between nature and culture, ancient and modern times, South and North, “child-heart” and disgruntled adulthood) vitiate its potential power. “The Dawn Chorus” takes up a similar theme, asserting “It is not sleep itself but dreams we miss . . . /We yearn for that reality in this.” Constable reads the poem as a serious gloss on Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”31 though it is not as philosophically ambitious. Although we find the “flaming seraphim” of Judeo-Christian iconography untrue, we still wait for “our metamorphosis” to a more spiritual state, yearning for a spirit realm, if only the one we glimpse through our dreams. The poem picks up Stevens’ favorite theme of imagination working upon reality, but without the philosophical rigor or figurative idiosyncrasy that marks Stevens’ work. The speaker yearns for a synthesis of “the archaic and the entirely new,” yet remains curiously passive. Again we get the desperate verb “clutch” (“Clutching the certainty that once we flew”), and a dream of flying (another version of Mahon’s “elsewhere”) that the poet refuses to submit to scrutiny.32 Its wish for flight appears desperate, an extreme instantiation of the speaker’s longing for escape. The villanelle form of these poems emphasizes their circularity, as the neatness of form here accompanies a sense of cultural claustrophobia. If the ideal relation of self to place can only be situated not-here, not-now, in the not-me, then how can this idea develop? The tension at work in Mahon’s other poems allows for egress. It admits instability, and from instability a new relation to place (spatial and temporal) can be forged. The Fire King is ultimately irresolute. For this reason one cannot speak of “the exigencies of historical circumstance”33 definitively present or absent in Mahon’s work. 31 He also draws a parallel between formality and flatness: the poems’ “formal neatness is contingent upon the fact that the poet’s feelings are not engaged in them” (Constable 117). This is not entirely accurate: feelings are engaged, but too simplistically. There is no tension within the poet’s mind; it is too easily settled. 32 The strength of imagination, and the potency of mental states that are formed through the interaction of mind and matter, are the ideas with which Stevens’ poem leaves the reader. One may contrast a few phrases—“he was the ascending wings he saw,” or “He chose to include . . ./. . . the whole,/The complicate, the amassing harmony”—to Mahon’s poem. There is no choice in Mahon’s poem. Harmony is discovered in an unconscious state, not created purposefully. See Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1990) 380–408. 33 The phrase is Eamon Grennan’s, but the same concept is invoked by other scholars. Eamon Grennan, “‘To the Point of Speech’: The Poetry of Derek Mahon,” Contemporary Irish Writing,

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Although The Snow Party, containing “The Last of the Fire Kings,” appeared in the same year as Heaney’s geographically and historically engaged North, 1975, it expresses a radically different relationship to history, focusing upon alienation rather than implication, separation rather than evocation and participation. The tension within Mahon’s poems often stems from the speaker’s freedom to choose his position, despite his perceived obligation. The pressure to participate in history is ultimately formed within the thinker’s mind (as, we shall see, Heaney’s “fabulous raiders” are products of the poet’s imagination). This network of pressures and counter-pressures (one must recall that the fire king projects his people’s “demand” into the future) resides in the speaker’s mind as well as in his objective situation. A sense of obligation is projected by the poet upon himself. Now the question is where, and whether, Mahon’s speaker may find transcendence from the disabling obligations that he associates with knowing one’s place. The serenity of “The Snow Party” is only available as a long-distance dream. This is the core problem of Mahon’s work: idealism is divorced from human possibility. Seamus Heaney formulates the paradoxical character of the speaker’s position: his is a “voice from beyond,” from “a condition of Zen-like stillness and silence, an eternity in love with the products of time.” All of Mahon’s work has “this dominant mood of being on the outside (where one has labored spiritually to arrive) only to end up looking back nostalgically at what one knows are well nigh intolerable conditions on the inside. . . . These poems of the displaced consciousness are . . . rinsed of political and ethnic glamour.”34 Mahon is considered a poet of the periphery, yet the contrast between “inside” and “outside” is so drastic that “displacement” seems too gentle a term. Rather, refusal, escape, constant re-thinking, and constant longing are the key features of his work. Heaney’s note that the poems are “rinsed of . . . glamour” parries the thrusts of critics who accuse Mahon of dwelling too exclusively in a nonplace in order to speak from the glamorous position of rebel with a cause. A basic knowledge of Mahon’s biography reveals the connections between poet’s life and speaker’s position, but Mahon refuses to write poems that bewail the Troubles in a confessional and exhibitionist manner. He also refuses to place himself permanently within the atemporal “palace of porcelain,” insisting on the constant re-negotiation of his position, the continuity of his struggle to define a livable relation to place. Mahon’s refusal of the solace of belonging leads him to the seeminglyimpossible position of denying the validity of writing altogether. Here the importance of separating abstract reasoning from direct personal investment is paramount. Of course Mahon does not actually renounce writing, just as eds. James Brophy and Raymond Porter (Boston: Iona College Press, 1983) 18. 34 Seamus Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (Peter Laver Memorial Lecture Grasmere, 2 August 1984) (Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1985) 10–12.

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he does not renounce history; his poems, however, explore the ramifications of one particular subject-position with relentless and sometimes comical rigor (“Matthew V. 29–30” is an example of this tendency). He is, after all, an admirer of Samuel Beckett, and the reductio ad absurdum is one of his favorite poetic devices; it allows the fundamentally serious, even tragic Mahon to flirt with parody and comedy. “Ovid in Tomis” leads, in a rather disjointed way, to the absurd conclusion that only silence can stand for a true, undistorted reality (157–62).35 The poem begins as a lament for an “ancient/Unity” that has left the earth, presumably between land and spirit, much like that of “The Andean Flute.” The speaker himself is unable to “keep faith,” exchanging it for “documentation.” What is essentially a poem about the spoliation of nature—which is the manifestation of this lost unity—becomes a call for inaction: “Better to contemplate/The blank page/And leave it blank// Than modify/Its substance by/So much as a pen-stroke.” Writing is an act of appropriation. Not only will it cater to the author’s perspective, but it will also defile the essential substance of its medium. Mahon toys with the view that natural objects possess integral identities that are laid waste by the tampering author. He cannot do justice to the heartbreaking “candor” of a blank page. For a poet whose earliest poems initiate a critique of his own position, “Ovid in Tomis” appears overwrought. After all, “First Love” has convincingly demonstrated the uncertainty of the linguistic act. Language is not tyrannical in “First Love,” but a mediative “blind” between light and human vision, and the poet who uses language strains after the “shapes of truth” that he can only see darkly. There has been a shift in the poet’s perception of his medium, and the new view, if taken seriously, is dangerous for his entire enterprise. If “the banished gods” are indeed present in the objects around us (e.g., in the candid page to which the poet inclines his head), the reader who wishes to defend writing will query how objects are to be revered if artistic expression is disallowed (as appropriation; as defacement). The view of immanence with which the poem toys is not conducive to the poet himself. The poem reduces Mahon’s rebellious dissatisfaction without offering an alternative to its reductio, ending at an impasse: “I incline my head/To its candour/And weep for our exile.” Our very concept of candor is based on the communicative acts of speaking and writing; the poet’s “exile” is from the act that allows the poem. His exile—as opposed to Ovid’s—is self-inflicted (Heaney will call himself an “inner émigré” in the final poem of North). It is an exile from the 35

This point is made by Jerzy Jarniewicz, who recognizes that this is the logical conclusion of one who realizes that the voice of history is corrupt and suspect, covering the vested interests of those who write grand narratives. Jarniewicz analyzes the importance of silence in Mahon’s work in “Derek Mahon: History, Mute Phenomena, and Beyond,” Kennedy-Andrews, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 83–95.

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ideal, however unsustainable, that justifies his work and provides each poem with teleology. The poet ends in a posture of deference to banished gods who remain undefined. The blank page is mute and pathetic; the speaker is muted and weeping. We do not achieve catharsis through laughter, as Beckett would have allowed. For all its depth of engagement, “Ovid in Tomis” ends at a conceptual and aesthetic dead-end. The blank page is fundamentally different from the “perfect prints” of “Thinking of Inis Oírr.” The prints, formed by animals in movement across the surface of the natural world, are viewed by the previous speaker not as an imposition but as part of the organic scene as well as representative of a transcendent ideal. They work with and against the scene’s organicism, perfecting the mutable forms of the world. The speaker needs to allow movement into his creative situation in order to reach this earlier ideal. His reverence for silence must be offset by a counter-pressure, one which does not subsume the individuality of his outlook into an undifferentiated collective. Creative agency reaches an impasse in “Ovid in Tomis.” When emptiness is equated with candor, the artist will appear as an imposter. In this scenario, Mahon comes close to antihumanism—he locates value in the prehuman natural order of Inis Oírr and the unhuman blank material that resists inscription. The poet’s own handiwork leads him on a mental journey that ends with a loss of authorial justification. Must being an author involve the imposition of authority? Mahon’s early poems think through the poet’s inability, and emotional reluctance, to add “interest” (hearkening back to “Spring in Belfast”) to his place. Authority is tacitly linked to the ability to accumulate value, whether this be psychological, cultural, poetic, or even emotional capital. By splitting apart value and personal ability, belonging and freedom, atemporal perfection and the mutable space of self-interrogation, Mahon creates a set of ultimately disabling conditions for the poet. These conditions are not inherently “out there” in the world around him, but are produced by his peculiar brand of poetic idealism. Mahon has succeeded in escaping the social realm. He has succeeded too well, and these poems keep forming self-enclosed and self-enclosing patterns: each one describes a cognitive arc, but makes no “progress” to speak of. One is left with the sense that Mahon must break apart these intricate patterns, even if their shattered harmonies will not be recuperable.

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4 Inhabiting the earth: Derek Mahon’s dissonances and harmonies Similarly to Yeats, Mahon creates a series of dichotomies that, taken together, form a complex system of value. These dichotomies center on the opposition between “cold” order and “hot” chaos, with the poet strongly on the side of the former, yet suspecting he cannot write without the latter. Also similar to Yeats, Mahon tacitly senses, at a certain point in his writing, that these dichotomies must be galvanized so that they do not harden into a stale, dogmatic division, and his poetry does not appear schematic, and so searches for a way to link (if not perfectly unite) his cultural environment and his sense of belonging. Mahon makes his name as a poet of alienation and isolation, and it is unsurprising that the major problem of his later poems is how to dwell in a culture, how to inhabit instead of move through or rebel against a singular place, a problem common to him and to Zagajewski. His strategies, however, are distinct and slightly perverse: Mahon grounds his voice by speaking through a pastiche of “other” voices and imagines himself into a place by reinvigorating abandoned or devastated sites. Concentration upon a single suggestive artifact or structure can, potentially, stimulate the imagination to an impassioned act of selfplacement. Yet Mahon does not sustain this creatively empowering trope for long; instead, he turns, in his most recent volumes, to more windswept vistas, in which he insists that belonging entails responsibility (of a very un-Yeatsian sort) to the material of the earthly. The tension between Mahon’s dichotomies is mined for its perverse, difficult, yet rich potential, and the poems move toward a state that enlivens the poet’s voice. “The Woods” and “Craigvara House” create a symbolic diptych that enacts this process in miniature: the former poem progresses from idyllic existence in a Marvellian “green retreat” to the inexplicable, not-quite-rhetorical question “But how could we/survive indefinitely/so far

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from the city and the sea?” The quiet nirvana envisioned in “The Mayo Tao” and “The Snow Party” is abandoned, as survival appears predicated on chaos and involvement (if not collective engagement). The “feast” of life in a forest retreat is rejected: Finding, at last, too creamy for our taste the fat profusion of that feast, we carried on to chaos and confusion, our birthright and our proper portion.1 Mahon’s poetic material must remain unconducive—he frequently quotes Raymond Chandler’s dictum, “No art without the resistance of the medium” —as identity is formed oppositionally, establishing itself through antinomy. Once again, we must reckon with this speaker’s sense of obligation, despite his desire to escape his dark “birthright.” It is matched, formally (in rhymed tercets) and thematically by “Craigvara House,” though in the latter, the poet has returned to his darkness, rain, and ocean. Perhaps Mahon wishes to respond to his critics’ accusation of escapism; an autobiographical reading suggested by Haughton, however, sees it as a poignant description of Mahon’s mid-life breakdown (the result of alcoholism and divorce), in which allusions to “crisis narratives” by Sartre, De Quincey, and Fitzgerald nourish the poet during his dark night,2 and enable him to cross over to a new sunlit shore, precariously optimistic and, as always, vulnerable to the forces the poem animates. Even if chaos and confusion are seen, in “The Woods,” as his “proper portion,” the poet must find a way to galvanize his antinomies in a way that is both creative and, possibly, therapeutic. His signature alternation of darkness and light symbolizes not just an emotional dichotomy but a creative one, in which light can be excessively therapeutic, sanitizing the foul rag-and-bone shop that is imaginatively necessary. As the early “Jail Journal” has demonstrated, a “night-crossing” is necessary to attain knowledge, and Mahon nuances this concept throughout his oeuvre. He has “crossed by night/a dark channel, my eyesight/focused upon a flickering pier-light.” The melodic chord of the perfect rhyme is interesting for its unexpectedness, letting us hear a harmony reached through disharmony—not an original point, perhaps, but the poem asks us to take it farther: darkness is responsible for creating the pier-light, for honing one’s capacity for vision (“eyesight”), the most intense beauty present being formed through opposition. 1 2

Collected Poems 132–33. “Craigvara House,” 134–36. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 166–69.

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These poems think through the consequences of Mahon’s artistic idealism. The ultimate guiding light may be the perfect “sea-light” of Inis Oírr, but his art begins with a night-crossing. It is the poet’s “proper portion,” and we may find a residue of religious feeling in this sense of allotment. He must learn the state that has been given to him; “know his place” in a yet deeper sense than “Spring in Belfast” had it. “Craigvara House” reaches the dark epiphany that “home is where the heart breaks.” Knowing one’s home entails pain, but evading it in the “green retreat” of “The Woods” will work against the project of self-knowledge.3 “Home” does not imply a happy unity, but a grounded pain. Eamon Grennan points out the spoken nature of Mahon’s language, positing that this quality reflects “a tenacious commitment to what is private in experience.” He posits, “Intimacy is the desired end of such poetry . . . but such an intimacy as permits the experience to have a “public” expression without losing its essentially private nature.”4 Grennan’s emphasis on expression of intimacy is a helpful way of understanding Mahon’s style, though it may be better to substitute “poetic” for “public,” since public speech too often approaches rhetoric, and Mahon cannot be called a rhetorical poet. It is the poetic effect of certain techniques, such as rhyme, that often renders this intimacy fragile. In “Craigvara House,” it is formed by the cliché of a broken heart that is made utterly new and poignant by its context. It is also formed by the atmosphere of confidentiality that lends the poem its emotional delicacy: we empathize with the speaker and share his memories. This private and conflicted experience is threatened by the outside world. Mahon images the world as a force that cannot be resisted. In “The Studio,” a scene from Edvard Munch is injected with manic fervor: “You would think with so much going on outside/The deal table would make for the window,/ The ranged crockery freak and wail. . . . .” This phantasmagorical situation is unimaginable; yet, we must imagine in order to enter its atmosphere. The abstract idea behind it, of an outer world exerting an irresistible pull on the interior, is not incredible, though. When the poem steps back from its claims (“But it never happens like that”) and rests in “quivering silence,” it holds itself in an uneasy equilibrium between the mind and the materials upon which it works, or the artist’s craft and the artist’s life.5 3

This view of home may be directly contrasted to Adam Zagajewski’s view, which depends on imaginative idealization (as achieved in “To Go to Lvov”). Home is not concomitant with aesthetic idealism here: knowledge of “the dark” is the basis for creativity, but there is no sense that exploration of one’s home will entail a quest of any kind. Home is the dark ground, not the lofty heights. 4 Eamon Grennan, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Omaha, NB: Creighton University Press, 1999) 257–8. 5 I borrow this formulation from Edna Longley in “Derek Mahon: Extreme Religion of Art,” in Michael Kenneally, ed., Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995) 294. “The Studio,” Collected Poems 36.

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The abstract tension summoned in “The Studio” is given fuller explanation in the epistolary poem “Beyond Howth Head.” Again, we have a cold and menacing seascape as the background against which the speaker weighs the claims of the outside world against the temptation toward eremitism. The material world is specific, though, including place-names (Carraroe, Dublin Bay), literary references (“our heliotropic Birnam Wood”) and unlyrical details (“bored to tears by Telefís”).6 The world is not being resisted even if the speaker smartly critiques it. The crisis question of the poem is “who would trade self-knowledge for/a prelapsarian metaphor,/love-play of the ironic conscience/for a prescriptive innocence?” The implied answer is, of course, “nobody.” The amorous quality of “love-play” minimizes the destructive capacity of irony, and it is instructive to know that the poet considers it in such terms. How genuine are this poem’s ruminations, though, if the speaker so evidently relishes his ironic technique? Perhaps this is not, after all, the voice of intimacy. The dichotomy of world versus self boils down to the question of sincerity. Can one actually separate social from personal language? Must the reader distance the poem’s language as a merely formal exercise (pitting one voice against another), or can one relate to a personal voice in one’s reading? The “ironic conscience” is opposed to “prescriptive innocence,” and in this adjective one comprehends the impossibility of conceiving a “pure” state of being in the world, or of communication. Total sincerity precludes rhetoric. However, the poem’s knowing voice makes “innocence” seem over-prescribed, devoid of organic naturalness. The speaker’s belief that “The writing on the wall. . ./elsewhere was written long ago” leads him to the same impasse as in “Ovid in Tomis”: writing is seen as oppression, prescriptive fatality. Life’s events have been prescribed, one concludes, and there is nothing to do except peek furtively at the world outside. The poem moves past this conclusion in a surprising way. “Beyond Howth Head” seems to start over again, twice, in the course of the poem.7 The speaker is not satisfied with his position. He keeps imagining other alternatives, chiefly withdrawal from the world “to return in greater style,” yet he happens on an image that literally sets the world spinning: Centripetal, the hot world draws its children in with loving paws ... 6

Earlier versions of the poem contain even more allusions than the current version in Collected Poems 52–57. The earlier poem also identifies the references (“my Dover Beach scenario”) within the poem. 7 John Redmond draws attention to the “panorama” effect that seems to mark a re-thinking; he also notes the “sonorous Latinate diction” and attempt at omniscience that doesn’t mesh with the concomitant desire for intimacy. See John Redmond, “Wilful Inconsistency: Derek Mahon’s Verse-Letters,” in Irish University Review 24 (1): 96–116.

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and spins them at the centre where they have no time to know despair but, without final purpose, must ‘accept the universe’ on trust Belonging in the world isn’t a choice; eremitism is. The overdetermined dichotomy (cold/heat, whirling/still) contains some seeds of ambiguity that may bear fruit. The battering sea, cold wind, and loud music disrupting the speaker’s meditative silence throughout the poem are “loving,” not hostile. He is the child of his surroundings and they desire his company; this posture is different from a sense of obligation because it is based on a positive choice (of him, by the world). Even in the “lost townlands” on the “crumbling shores,” he is drawn toward the center. There is no such thing as detachment, this image implies, because even the most hermetic poet is drawn into the general mess. The lines continue, end-stopped yet not condensing to simple statement, until each thought-unit of the poem becomes complex and scrambled. The need to “‘accept the universe’ on trust” is also questionable. The quotation marks lead one to ask whether the speaker has fully incorporated this message into his psyche, or left the marks to indicate distance. Likewise, the rhythmic jolt of “without final purpose” makes one wonder if the speaker accepts this lack of purpose so easily. Such devices keep apart the world and the self. The use of quotation marks, which increases in Mahon’s oeuvre, gives the poet the simultaneous benefit of observation and participation: he observes (ironically? it is not always clear) his own use of language. Its drawback is that this technique can disrupt lyricism. The allusiveness of “Beyond Howth Head” pulls against the speaker’s desire to be “like one of those old hermits.” Incorporating direct quotes is a modern device, it pulls in the world as well as holds apart from it. When allusiveness overpowers the voice, it can even be seen as a sign of lack—the speaker cannot create his own words. “The Hudson Letter,” a poem in a radically different style from Mahon’s early work, portrays the “furious world” of contemporary New York City and admits the speaker’s incapacity to counter its pressure. He feels a sense of sterility in the midst of the city’s activity: “and what of the kickstart that should be here?” Later, he entreats, “Oh, show me how to recover my lost nerve!”8 The poem escapes from outside to the speaker’s apartment, yet cannot find its “kick-start.” The noise of the radiators does not initiate a loftier song formed by the poet, but merely serves as an irritant (“I toss and turn and listen”). One cannot accuse the poet of escapism, but we must ask about what the world can offer that is of poetic value. Since he has not entirely accepted the universe, he cannot reconcile himself to a lack of purpose and 8

Collected Poems 186–87.

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accept it simply. A poem such as this cannot escape the centripetal force of the “hot world,” nor lift itself onto a visionary plane. The tension between world and self is also a tension between lyrical registers. Most of Mahon’s poetry situates itself between the song-like villanelle of “The Dawn Chorus” and the loosely compendious “The Hudson Letter.” Being in history seems to be equated with allusiveness, irony, and rebellion (if not outright rejection); being outside of history is a “cold dream” whose porcelain perfection is crushed by the paws of the hot world. “Rage for Order” comes to grips with the poet’s impotence to change “real” events. Although it relegates poetic activity to the sidelines, it also furnishes a clear division between two types of action: beyond the “burnt-out” detritus of the postindustrial world, which has finally brought about the demise that lurks beyond so many of Mahon’s poems, the poet is “indulging” a “wretched rage for order.” Unlike the singer of Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West,” this poet cannot match Stevens’ assertion of imaginative power, but grimly subverts Stevens’ depicted synthesis of nature and art, idea and emotion. The landscape of “Rage for Order” has descended into “wretched” fragmentation, in which art is so powerless to provide a stay against confusion that it is sarcastically denigrated as an indulgence. Both poems place their lyricist in a space apart, but Mahon’s is deflationary, Stevens’ is resonant with achieved harmonies even while insisting upon the separateness of singer, song, and surrounding. His verbal play is gentle, corresponding to the nuances of the thinking process, while Mahon’s short lines and alliterative consonants pound their reality into the mind, forcing the reader to acknowledge the essential antagonism between poet and place. The poem will not let us euphemize this situation as a creative tension. Lest we assume that Mahon allies himself with the poet, the poem wrenches apart the speaker from “us,” inhabitants and authors of our own apocalyptic chaos. . . . the fitful glare Of his high window is as Nothing to our scattered glass. ... Now watch me As I make history, Watch as I tear down To build up With a desperate love, Knowing it cannot be Long now till I have need of his Terminal ironies.9 9

Collected Poems 47–48.

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In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the song is above and beyond the elements; Stevens, in fact, separates the artist from her surroundings more thoroughly than Mahon, who diminishes the essence of art by making it ultimately subservient to its context. The poet is beyond his surroundings but his words can only be measured in them, and this situation leads to the inevitable conclusion that poetry makes nothing happen. Stevens, on the other hand, perceives this nothing as an essence in itself. Mahon places the late-Romantic Stevens in the scales with antiRomantic Philip Larkin, yet in the context of “Rage for Order,” both poets curiously signify an orientation toward harmony and sublimity. Larkin’s high window shows nothing yet comprehends eternity. It does not “glare” accusingly toward the speaker but indifferently gives out onto a prospect of endlessness. The “fitful glare” illuminating this poet’s wretchedness is directly opposed to Larkin’s window that shows nothing and is nowhere. Its integrity is opposed to the “scattered” shards of an urban Waste Land unredeemed by prayer. Mahon’s poet is damned to reside somewhere, despite the desire for hermeticism expressed in “Beyond Howth Head,” and this desire lies dormant beneath “Rage for Order” as a motivating animus that turns toward the wistful hermit-poet himself, who becomes an object of derision in this merciless antilyric. Casting Larkin as a Romanticallyinclined optimist is quite a feat. Whereas Stevens’ rage for order is “blessed,” leading to the “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” of an art that approaches spirituality, Mahon’s rage for order is “wretched,” a word that cleverly echoes the vowel-sounds of “blessed.” The rage for order does not master but, like a child, is indulged. Ultimately, it will die out as a matter of natural selection, as the strong and unpoetic will triumph. The “I” who suddenly emerges in the penultimate stanza is, or wants to be, one of these triumphant people of action. His bluster (“Now watch me”) demands rather than wins our attention. The notion of forceful action “making history” is naïve, as the poem admits, since “history” is comprised of subtle as well as overt influence. One subtle effect of the poem is its inclusion of a rhyming pair in each stanza, evincing the speaker’s internal order-creating impulse and, often, creating a seemingly antithetical grouping that may produce a salutary irony of its own. The quality of the poet’s ironies significantly changes from draft to draft of the poem, so that an early draft closes with “germinal” ironies, later emended to “desperate” and then “terminal.” Michael Allen believes the revision moves from an “eruditely ambiguous” meaning to a more “sensibly realistic” one,10 yet “sensible” is not a word readily associated with Mahon. These adjectives 10 Michael Allen provides an instructive analysis of Mahon’s revisions. He focuses on rhythm in particular, highlighting a progression from diffidence to boldness. Michael Allen, “Rhythm and Revision in Mahon’s Poetic Development,” in Kennedy-Andrews, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 111–29.

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move from an association with birth to one with crisis and then death, but “Terminal” may be the most ambiguous word of all, for the word also signifies a teleology—there is a terminus to the poet’s work, perhaps, and when it is reached the poet will be rendered unnecessary. The man of action will embody the now-spurious poet’s messages. Just as a poem may be a paradigm of good politics, so a world of good politics may not need to be guided by a “wretched rage for order.” The earliest “germinal” most clearly expresses a hope that a new synthesis may blossom from the seeds of irony, linking the wretched poet and the high-handed maker of history. Thus the dichotomy between hot world and hermetic poet is unresolved. The push and pull of their conflict extends to the tone and voice of their depiction, as the grandiloquence of “Watch as I tear down // To build up” contrasts with the delicacy of the fire king’s “palace of porcelain” and the intense quiet of “The Snow Party.” The poetic question becomes how to involve the speaker in history without overpowering the private voice. His emotional alliance with the ahistorical is clearly stated in a poem like “The Banished Gods,” the aestheticized language and imagery of which are inextricably linked to its subject-matter: “It is here that the banished gods are in hiding,/Here they sit out the centuries/In stone, water/And the hearts of trees,/Lost in a reverie of their own natures.”11 The long-range perspective of “centuries” extends into the space around the laconically noted “stone, water,” as the space of the page is filled by a sense of undisturbed existence. There is discord between the temporality of the hot world, with its desperate cityscapes and scattered glass, and these elemental “centuries,” yet the speaker cannot belong here. The problem of place is a problem of imaginative affinity: reveries of escape consume the heart away from its residence, as they will for Julia Hartwig to an equally high degree. Residence, though, is a reality that must be faced; the would-be contemplative must leave the sensual contemplation of “The Snow Party,” “The Mayo Tao,” and “The Banished Gods” in favor of the sensory dystopia of “our scattered glass.” The core problem here is that the speaker is not fully satisfied with a place out of time, though it remains an ideal state. He cannot, however, settle on a type of diction that communicates the imaginative concentration of the poet’s mind without creating an atemporal utopia—imagination is inevitably quashed and quelled by a hostile, devouring world. Communicating thisworldly transcendence is difficult. Mahon’s poems incorporate different levels of diction, but the poet’s mind is not fully satisfied unless his diction soars above the ordinary. The ostensible theme of the brief “Tractatus” is a defense of imaginative reality, but its drama plays out in its diction:

11 Collected Poems 85–86. Mahon tries to describe Belfast with the same gentle, mellifluous language in “Afterlives,” yet the jagged edges of violence and alienation cut through the poem’s harmonies.

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‘The world is everything that is the case’ From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facèdly, His agèd face12 Wittgenstein is paraphrased in colloquial words that are vague enough to require a poetic gloss.“Giving up” is both casual and humorously euphemistic, as if the scope of the earlier proposition needed vernacular diminishment and even secrecy—the face of “the fumbling God” is hidden. Edna Longley describes the effect of these lines as a competition: the first three lines “cosmically cheek” Wittgenstein’s assertion “by rising from the lowest order of defeated nature . . . to the highest order of triumphant art.” The second stanza carries this further, claiming that our imagination may outdo reality.13 The poem’s movement between colloquial and high style to use Zagajewski’s term harmonizes the terms in competition, so that both registers contribute to Mahon’s view of “the whole.” Both poets seek to celebrate a unity that, however, they still see in terms of the ultimate harmony of art and spirit (as “case,” “Samothrace,” and “face” rhyme) more than an all-encompassing harmony of precious and dross matter. God may fumble but the archaism of Mahon’s syllabic emphasis (facèdly, agèd) and the sensuousness of the speaker’s spirituality connects the lines to a tradition of celebratory religious poetry and—notably and surprisingly, given his Protestant background and general secularism—to Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose verbal concreteness and sprung rhythm communicate the sensual presence and dynamism of divinity.14 Hopkins’ religious ecstasy is one pole of feeling that is attractive yet ultimately implausible. The intensity that Hopkins brings to bear upon his rhythm and imagery cannot be sustained by this poem’s speaker, though, who cannot quite situate himself in the “high” world that attracts him. The problem of including the world on one’s own terms is revisited in Mahon’s two most recent poetry volumes, The Hudson Letter (1996) and The Yellow Book (1998). This is a more subtle version of the same problem that the speaker of “Spring in Belfast” confronted in the chiasmatic lines “Should engage more than my casual interest,/Exact more interest than my casual pity.” The opposition between “casual” and its implied antonym (sincere, deep, intense) is explored on different levels. Mahon has created 12

Collected Poems 120. Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986) 184. 14 Hopkins’ influence on Mahon is often overlooked. The influence of modern Irish poets has been demonstrated by Mahon’s scholars, and links with French poet Philippe Jaccottet have been established, as well as tenuous connections with Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden. Occasionally one hears Hopkins’ cadences below the surface of Mahon’s poems, as in the play of vowel and disjunctive stress: “He hides, shame-facèdly, his agèd face” or “Skies change but not souls change.” The latter line is from “Homecoming,” Collected Poems 33. 13

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a system of ideals in his poetic work that reveals the desires of his poetic speaker,15 and one cannot accuse the speaker of taking a merely casual interest in his surroundings. However, interest is not the same as participation and thematic participation (poems about the speaker’s place) is not the same as stylistic inclusion (poems that express place). The quiet voice of “The Snow Party” is rejected by the poet. The tinge of irony that may undermine “The Mayo Tao” is part of a broader tendency toward self-criticism. The elements of Mahon’s poetry may undercut each other: colloquial diction deflates high style, the ideal rural space is relinquished for the unloved city, and the rage for order that creates poetry is deprecated as wretched. In The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book, the desire for a place out of time is denied by a compulsion to include socio-cultural realia. The poems take in allusions, idioms, colloquialisms, and local details without wholly digesting them. This speaker cannot be accused of standing aloof from the world. The title poem of The Hudson Letter takes the poet’s inability to find a “kick-start” as its topic, giving rise to the criticism that Mahon’s poetry has become sick of itself. It is over-stocked with reading lists, allusions to postmodernity and academic jargon.16 “On the Automation of the Irish Lights” begins concretely—the speaker visits an old lighthouse around a golf course—but turns to a different register: “These are the stars in the mud, the moth’s desire,/the cosmic golf that guides us ab aeterno/to ‘a little cottage with a light in the window’; /like Ptolemy and Ussher the mind creates/its own universe with these co-ordinates/marked out by beacons of perpetual fire.”17 Diminishment of old beauties is a theme that runs throughout these volumes, yet these beauties are not always memorialized in high style; or rather, the tone falters, stumbling downwards when it seeks to “guide us ab aeterno.” This is, perhaps, a stylistic defense mechanism, a complicating factor like Zagajewski’s disjunctive similes. The poem ends on a very tentative upbeat, yet its pastiche effect makes it difficult to find the vision of harmony that the speaker seems to seek. This is, again, a question of shuttling between chaos and peace, confusion and formal achievement. It is hard to find spiritual sustenance in pastiche, the dominant mode of Mahon’s 1990s poems. When poetic language becomes one more illustration of spiritual malaise, one begins to question the project of the poem (and here, Zagajewski and Mahon definitively part ways). On the one hand, the poet’s candid admission that he is using others’ words saves him from the egotistical sublime; on the other hand, in his earlier poems, the singularity of his voice was the necessary mediating agent between the poet’s cold dream 15

There is only one poetic speaker in Mahon’s work, and he develops through time, even while there are also certain poems inhabited by different personae (such as “Rage for Order” with its poet opposed to maker of history). 16 Peter MacDonald, “Incurable Ache,” Poetry Ireland Review 56, 117–9. 17 Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1998) 54–55.

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and the hot world. If the world is allowed to take over his voice, where can we situate the poet’s identity, confused and contingent as it may be? Such poems are not pure pastiche, but at times approach dangerously close to it, and belonging appears rather chimerical when the poet’s identity is all but drowned by the diverse fragments of knowledge surrounding it (he is not “everything that is the case” himself). The individuality of the poet’s perspective is compromised, and the search for belonging is all but annulled when the poet abandons sincerity as a prior imaginative figment. Mahon’s most allusive poems lead us to consider an important question in the study of poetic belonging: how much is belonging founded upon a basic acceptance of the individuality and honesty of the word, and how can belonging be sought or expressed in a language one consciously proclaims is not, and possibly cannot be, one’s own? Seamus Heaney struggles with the English language’s “preoccupation” with colonialism; Mahon struggles with the cultural imperialism of media-speak and the dizzying force of multiplicity—the mind cannot quite create “its own universe.” It would be incorrect to imply that Mahon’s use of quotation is confined to the 1990s volumes. His poetry has always been allusive. Yet allusions have never overpowered the poems’ effects. The quotations in the later poetry, on the other hand, are too numerous to be instructive, and disrupt the lyrical flow of the poems. Common phrases are placed in ironic quotation marks at inexplicable times. The speaker still, clearly, desires to set apart his mode of speech from that of others. Our question becomes one regarding individuality and sincerity, and whether they function in necessary interrelation. These poems do mark a progression from the disabling dichotomies of the earlier work. The world is no longer held at a distance. The poet has relinquished some of his verbal control by allowing others to speak for him, and this may be viewed as a greater openness. One feels how the poetry dwells in its location—New York City for The Hudson Letter, Ireland for The Yellow Book—yet is not at home in this context. The emphasis on notbelonging in the early work is matched by another sort of not-belonging. The earlier poetry lifted off from grounded ironies to achieve a bird’s-eye view as a means of finding a space of one’s own. Belonging was found beyond, not within. Despite the presence of an often-overwhelming sociocultural context in the 1990s, the poet must still, always, look away from this context to find transformative vision: “being is an art/we learn for ourselves, in solitude, on our very own,/. . ./dreaming at all times our uninterruptible dream/of redemptive form.”18 18

“The Hudson Letter” IX, Collected Poems 201. The poet’s self-created context (the mind’s own coordinates, Mahon might say) continuously informs his poems, so that “The Snow Party” may be counterpoised with the burnt-out buses of “Rage for Order,” the aristocratic palace of “The Last of the Fire Kings” against the urban “fallen angel” of “Spring in Belfast.” Mahon’s insistence upon dichotomy necessitates a reading that holds his antinomies in mind. In his later poetry, the antinomies become increasingly Yeatsian, even when they are phrased in demotic

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The picture of poetic solitude painted by The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book is not one of “uninterruptible dream,” but of disabling loneliness. It is often interrupted by unredemptive noises (motorcycles, garbage trucks, beggars’ harangues) or the speaker’s own interjections. When the world enters the poems, it overpowers them. Mahon is attracted to fin-de-siècle decadence in his early poems, and The Yellow Book takes this longstanding attraction as its organizing principle, forming an implicit parallel between the 1890s and 1990s (the “decadent” literary journal called Yellow Book was in publication roughly a century before Mahon’s volume came out). In this volume there is a sense that the baroque lifestyle described by Oscar Wilde is a colorful, glittering antithesis to the dreary, littered city outside the poet’s window. The speaker’s voice pays homage to the literature he loves, but abruptly descends to an abject lament: . . . the pleasures of the text, periphrasis and paradox, some languorous prose at odds with phone and fax. It’s cold up here in the city of litter and drums while fires glow in the hearths of suburban homes; I have no peacocks, porphyries, prie-dieu, no lilies, cephalotis, nepenthes, ‘unnatural’ vices, yet I too toil not neither do I spin, I too have my carefully constructed artificial paradises and I’m going crazy up here on my own.19 This language’s unnaturally high pitch is counterbalanced by the raw admission of loneliness. The baroque quality of the speaker’s artificial paradises contrasts painfully with his lived situation, and his outcries are emotionally piercing (poignant is too weak a word). His perversely Biblical self-admonishment, carried off with a syntactic flourish—“yet I too toil not neither do I spin”—is brought up short. Such flourishes provide delusory contentment for only so long, the poem’s grammar implies, before simplicity is made necessary. The “artificial paradise” of style is under pressure here, and it is revealed as ultimately untenable as a form of belonging (Heaney will come to a remarkably similar conclusion about his carefully constructed metaphorical systems). The poet’s inability to escape from his immediate situation is often considered by Mahon’s poems of the 1990s, and his revisions to those poems attempt to assuage their wrenching sense of incapacity. Even though there is only a year’s gap between the publication of The Yellow speech. I think especially of “traditional sanctity and loveliness,” its association with “the old high way” in Yeats’s work, and Mahon’s increasing sense that tradition and imagination hold the greatest riches for the poet. 19 “Axel’s Castle,” The Yellow Book 14–5. Revised version in Collected Poems 226–7.

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Book and the Collected Poems, substantial changes have been made to “Axel’s Castle” (quoted above). The last cited line is excised, lending the stanza a very different coloration—Mahon appears to desire confirmation (“I too/have. . .”) rather than confession in making such a revision. The unusual end-rhyme of “drums” and “homes,” which may tacitly refer to a Northern Irish cultural setting, with political violence around the corner of every snug “suburban home,” is deleted. Instead, he inserts an image that could be anywhere, unsituated: “The psychiatrist locks up and puts out the light/above desk and couch in his consulting rooms.” Both revisions affect the poem’s tone. Desperation is replaced by domesticity (two additional lines refer to a companion leaving the speaker’s domicile) and a culture of self-help replaces an older one of hearth-fires. There is no transcendence in these new images, no “kick-start,” but a quiet smoothness. Cyril Connolly’s epigraph to The Yellow Book states, “To live in a decadence need not make us despair; it is but one technical problem the more which a writer has to solve.” Through the technical means of formal precision, perhaps the poet can indeed make form redemptive. The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book ground their millenarian perspective in sensory detail. Litter and luxury dwell side by side, as the concept and state of decadence is mined for its germinal ambiguity, signifying both deterioration and excess. The poet, however, is still perversely alone. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews sums up this paradoxical situation: “for all the poet’s going out into the ‘real world’ of history and people, he invariably retreats into a closeted aesthetic world of high culture.”20 The world of high culture satisfies his need for imaginative autonomy more than the real world that pulls him into its chaos, and the tension between these two pulls generates his deepest meditations. Kennedy-Andrews aptly ironizes the “reality” that is, after all, as much “the case” as the reality of the imagination (“the world is everything that is the case”). The “artificial paradises” of Oscar Wilde are a luxury for the selfironizing speaker who is conscious that any utopia will be artificial, whether it is the fire king’s palace of porcelain or an idealizing nostalgia for Dublin or New York back in the days of “film noir and real jazz.” Wilde creates a world that the speaker may relish with full knowledge of his position outside of it. Its color contrasts with his stark sincerity. The major problem here, is that the closeted luxury that sets itself defiantly apart from the “real world” cannot be made to be “the case,” and the imagination everywhere encounters the resistance of its medium, the world. There is a problem in the concept of identity that is relevant to this position, wherein the real world pressures the speaker for engagement while his self-perception is defiantly au contraire. Peter MacDonald explains it clearly: “A sense of identity seems to point up the sheer individuality of 20

Introduction to Kennedy-Andrews, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 26.

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experience, its unrepeatable particularity; in fact, the idea of identity is employed almost always to emphasize the common nature of experiences, and to provide these experiences with a significance and meaning already mapped out in cultural or historical terms.”21 When the term “identity” is used in a socio-cultural context, it usually connotes definition by group membership. Mahon’s voice is, meanwhile, defined most acutely by his incapacity to be a member of a group, whether on the streets of 1960s Belfast or in the drawing rooms of the 1890s. It is difficult to summarize Mahon’s relationship to Ireland because he backs away from such “mapped out” identity, from commonality in general, and leaves us suspicious of the cultural terms that the poems reject. By querying how the poems seem to ask us to read them, we are led away from terms emphasizing commonality and toward the idiosyncrasy of the poems, which ostentatiously reject easily mapped identity coordinates. This view of identity helps to clarify Mahon’s relation to the artifact. Abandoned sheds, garages, and gardens have the power to stimulate poetic epiphany. These sites are part of the cultural life of their location, and as such are representative of particular locales: the two most famous poems of abandonment, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” and “A Garage in Co. Cork,” pinpoint their locations in their titles, even if the poems’ work leads quickly away from them. These buildings’ position outside of their cultures, at the fringes of society, makes them interesting to the outsider-poet. The abandoned artifact becomes symbolic of another type of decadence, not literary but material. It is a physical synecdoche: from an isolated fragment, one may imagine its surrounding structure, the life happening around it, and the culture of which these details form a part. Thus the shed in County Wexford reminds the poet of the grand hotel once standing beside it, and the garage recalls a family—by all accounts an imagined one—that made use of it. Such artifacts allow a remarkably fruitful relationship between poet and place: they necessitate imaginative work but do not impose upon it and elicit longing to leave them. These abandoned sites and objects allow Mahon’s speaker to participate in the physical and cultural life of a single place as fully as possible, . . . every artifact A pure, self-referential act, That the intolerant soul may be Retrieved from triviality And the locked heart, so long in pawn To steel, redeemed by wood and stone.22

21

Peter MacDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 7. 22 “Sunday Morning,” Collected Poems 127.

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This excerpt from “Sunday Morning” delicately sketches out the object’s potential to inspire deep feeling. The lack of pause—either line-end caesura or comma—in the very lines that lift the soul to a high level of contemplation allows them to enact a smooth rhythmic swell. The reader is left to ponder the weight, modesty, and purity of these humble natural materials. It is not the energetic earthy celebration that Stevens evokes in his “Sunday Morning,” but a calm revelation of purity. The internal rhyme of “art” and “heart” creates an equivalence that one may be tempted to take for granted, if it were not for the unusual emphasis upon physical material that may “retrieve” the soul from its improper situation in “triviality.” The object’s aesthetic quality is not decadent here, but life-giving and even redemptive. This urge toward spiritual redemption by means of sensuality, or rather, sensory appreciation that becomes spiritual inspiration and spiritual belonging, is of paramount importance to Mahon’s struggle to “know his place.” “Sunday Morning” is placed three pages before “A Garage in Co. Cork” in Mahon’s Collected Poems, and it introduces the redemptive vision that is fully explored in the latter poem. The abandoned garage is physically dirtied with puddles of oil, garbage, and rust, but the distance between the time of its use and the present moment has been psychologically purifying. Instead of focusing on the tawdriness of its detritus, the speaker hones in on the imaginative potential of this “roadside oasis” until its sullied physicality is not just redeemed but magically transformed. The front wall “might have nothing behind it,” yet this possibility is exactly what delights a speaker who good-naturedly assumes his readers’ distaste for the trash he describes, and his pleasure in subverting our expectations is patent. This artifact is not self-referential, but leads the viewer to imagine the life within and beyond it, as the “glare” of the wretched poet’s high window in “Rage for Order” becomes a thrilling manifestation of inhuman beauty: It might have nothing behind it but thin air, Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron, Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden Silence of an untended kitchen garden— Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark Interior echoing with the cries of children. Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork A family ate, slept, and watched the rain Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit So that the mind shrank from the glare of it. ... Left to itself, the functional will cast A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon.

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The intact antiquities of the recent past, Dropped from the retail catalogues, return To the materials that gave rise to them And shine with a late sacramental gleam.23 The speaker counters his “Nirvana!” with an oppositional vision of cracked glass and darkness—perhaps referring back to the “scattered glass” of “Rage for Order”—yet does not lose his vision during the temporary diminuendo that ensues. This is an important moment in Mahon’s work. Although he sets the stage for an emotional diminuendo, it does not come. Instead, the poem achieves ecstasy, yet not through the banishment of civilization, as in “The Mayo Tao,” or its byproducts, as in “The Snow Party.” Instead, “A Garage in Co. Cork” balances on a borderline between social participation and escapism. It incorporates the curious imperative of “The Woods” and “Craigvara House” to face human society, yet without the sense of obligation that Mahon’s other poems confront. Its “Nirvana” does not entail expulsion of the worldly and human, but crucially, humanity enters the poem on the poet’s own terms. The capacity to re-imagine is central for both Mahon and Heaney’s treatments of belonging. The actual absence of any family has a cleansing effect parallel to that of the rain, allowing the speaker to imagine their hypothetical existence free of the public world’s pressure; just as “the exhausted grit” is colored cobalt, so this family is colored in nostalgic hues by a speaker who prefers his society at a distance (if it must be present at all). They are not out of time like the Fire King’s palace of porcelain, but they are out of the historical realm that Mahon has always found so damaging. The speaker is creating an alternate history, aestheticized yet taking transience as its basis. It is a step closer to the quotidian realities of The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book but his pose is not ironic. Instead, the viewer creates a transcendent scene so luminescent that “the mind shrank from the glare of it,” cowed by its own extraordinary power. Unusually for Mahon, religion is not repressive, hypocritical, or ironically distant—the “late sacramental gleam” of definitively maculate relics matches, and is intensified by, the “glare” of personal inspirational vision. This scene counters “Rage for Order,” wherein the irredeemable ruins cannot or will not be transformed by the glare of a desperate poet’s high window. It differs by its emptiness, even while the language of religion—“Nirvana,” “sacramental,” “Sunday,” “redeemed”—serves to connect an idiosyncratic visionary experience to a social framework. The qualities of these artifacts are consciously linked to established paradigms of transcendence, yet significantly, these references are syncretic. Critics such as Edna Longley work to root Mahon in Ulster Protestantism (her own home tradition), yet we must recognize the extent to 23

Collected Poems 130–31.

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which dissociation from the confines of a single and exclusionary religious tradition is vital for establishing a sense of belonging. At this middle stage of Mahon’s writing life, after he has voiced his scorn for orthodoxies, vision is found in the heterodox and the multifarious. Interestingly, the most sensual evocation of the garage bears the greatest emotional fruit: the poem’s rich description of debris moves toward the perfectly rhymed climax of the rain dancing the grit clean. Movement and vision reach their highest pitch at this point. Although the poem progresses past these lines, the speaker’s attempt to explain his vision slightly deflates its grand effect. He has found a type of transcendence that is not escapist but that which finds a beloved “antiquity” in the “recent past,” and an originary sacredness in the transformation of civilization’s detritus. The irony that undermines “The Mayo Tao” is not present in “A Garage in Co. Cork” or in “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” but there is an urge toward clarification that belies insecurity or, perhaps, doubts whether the visionary moment will persist casting its glow: his need to explain that “the functional will cast/A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon” is rendered unnecessary by the descriptive opening stanzas. The speaker, perhaps from commingled enthusiasm and anxiety, wishes to explain and underscore in order to uphold his vision. Mahon’s most famous poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” displays a similar shift of linguistic registers. It inhabits a crossroads between voyeurism, witness, and participation in the presented scene.24 It is most often read as a poem about creatures ignored by history but it can also be interpreted as a larger parable about allowing intimately private life to see the light of day, a topic very much at issue for a poet in permanent flight from potentially repressive “group membership” and social identities. The difference between discovering an unacknowledged creature and uncovering someone who had rather stay hidden underlies the difference between the acts of witness, participation, and voyeurism. Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. This is the one star in their firmament . . . The absence of such survivors allowed the poet to sacralize the abandoned garage. Here, however, he is pressed into a certain kind of service as the act 24 Eavan Boland discusses this poem, as well as “The Last of the Fire Kings,” in relation to Mahon’s attraction to Modernism and formalism. These poems are suffused by a longing for the legend of the poet’s power. The Modernists’ debates on the authority of the poet over his material are “unfinished business.” Eavan Boland, “Compact and Compromise: Derek Mahon as a Young Poet,” Irish University Review 24.1 (1994): 61–6.

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of excavation uncovers not just a space of possibility but of responsibility. Since the mushrooms “crowd to a keyhole,” not only seeking nourishment (by light) but also straining toward the outside world, the excavator has no choice but to engage himself with their plight. A real complication enters the poem and Mahon’s exploration of his place: the specter of social obligation, particularly when it entails participation in history (the mushrooms are “prisoners of the old regime”), has stymied the speaker in the past. It has shut down the possibility of belonging. A ghost presence in poems such as this may be Larkin’s “Church-Going,” in which an eventual realization of social and spiritual connection is predicated upon an initial absence, a church free of anything “going on” inside it. In contrast, the visitor to the shed puts a historical process in motion, a process marked by violence—the mushrooms are awoken by a “flash-bulb firing-squad”—and by the obligation to speak for another. They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say, ‘Let not the god abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’25 The mushrooms’ desire, though, remains uncertain: they have been expecting “deliverance” for so long that “there is left only the posture” of yearning. Can the speaker truly interpret such “wordless” cues? The poem summons the menacing political backdrop of the Troubles, the natural disaster of Pompeii, and the atrocity of the Nazi concentration camps in a rather uneasy conglomeration. Are these events compatible, and is it ethically fitting to bring them into the same poem? Should the volcanic burial of Pompeii be made equivalent to the manmade slaughterhouse of Treblinka? These serious instabilities fracture the poem, which remains an ethically ambivalent site. The mushrooms themselves remain vegetal and therefore incapable of speech; the poem’s main image is not one of trapped humans but of mute matter. The ambiguity of the mushrooms’ symbolic role leads to the issue of imposition: is the speaker imposing speech onto the mute, or divining the words of the forcibly muted? The question connects to the issue of how this poet views abandoned locales: does he, or must he, incur an obligation to resurrect their lost life, or may such locales be treated as 25

Collected Poems 89–90.

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“pure” artifacts enabling transcendence beyond time, beyond history and the need for witness, as the rain repaints the grit of the garage in County Cork? “Sunday Morning,” “A Garage in Co. Cork” and “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” present three relationships of the speaker to the artifact. The last poem has generated the most controversy because of its explicit mention of mass tragedy. Assuming that the poem may concern survivors of the Holocaust compels the reader to accept an ethical imperative: the poet must tell the victims’ stories; this is where “A Disused Shed” parts company with the relatively dehistoricized garage in County Cork. The poem’s achievement is due to the ambiguity that makes this one of several possible interpretations. One may also highlight the lacunae in the text that resist one single reading. The mushrooms are both magi and moonmen, beyond nature yet expressing “gravity and good faith,” wordless yet begging, food for worms yet still laboring. The reader is left with the overwhelming question of how the speaker can divine their state of being if incapacity for speech is their main characteristic. This issue comes about as a result of the artifact’s association with a context blissfully missing from the garage in County Cork—the shed is impure, not “self-referential.” It cannot be reimagined because it compels the speaker, yet in order to allow him voice, its inhabitants are seen as voiceless. The poem’s flow is unbroken because the mushrooms only “seem” to call for human intervention—the speaker acknowledges that he is speaking for them. The issue of imposition is a problem in Mahon’s view of the living artifact, a phrase that may be oxymoronic, since the mushrooms may still have communicative potential and cannot be definitively spoken for. Scholarly interpretations of the poem focus on its historical statement. They are supported in this effort by the modest epigraph, in parentheses, to J. G. Farrell, whose depiction of a crumbling hotel proved germinal (Mahon cobbles together images from Troubles and The Lung). Troubles, the novel Mahon “lost his heart to,” is set in 1919 during the Irish War of Independence, when remnants of British rule (such as a grand hotel) were violently brought down in a gesture of rebellion.26 The poet is considering the possibility of a messianic role, speaking for the war-torn nation, and the mushrooms’ last words accuse him of undue levity—“You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary.” The parallel between a photographer’s voyeurism and the poet’s casual metrics considerably complicates engagement or commemoration. A critique of the poet’s role is embedded within the poem, possibly revisiting 26

There are a number of significant dates behind the poem: Farrell’s Troubles was published in 1970, Mahon’s poem in 1973. The Irish civil war that accompanied the 1922 Treaty establishing Irish independence came to a (temporary) end in 1923; an even half-century later, soon after the Bloody Sunday in 1972, the poem is published in the midst of a new wave of violence. The poem mentions “a half century . . . in the dark.” My discussion is indebted to Hugh Haughton’s article “On Sitting Down to Read ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ Once Again,” The Cambridge Quarterly 31.2 (2002): 183–198.

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the “casual pity” of “Spring in Belfast,” now denounced as ugly indifference or even abandonment. There appear to be only two possible roles for the poet in this context— visionary outsider or political metaphorist—and the first has become more tainted than ever before in Mahon’s oeuvre. In a parallel manner, the mushrooms are caught between the desire to reenter history and to transcend it (as “Save us!” might imply salvation from history).27 Seamus Heaney voices both views at different occasions: in his Place and Displacement lectures, the mushrooms stand for “a whole Lethe full of doomed generations” straining toward a guiding light; the poem expresses the need for “recognition in the eye of God and of the world.” Later, Heaney sees them as the shades of Mahon’s Belfast ancestors, “pleading from the prison of their sectarian days with the free man who is their poet-descendant.”28 This Northern Irish interpretation is widespread among critics, but the poem’s effect depends upon its universal application. Its self-conscious awareness of its audience seeks to create a generalized sense of urgency—there is more than one situation at stake. The poem’s variety of locations and of poetic techniques opens it to various interpretations. At the same time, its tonal variety accentuates the high pitch of its closing stanza, moving between the evocatively descriptive, assonantal “slow clock of condensation” at work in the shed and the grand sweep of “a thousand mushrooms crowd . . .” and, later, the distraught exclamation, “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!” Heaney hears a “vault-filling resonance” in the poem, but his description points toward a dangerous grandiloquence made additionally problematic by the ventriloquized “Save us, save us.” In a poem about the overlooked and muted, such gestures endanger its import. They also problematize the view of “A Disused Shed” as a didactic poem, since it begins to clamor rather than teach.29 Its speaker has the superior 27 Kennedy-Andrews describes the debate between Seamus Deane’s argument for political reintegration (the mushrooms wish to be made historical) and Edna Longley’s argument for transcendence (The Poetry of Derek Mahon 15). Meanwhile, Longley interestingly notes Mahon’s “split poetic psyche”, which accounts for many of the ironies and ambivalences of his poems. These two positions are not necessarily self-contradictory: Mahon’s dreams of transcendence may be understood as reactions to social situations that the poet would rather resist and not enter. Both terms of his dichotomies are necessary to establish the poems’ Yeatsian movement between antitheses. 28 Place and Displacement 9, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 49. There are various intermediate positions between local and universal interpretations, of course, including Kennedy-Andrews’ view that while the poem “closely reflect[s] Mahon’s particular personal and cultural perspective,” he also “seeks to locate the local and personal within a wider cultural world” (Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home 160, 162). Neil Corcoran holds that while the mushrooms “in part” represent the Anglo-Irish class that “fell, or was finally pushed, out of power and history in the 1920s,” they also stand as a figuration of Mahon’s “finely tuned and frequently invoked apocalypticism” (Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999): 139. 29 It is both didactic and hortatory, soliciting comprehension and action, which it achieves (according to Silkin) in the course of the poem. See John Silkin, The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1997) 349–52.

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knowledge to show the reader what he may have ignored, though the gentle, alliterative lyricism of “a slow clock of condensation” and “flutter/ Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft” descends to the prosaic “Dog corners for bone burials/And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford” (an earlier version read “shit burials,” sinking the language down even farther). Longley calls this a “rhythm of diminished confidence,” opining that the content, diction, and resonance of these lines “mark some kind of nadir in English poetry, as in Irish history.”30 Is the speaker capable, then, or self-confident enough, to take on a didactic role? “A Garage in Co. Cork” employs a similar technique in a different conceptual framework, as the garage’s puddles of oil and cement heap are transformed “upward” into a gleaming vision. “A Disused Shed,” on the other hand, casts itself down in order to enact a dramatic crescendo. It climbs through rungs of increasingly formal diction—the Latinate “firmament” above, the foreign “waltzing” clouds, to an “expropriated mycologist” finished with his “interminable departure,” gaining pathos by juxtaposing such verbiage with the plainest English (“He never came back”)—to its high-pitched final injunctions. The ease of the last stanza’s simple rhymes (“way,” “Pompeii,” “say”) is discordant with the profound difficulty of redressing (or even addressing) serious tragedy. Just as in “A Garage in Co. Cork,” when the poet moves away from specific interaction with the scene’s visual elements to a larger explanatory or moralizing statement, the poem changes. It does not lose its potency but it retreats from its position of greatest strength. The virtue of the physical artifact is that it enables Mahon’s speaker to exert a visionary magic upon the physical scene. This situation allows for imaginative freedom: the speaker dwells inside his own story but does not escape the phenomenal world. Rhetorical exclamations, however, such as “Lost people. . .!,” cast him into a voice and story that is not his own, and in doing so he loses his vocal originality; this is exactly what the younger Mahon sought to avoid. One may connect “The Mayo Tao,” “The Snow Party,” and “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” based on their celebration of silence, and this line extends to the minimalist perfection of “Thinking of Inis Oírr” and the solitary perspective of “Beyond Howth Head,” whose speaker resists the hot world together with the poet of “Rage for Order.” The rhetorical call of the lattermost poem’s history-maker—“Now watch me . . . make history”— is obviously unsympathetic, and when placed against it, the grandiloquent cries concluding “A Disused Shed” appear similarly out of character. Mahon’s poetry does not progress to a resolution of its tensions. The gap between intellectual knowledge and sensory apprehension actually widens in his later work. The poems concerning artifacts are a short-term solution. Their potential has not yet been fully mined, yet the theme is not taken up after the 1980s. Time is a destructive agent in the later poetry. Ruin is not counterbalanced by the renewing act of imaginative apprehension, but the 30

Poetry in the Wars 182.

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imagination is overwhelmed by a sense of the world’s deterioration. The familiar Modernist theme of belatedness applies to events in the present—the speaker of “Aphrodite’s Pool” is part of the bathing scene he describes, yet retains the feeling that he’s an “incongruous visitor/under the fairy lights and paper frills/of a birthday party I was too late to attend.”31 The poem performs a delicate act: it situates the speaker squarely in the midst of the pool scene while disclaiming his belonging in it. He is an “incongruous visitor” to his own poetic event. This speaker seems to create an aura of incongruity wherever he appears. He is hampered by his inability to connect sensory apprehension with intellect. His hyper-conscious contemplation has reached a crisis point. He cannot assert his will against time, either by creating an autonomous vision or by using time’s debris as the ground for new growth. The speaker also cannot assert his will upon language, despite the intricate rhymes and tonal structures of the poems. The abundance of allusions discussed earlier illustrates this incapacity, as does the occasional flash of desire that never finds satisfaction in a vision of perfect prints or redemptive rain in the later poems. Art and literature are used to highlight the difference between previous manifestations of imaginative power and the present moment, not, as previously, to portray unchanging truths (“Girls on a Bridge”) or to picture the speaker’s own situation (“The Studio,” “Courtyards in Delft”). The golden bird and bough of Yeats’s Byzantium poems have become laughable: “A cock crows good-morning from an oildrum/like a peacock on a rain-barrel in Byzantium.”32 The parallel is pathetic instead of celebratory, though it is vigorously original. Yeats’s bird sang of temporal change (what was past, passing, or to come), but this change led to transformation. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” reflect on the realms of imperfect temporality and the golden perfection of art, but end in a vision that allows for purification into the eternal realm, whereas Mahon cannot imagine such transformative movement. The organic perfection of Inis Oírr has disappeared, and temporality is opposed to artistry. Knowledge has become a burden precluding belonging: the speaker’s tongue-in-cheek allusiveness exemplifies a knowing relation to place (temporal and physical), but this prevents redemptive vision. The perfect prints of Inis Oírr shamed vision into simple sight; the pure, self-referential act of the artifact provided closure to “Sunday Morning.” The later speaker is caught in a referential maze, with purity lodged in the unrecoverable past. Strangely enough, it is “Dawn at St. Patrick’s,” a poem set in an asylum that offers a hint of how loss can be transformed. The speaker ruminates in “Craigvara House” that home is where the heart breaks, and the later poem transforms heartbreak into a concrete object:

31

“Aphrodite’s Pool,” The Yellow Book 37–8. “Christmas in Kinsale,” XX of The Yellow Book, in Collected Poems 264–5.

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There is an old statue in the courtyard that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone. The griefs of the ages she has made her own. Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard, her body is covered in mould, the garden overgrown.33 The speaker is confident that the stone has an inner life. It is close to being an artifact, only the poem does not contain an epiphany. This is a quiet realization of emotion taking its place in a temporal continuum. Historical griefs are made visible in the statue and “made her own,” internalized into the statue’s essential nature. The rhyme between “stone,” her physical material, “own,” her ownership of her material, and “overgrown,” her inclusion into organic time, puts these states into harmony. Time does not obscure character. The lyricism of the voice is unchallenged—the stanza rhythmically expands and contracts without lightening the weight of its central realization. This is a modest instance of redemptive form, but its aesthetics signal a possible view of the artifact that expresses a quiet recognition of value. The voice of the stanza rings true to itself. The idea of making “the griefs of the ages” one’s own is potent for Mahon: from the earliest poems to the most recent, the sense of outside pressure upon the self, and the self’s inability to exert a counter-pressure, has been a constant thematic problem. One may object that this reading accords too much power to a material object, as “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” accords historical weight to a rather humble growth. Mahon’s objects have the virtue of grounding the speaker’s exploration of belonging and alienation in precise images, without the pressure of social obligation, the overwhelming effect of intertextual allusions, or the hopeless vistas of his philosophical meditations: when the speaker of “Dawn at St. Patrick’s” shifts his gaze to a cosmic panorama, he descends into fruitless dejection (the infantile gesture of chewing his thumb is a reaction to the existential assertion “We style,/as best we may, our private destiny,” a thought that gives the asylum-bound speaker no rest). This speaker needs a redemptive form that binds him to the earth he inhabits. The voice gains strength when the decision to resume working is reinforced by the “Cork”— “work”—“fort”—“turf”—“dusk” clump of tough consonants: “Earthbound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork/and trying to get back to work/at my sea-lit, fort-view desk/in the turf-smoky dusk.” Work is made concrete. It takes its place upon the same earth on which the stone statue tenaciously stands.34 The poem ends ambiguously. Jonathan Swift is the literary ancestor 33

“Dawn at St. Patrick’s,” Collected Poems 169–71. One may compare these “tough” words to the loose language of meditation—“what brought me to my present state,” or “one who has hardly grasped what life is about,/if anything.” I do 34

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presiding over the asylum world, and his satirical pessimism infuses much of Mahon’s recent work.35 The humor of the poem’s ending is somewhat cathartic (the New Year demands “modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,/new leaves”), but not constructive. Neither philosophical thought nor verbal play help the speaker gain control over his life. Mahon’s readers are left with the question of whether the poet can make the world his own. The speaker figures his place in the world by means of a complex series of dichotomies, and the tension between them vivifies his imagery. He acutely feels the need for a pure voice, and when he asks the ghost of Auden, “When will we hear once more the pure voice of elation/ in the nightwood of known symbol and allusion?” we ask the same of him. He asks his poetic predecessors for advice on how to position the self in the world, yet the “known symbol” must be traded for a fresh relation of eye to concrete image, one that involves the thinking mind but does not trade perception for self-enclosed rumination. Self-expression is allied with courage: “you remind us of what the examined life involves—for what you teach is the courage to be ourselves.”36 These lines are not visionary but their linkage of expressive courage with examination carries the potential for constructive vision. The notion of belonging must be applied to one’s own self: how to belong in the mind is as crucial as how to belong in a geographical locale. The “pure voice of elation” can only be achieved when the voice is grounded but not obligated, knowing yet not corrosively ironic, visionary yet not detached. Mahon’s poetry journeys toward this imaginative purity, tirelessly reconsidering its own claims. “Ovid in Tomis” proves to be the “early” poem that best prefigures Mahon’s work since 2000. Here, belonging is imagined in a cosmic scale that finally draws us out of the street-level imbroglio of his earliest work. . . . the ancient art of leisure best practiced not on any not wish to imply that meditation cannot be redemptive or produce strong poetry, but that this poet does not find the grounding that he desperately needs in philosophy. Rumination leads to inaction and a sense of hopelessness more often than not. 35 There is an uneasy relation between the literary influences manifestly at work in Mahon’s poems: Modernist attempts at mastery (Pound in “A Kensington Notebook”), images of decline (Eliot’s Waste Land in numerous poems), Stevens’ defense of the imagination, and Yeats’s visionary strain and defense of “the old high way” are used to different effect. Swift enters the recent poetry as a pervasive influence, and the carnivalesque disintegration pictured in “Christmas in Kinsale” plays against the speaker’s need for constructive imaginative power. Mahon has edited a selection of Swift’s verse for the Faber Poet to Poet series, just as Heaney has for Wordsworth. See Jonathan Swift: Poems, ed. Derek Mahon (London: Faber and Faber, 2001; 2006), especially the Introduction (vii–xx), which opens by wondering why Swift’s “dim view of human nature” should be seen as a sign of madness. 36 “Auden on St. Mark’s Place,” The Hudson Letter (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1996) 38–9.

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petrol-blue côte d’azur with its bums and money but in the fresh exposure of a single sea-anemone.37 The sense of distance that Hugh Haughton rightly senses in “Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass” is compounded here.38 Whereas the thematic nexus of the earlier poem was found in its alliance of “perfect prints” with a set-piece seascape, this alliance is not present in the more recent poem: human presence is a pollutant. Better to turn from the acculturated côte d’azur to the exposure of the singular sea anemone, “fresh” because not acculturated into the social matrix, “single” in the same manner as the speaker always has been and, we may suspect, always will be in Mahon’s oeuvre. The relation of the speaker to the physical world has become the main problem through which Mahon thinks in his poetry. Paradoxically, belonging is tacitly affirmed as a grudging realization that the speaker cannot participate in the fresh singularity found occasionally (yet not regularly) in the natural world, but must take his place in the polluted social matrix. Similarly to Zagajewski, Mahon constantly and continuously casts himself out and beyond, yet keeps returning to his “proper portion” of the chaotic and sullied reality in which he must live. Ever attentive to the ironic echoes of antithesis rhymes (a technique perfected by Yeats), the utopian trail of “leisure,” “azur” and “exposure,” leading us out into “the beyond”, which so irks Andrew Waterman, is brought heavily down to the ground by the antipoetic match-up of “any,” “money,” and “anemone,”; the latter word abruptly de-naturalized by the association. The search for a salvational “beyond,” where a thought might grow and an ideal of belonging may be traced in perfect prints, is stymied more frequently than it is indulged in and thought through in Harbour Lights. The solitary speaker observes and responds, yet infrequently searches. Despite his solitude, literary interlocutors crowd Mahon’s post-Hudson Letter poetry: Auden and Ovid are long-honored guests at his side, Valéry and Bonnefoy displace Jaccottet, contemporary painters displace Munch and the Dutch masters, and Yeats becomes the main figure to which the speaker responds in his meditations on time and human activity. The Eliot of Four Quartets also underlies the speaker’s prolonged, yet strangely half-hearted, search for the life of significant soil. Most surprising is Mahon’s desertion of the creatively enabling motif of reconstruction. Whereas abandoned places and disused artifacts allowed the speaker of previous poems to find a salvational alternative to the political mess and artistic muddle of contemporary life, now, a slow seaside meditation reaches a significantly more modest summit: 37

“On The Beach,” Harbour Lights (Loughcrew, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2005) 56. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon 44.

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Back at the house revisit the dark grove of baths, old cars and fridges, while above a withered orchard the slow cloud-cranes move in the empty silence where a myth might start —flute-note, god-word—the first whisper of art withdrawn in its integrity, in its own obscurity, for not everything need be known.39 The speaker fails notably to “start” the myth, to invoke the Andean flute or “god-word” that his newly-beloved Yeats might summon from the spirit world. Re-visitation brings no new vision. There is no late sacramental gleam in this disused corner of earth; instead, the speaker must look up and away, conceding helplessly that the “first whisper of art” has withdrawn. “Integrity” and “obscurity” form a Gordian knot here. The association hearkens back to the similarly incapacitating integrity of the blank page in “Ovid in Tomis.” There is no possible belonging in the integral realm, then; to belong in the phenomenal world is to be absent from the silence where a myth might start. It is not the same silence where a thought might grow in “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” because that earlier silent place was fully materialized and historicized. This new silence is and must be out of reach. When the speaker invokes Eliot’s prayer for the lost from “The Dry Salvages,” he cannot sustain the lyrical pitch of his exemplar but dives downward: “Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory/above the fancy golf-course, taking inventory/of vapour trails and nuclear submarines,/keep close watch on our flight paths and sea-lanes.” Whereas Eliot’s prayer is one of more prosaic lyrical moments of Four Quartets (as opposed to the deliberately prosaic meditative passages), Mahon takes his diction a step lower, and substitutes “inventory” and “watch” for prayer (Eliot writes, “Pray for all those who are in ships, . . .”). The problem is not so much the contemporaneity of Mahon’s images or even his taste for compound phrases, which are here at their most banal (“golf-course,” “vapour trails,” “flight paths”) but that Mahon has traditionally found salvation in the intensely lyrical moment. When the vigor of the diction and imaginative capacity flag, so does the speaker’s ability to grope toward an identification that allows for a vision of belonging to be glimpsed. The pessimistic selfaccounting of “Harbour Lights” vaguely resembles Heaney’s “Exposure” (to be discussed in Chapter 5), which contains the outcry, “How did I end up like this?” Mahon asks, in a different register, “What have I achieved? Oh, little enough, God knows:/some dubious verse and some ephemeral prose;/as for the re-enchantment of the sky,/that option was never really going to fly.” In his own terms, the myth has not started to take form. The lines fumble for iambic regularity, find it, and ostentatiously let it go. The 39

“Harbour Lights,” Harbour Lights 61–67.

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poem does not fly, the old enchantment gone. The inability of these lines to stylistically contradict their own statement delivers the coup de grâce to an otherwise ambitious poem. This aggrieved tone and aggressively colloquial diction do not dominate Mahon’s most recent work, however. The dichotomies through which he thinks through the problem of belonging in his middle-stage work find, in 2008, a sense of abeyance. It is, of course, an uneasy abeyance; Mahon abhors finality as much as Adam Zagajewski does. Yet in poems such as “Insomnia” and “Country Road,” the speaker explicitly considers the imagistic and then the conceptual form that belonging must take in order to cohere his aesthetic beliefs. . . . a cloud climbs and swirls, yellow and red streaking the estuary, and a soul screams for sunken origins, for the obscure sea bed and glowing depths, the alternative mud haven we left behind. Once more we live in interesting times.40 The poems privilege affirmation over resolution. Despite the apocalyptic cloud overhanging one of Mahon’s signature waterscapes, the poem’s effect is one of acceptance, even if eschatological concerns remain prominent (as they are in much of Mahon’s oeuvre). What has happened to the speaker’s uneasy sense of national belonging, to the egregious alienation that made him unique in contemporary Ireland? Most obviously, it has become denationalized. We may explain this turn by citing the greater peace brought about by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, but this would be too easy; rather, Mahon has been consciously turning outward, toward a sense of globality and, even more, planetarity, since The Hudson Letter (1996). Belonging in and on the earth is more important than belonging in Belfast. Correspondent to this shift in spatial vista is a shift in pronominal breadth. The poet’s literary identity no longer depends upon a strict demarcation between the singular and plural. Nor does it depend upon a particular definition of the first-person plural, reflecting what Grennan had called Mahon’s commitment to the private. The breadth of the “we” is asserted by literary contrast: reworking Patrick Kavanagh’s well-known “Epic,” which begins with the line, “I have lived in important places” and sharply affirms the centrality of a “local row,” Mahon lends the phrase cosmic resonance and apocalyptic coloration. “We” are caught up in interesting times not because of either local rows or historical cruces but because of a generalized condition of metaphysical displacement. “Once more” we live in interesting 40

“Insomnia,” Life on Earth (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008) 23.

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times, yet it is time, and not specific place, which is important in this new framework.41 The breadth of pronominal reference is matched by a breadth of vision that does not always insist on “grand synthesis.” Even more importantly, images that had been previously seen as private sanctuaries—“Nirvana” in “A Garage in Co. Cork”—are now owned by the “we,” seen as “the whole/ show” to which “we” belong: Are we going to laugh on the road as if the whole show was set out for our grand synthesis? Abandoned trailers sunk in leaves and turf, slow erosion, waves on the boil. . . We belong to this— not as discrete observing presences but as born participants in the action. . . 42 What is more noteworthy, the insistence of the first-person plural or the quality of the affirmation? The question is not just rhetorical, because these elements are not necessary concomitants, nor are they comprehensible simply as a marker of age: a poet in his sixties settles into the affirmative mode after vanquishing the alienation of his youth. Mahon goes back to the carefully shaped stanza forms of his earlier work (pre-Hudson Letter) and what has come to be known as the typical Mahon note of alienated lamentation is still there. There is a new sense, though, that not knowing can serve the purpose of belonging, and this is radically different from the willful rejection of the early poems. A Yeatsian “grand synthesis” cannot, perhaps, be reached, and this is one reason for the dominance of the descriptive mode in Harbour Lights and Life on Earth. Rather, Mahon is attracted to the affirmation of Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” predicated upon tragic gaiety rather than ideational synthesis or historical action. We are “born participants,” yet participation signifies more than historical testimony here, and Mahon’s new idea of participation stretches far beyond the national: “We belong to this —.” Strictly defining “this” is precisely what Mahon wants to avoid in his latest work. An important contrast may be ventured here. While Zagajewski’s speaker feels threatened by the intrusion of the unknown upon the known (see “Nieznana,” or “Unknown”), Mahon’s speaker must allow for the too-well 41 Heaney rewrites the same line at the opening of “Singing School”: “Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived/In important places.” His sequence builds upon the specificity of place, though, as well as time, in contradistinction to Mahon’s poem. 42 “A Country Road,” Life on Earth 42.

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known to become blurred, its boundaries effaced, in order to affirm belonging. This is not quite the same as giving himself up to the unknown, and it is not Keatsian doubt and mystery. The effacement allows for the “blank page” of “Ovid in Tomis,” which signified an unprinted purity that reproached the speaker, to be present as an undefined space at the borders of the phenomenal world. If everything that we imagine is also present, as “Tractatus” reminded us, then it need not be summoned strictly in sensory terms, as the earlier poem had it. The dissatisfied singular “I” opens himself to a synthetic “here” that need not find precise definition: “Bird, beast and flower, whatever your names are,/like the wind blowing through/we belong here too” (Life on Earth 43). Mahon’s 2010 Autumn Wind is another turn, this one toward a surprising brightness: the global perspective of his work remains, yet Mahon’s twentyfirst-century ecological awareness links to his career-long focus upon temporal displacement without his former rebelliousness. In order to recover a sense of earthly dignity or, even, sacredness, we must recover an older mode of dwelling upon the earth. His emotion is less bound up with the depredation of the present as with the evocative celebration of the past, whether it is composed of remembered landscapes or undiminished values, or sometimes, even, his beloved abandoned artifacts: A grim summer, but if fortuitous light strikes the rubble and a sun-spoke pierces a cloud rift the meaning becomes clear.43 These sudden brightenings deliver “fortuitous” knowledge of value that is not quite epiphanic (there is no god descending) or transcendent (there is no ascent, no beyond). It is unclear whether this is a spiritual moment or an epistemological one. Perhaps the speaker does not know himself— the dismantled convent, first seen as “a tabula rasa,” is eventually seen as “a special place” allowing for brief, dizzying moments of “heightened consciousness.” In his recent collections, Mahon often seems to surprise himself stumbling across such New Age concepts, which appear unbidden 43 Derek Mahon, An Autumn Wind (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2010) 37. The poem’s title is “A Building Site.” The pattern of late brightening—of finding oneself surprised by light, by the miraculous, in late adulthood, is common to Mahon and Heaney, though the ways they “credit marvels” are obviously different: Heaney never leaves behind his childhood Catholicism, whereas Mahon’s sense of spirituality, and of value, is quite far removed from his childhood Protestantism in these works. He insists that his parents were never “church people” and, clearly, neither was he, nor is he in later age; Mahon’s flirtation with ecological awareness and a vaguely New Age mysticism (heightened by his “Eastern” poems set in India) is one of the more baffling features of his post-2000 work.

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yet are usually banished in a hurry, obviously unsuitable to his temperament, if tempting in their spiritual inclusivity. He who once defined himself as “a chiliastic prig” now clutches at glances of “sun-spokes” that allow for a vision more Larkinian than Yeatsian, only Mahon takes Larkin’s conclusions a step further, contemplating the demolishment of the church’s special shell with a near-glee that comes from knowing what to expect: a momentary, oblique vision of an unknown eternal dispensation, the infinite republic of primary creation. The salubrious quality of Mahon’s beloved garage in County Cork has come alive again. The knowledge of this infinite and eternal primary republic was, one may argue, there in Mahon’s poetry from the beginning, as his younger speaker protested against the felt obligation to belong in a place and time that he considered alien. By necessity if not by choice, his poetry confronted the strain of its particular place for several decades, and now allows itself to celebrate such “oblique/vision” of a “primary” realm with greater confidence in An Autumn Wind. The “eternal” and “infinite” are brought into the poet’s orbit, in lieu of the exile described in “Ovid in Tomis.” He can participate without fully knowing the “dispensation” at work, and know the infinite ramifications of a situated moment. The dichotomy of chaos and order has become blurred and complicated. The poet no longer must choose between a “green retreat” and his “proper portion” of chaos, but must seek intricate linkages between past and future: No going back, is there, to that wild hush of dedication, to the solitude, the intense belief, the last rock of an abandoned civilization whose dim lights glimmered in a distant age to illuminate at the edge a future life.44 The “edge” has always attracted Mahon, as he refused rootedness but held himself on the very edge of disavowal and the edge of idealism, not ever fully a poet of one or the other. This is a crucial aspect of his notion of belonging. The brightenings of An Autumn Wind are either fleeting in time or partial in extent. He can only access the edge of idealism, as it were, less sure of 44

Autumn Wind 33.

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what “perfect prints” will look like now than before, where the holding power of these prints depended largely on their dichotomous relationship to the hot chaos of the violent surrounding world. The poet’s contentment seems to increase as his belief in a specific vision of perfection—particularly creative perfection—seems to decrease. The “momentary, oblique/vision” of a “primary” realm remains ephemeral, as the speaker finds a late-life balance between revivifying visions of spiritual vitality and the “quiet spot” he has “come down/to” in his later age. Making good on his statement that “It’s time now to go back at last/beyond irony” (17) proves to be the guiding task of An Autumn Wind. Getting “back” to the lost civilization that may “illuminate . . . a future life” is Mahon’s quest, though to “relax and live/the lives we used to know” (42) proves to be an eccentric idea of belonging. Mahon’s desired form of “earth-residence” has always been eccentrically backward-looking, ever since “Glengormley” took “the unreconciled” in their “metaphysical pain” as its symbol of heroic alienation and lost purpose, but here the project of making a future from the past reaches a new level of seriousness, as the speaker considers his own advancing age (nearing seventy). “Under the Volcanoes” (51–53) is a focal point here, beginning as a touristic description and moving into deeper contemplation of how our human civilization dwells upon—and might, ideally, belong upon—the earth. Its tutelary presence is less Lowry than Auden, whose discursive, long-lined “In Praise of Limestone” counterpoints Mahon’s vision of “a civilization built on igneous rock.” When he tries to imagine a faultless belonging, Mahon sees life “tucked into the landscape” and using its cruel power to fuel its art. Rather than Auden’s constantly shifting limestone landscape responsive to human touch, Mahon offers the volcanic forge to “remind us of the origins of the arts,” of man’s constant negotiation with the physical world. The volcanic landscape of Lanzarote stands as a creatively germinal version of the burnt-out gables of “Rage for Order” and, perhaps, the boiling squares of “The Snow Party.” “Under the Volcanoes” weaves together references to Mahon’s own work as well as that of Auden, perhaps Stevens (as the poet confronts his “ancient rage/for order”), late Yeats (clinging to his formal ideal while surrounded by a chaotic wind summoning “A Prayer for My Daughter,” though this is a prayer for himself in old age, sifting through “the debris choking up the mind”), and Eliot of the Four Quartets (“thyme and sage/redeemed from fire” summoning Eliot’s wild thyme unseen and his redemptive Yeatsian fire). The mature visions of these imaginative masters, in which the establishment—but not forcible imposition—of form upon the chaotic world is their common theme, provides a redemptive context for the contemporary outsider poet. Although Mahon takes his volume title from this poem (“an autumn wind/shaking the window”), the poem, like many others in this volume, “redeems” its own vision by countering images of disaster or entropy with renewal. The image of fire retains its violence while becoming allied with origin rather than endpoint—it is closer to Yeats’s purifying flames, and

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the harmonies of Little Gidding, than Dante’s Biblical flames (see Mark 9.42–48). In other words, Mahon’s late-life visions are of redemption and renewal, and the apocalyptic aesthetic (one he shares with Zagajewski) is yoked to a belief in creative possibility, “things as they were and might be like.” Since Mahon is a consummate craftsman, asserting the primacy of art over life-material or cultural description, his syntheses must be made at the formal level, while the creative confusion perennially necessary for his work cannot be ordered out of existence. The germinal paradox of civilization wrung from fire, raging for order yet needing igneous heat and even disaster to stoke its smithies, will not—cannot—be put to rest. “‘Everything can be remedied’, . . . the most unpromising/material shaped into a living thing,” the poet concludes, having learned not to seek the false harmony of easy belonging but to continually forge art out of “unpromising,” recalcitrant, maddening dissonance.

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5 Belonging as mastery in the poetry of Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney earned his early fame by writing poems almost diametrically opposite to Mahon’s “Spring in Belfast.” There is a clear opposition to be made between his Arcadian childhood in Mossbawn and Mahon’s workingclass childhood in a Belfast suburb and, further east, Adam Zagajewski’s early sense of displacement from his natal city of Lvov. Textbooks, anthologies, and introductions stress the positive inspiration offered by this background (it is obligatory to mention Mossbawn in a capsule summary of Heaney’s life, a fact the poet treats with gentle humor today). Zagajewski and Mahon have autobiographical reasons for writing so keenly of notbelonging; Heaney, in this schematic opposition, does not. This is why we must view Heaney somewhat differently: his writing is filled with anxiety over “knowing his place,” yet it is a subterranean anxiety. It is not to be readily found in autobiography or even politics: Heaney’s political stressors are shared by many in Northern Ireland—though we should not forget the important difference between his Catholic rural community and Mahon’s Protestant urban one—and are not the preeminent source of anxiety and not-belonging in his first three volumes. When he ends “The Tollund Man” by admitting “I will feel lost, unhappy, and at home,” he affirms a prepolitical sense of division and dispossession that is strengthened, but not created, by the violent civil strife in Northern Ireland, or even by his sense of colonial dispossession. Heaney’s early work makes an effort to plumb this paradoxical simultaneity of feeling “lost . . . and at home” in a place that may not unequivocally allow him to embrace the belonging he seeks. Where we can locate his feeling of being lost, which corresponds to a felt lack of control, is an issue we can only broach by appraising how he gives voice to it. This persistent feeling of not-belonging is based in not-knowing— in other words, in an epistemological failure, or rather an uncertainty. The young Heaney is not sure how to know. His early poems are suffused with

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fear. The aesthetic beauty of their crafted forms and pastoral images must be carefully detached from the dark frustrations, incapacities, and panic that often, in fact, motivate his verse. Heaney’s early poems register a fear that the land may swallow or pervert one’s selfhood. The integrity of the body is threatened; its spatial coordinates shift and disorient the speaker. His strategies for battling this fear are distinct and sequential, as he seeks control over his place by creating three tropes of mastery: the archaeological dig (into the land and the psyche), the ritual of learning the land, and the construction of myth (metaphorizing Northernness). Belonging is ultimately affirmed through the master-trope of land as language, as the poet’s power over words is used to convert the bottomless bog into a controllable, bounded text. In such a situation, the poet is simultaneously “mystery-man” and decoder, one who points to a darkness that he then illuminates and explains. Although Heaney’s master-trope allows him to redress the psychic divisions that complicate his relation to his home place, he ceaselessly reconsiders his position and finds it lacking. The notion of belonging in language is ultimately recognized as unsustainable by both Heaney and Zagajewski, as they realize that selfhood is revealed through disruption even while they wish they could use language as an instrument for forging unity. Just as Zagajewski’s similes open up a space of inassimilable otherness in the text, so also otherness appears in the very system of images that Heaney uses to forge identity. Both of these poets long to view language as a constructive system that allows them to build a metaphorical home, even if Zagajewski insists on the instability of the self far more than does Heaney. Heaney’s work struggles to realize that belonging through continuity—of land, of language, of imagery, of ritual—may not be a sustainable ideal. Paradoxically, keeping “at a tangent” allows him to express a local identity more adequately than subsuming the local into a mythic master plan. Heaney endeavors to speak with a voice whose personality is not overborne by history, even if it is a subjective history. Unlike Zagajewski, he does not ally history solely with war and oppression; like Zagajewski, the speaker’s relation to a complex cultural and political history is problematic. The early “Death of a Naturalist” and “Personal Helicon” dramatize the parallel between land and psyche, while the initiatory “Digging” shows how a pen fits “snug as a gun” in the young speaker’s hand. His fear of his own violent capacity is not examined within the poem, but this colloquial phrase accrues meaning when placed against the baroque imagery of dissolution in “Death of a Naturalist”: “the flax-dam festered in the heart/Of the townland; . . . best of all was the warm thick slobber/Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water.” The pressure of the scene is almost overdone as the rotting flax appears parallel to carrion. The sexual frogspawn is metonymically and rhythmically associated with the flax-dam, thus connecting procreation to decomposition, eggs to rot. The townland, as a body with a “heart,” is also

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infected; Hugh Haughton reads the metaphor as an expression of political fear, of the dark forces at the “heart” of the Unionist state.11 The speaker’s disgust, however, increases as he grows younger, his initial literariness of expression (“festered in the heart”) giving way to the cadence of a schoolboy: “the daddy frog was called a bullfrog.” The poem’s second, shorter stanza shows a narrator who is, perhaps, younger still, not fascinated by frogspawn but revolted by the scene, one who cannot even watch the frogs whose dissolute attractions were expansively described in the first utterance. Their bodies are “cocked,” their loose skin “pulse[s],” and their “slap and plop” are seen as “obscene threats” against him. . . . Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.22 The boy’s disgust is registered in the same earthy, Anglo-Saxon terms that delight the older speaker of Heaney’s poems. He is bullied by his own language: slant rhymes like “slap” and “plop” seem to erupt instead of being summoned, the “o” vowel insistently intrudes itself, and the rhythm itself appears to stick and unstick in a consonantal mud. Phonemes bump against each other (“bass chorus,” “some hopped,” “their blunt heads farting”) and the lines appear tangled in a mess of stressed syllables. This rhythm registers the awkwardness of the sense experience forced upon the young speaker. It signals disruption within the psyche. The child turns the scene into grand drama—“the great slime kings” seek “vengeance” against him—but finds himself aurally sucked back to “dipped,” “spawn,” and “clutch,” unable to sublimate the local sensual event. These aural effects convey the speaker’s difficult passage to a new type of knowledge, of sexuality and bodily decomposition. This is the earliest source of Heaney’s fear, and that fear is located within and upon the land of his childhood. The poem’s two parts correspond to what is known by the senses (and secondarily through school lessons) and what is unknown, 1

Hugh Haughton, “Power and Hiding Places: Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney,” The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature, eds. Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006) 93. 2 Seamus Heaney, “Death of a Naturalist,” Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966) 5–6. Peter MacDonald influentially posits that Northern Irish poetry cannot be “innocent,” however much it may strain to do so, and that its language often colluded with “encoded narratives” that take part in identity politics, some of which defend a “legitimate” violence over other, illegitimate, forms: see Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 56–57. Such struggles and oppositions often underwrite Heaney’s own early work, even while this particular study does not view his youthful fear as essentially political.

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and therefore feared. The unknown realm is lascivious and aggressive. It violates the speaker’s senses with noises that are construed as obscene threats against him. The grenade is, here, less symbolic of political violence than of a generalized threat to the self: the flax-dam will not let the boy maintain a separate identity. He must be pulled into its rot, which is also the inherent rottenness of his own physicality and of Irish politics. Heaney absorbs the texture of Ted Hughes’ early poems, which plumb the darkness of instinct and favor Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and metrics, but instead of evoking an animal’s thrill of mastery over its prey or its surroundings, as Hughes does, Heaney is himself a potential object of prey in these early poems. The center of Heaney’s early poetry is human: the speaker is small, incapacitated, scared.3 He is less interested in natural processes for their own sake than in how the perceiving sensibility registers these processes. One may ally the young speaker at the flax-dam with Heaney himself, and explain his fear of the sexual “spawn” as the effect of a conservative Roman Catholic Church. The “vengeance” would be primal punishment for the “original sin”. The root of his fear, however, is essentially preverbal, irrational, and prereligious, and it motivates Heaney’s entire oeuvre. Heaney’s assertions of belonging react against this elemental fear of the land. Beginning with “Death of a Naturalist,” the title poem of his first eponymous volume, his poetry seeks to master this fear-inducing otherness of the land. His obsessive return to the themes of home, place, and landscape is part and parcel of his basic fear. Eugene O’Brien senses the presence of the uncanny within the seeming certainties of home or place; the unitary, organic self is fractured. Although O’Brien focuses upon cultural hybridity, the notion of an uncanny otherness within the self functions on multiple levels, not just the cultural, and is a rather provocative notion to explore in light of Heaney’s reputation as an organically rooted poet of home.4 Until Station Island (1984), Heaney’s poetry attempts to reckon with this shock of alterity within the self and between self and place. “Personal Helicon” memorializes the young boy’s love of wells, wherein his knowledge that even the deepest, darkest wells would mirror his face if the water level were high creates, for him, the possibility of a perfect “rhyme” between self and place: “I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”5 The aural harmony of rhyme parallels the optic harmony of reflection. The darkness is set echoing with the speaker’s own voice, and the body is sublimated into 3

See Roland Mathias, “Death of a Naturalist,” in Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney, 4th ed. (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 2001) 11–25. Edward Picot refines the HughesHeaney connection in Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997) 206. 4 Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (London: Pluto Press, 2003). See also Alex Davis, “Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing,” Irish University Review 34.1 (2004): 196. 5 Death of a Naturalist 46.

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voice and visual image. The problem of reconciling the otherness of adult sexuality with the child-speaker is avoided by this sublimation of the physical body, so that the singular instant when a rat “slaps” across his reflection is passed over quickly. The poem is a fragile moment when he controls a system of reverberations. One may view this moment as a refusal to accept the knowledge gained in Lacan’s mirror phase, when the child views itself as an “other” physical body and breaks apart a unitary wholeness of self. This speaker is refusing the realization of alterity by creating a closed circle wherein voice echoes image and closes the gap between the mirrored image and the perceiving self. The first of Heaney’s celebrated bog poems, “Bogland,” breaks this delicate echo by loudly asserting a wish to delve into the land and learn this new otherness—the difference of materiality from voice and spirit. Digging into the “center” is Heaney’s first trope of mastery. Here, the wish to create a fragile reciprocity is replaced by a more aggressive desire to master the land. The poem starts defensively: “We have no prairies/To slice a big sun at evening —,” and because “we” (presumably the Irish, as opposed to the Americans) cannot displace our fear of what lies beneath by engaging in a horizontal quest toward a frontier that stretches as far as the sun itself, we must strike “[i]nwards and downwards.” Vertical and horizontal axes become paradigms for different epistemologies. The horizontal quest is tainted politically, since it is associated with colonial expansion, and an Irish “pioneer” must choose a different paradigm if he is not to repeat the colonizer’s activity—yet in poems such as “Bogland,” vertical exploration is also a form of physical and epistemological appropriation. One digs to know; one knows to possess. The poet’s search for an alternative thus ends up with a parallel. This major socio-political problem underlies Heaney’s mode of metaphorizing spatial knowledge. The youthful fear behind “Death of a Naturalist” has changed into a determination to drill down to its psycho-cultural sources. The lyric voice is determined, the stanzas short and squat. Heaney’s comparison of his “bog” stanzas to drills—for penetrating earth and history—intimates the aggression that is here latent and elsewhere patent. The poem’s tone, though, is not especially aggressive, as “we,” like the land, keep “missing [the] last definition” that would allow “us” control. Because the land is not aggressive, likened to “kind . . . butter,” a speech seeking to end that it should not be either—“my quest for definition,” Heaney writes, “while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape.”6 In 6 This quotation, as well as the story of bottomless bogholes, is contained in “Belfast,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980) 36–37, 35. Heaney interestingly disclaims the significance of the first-person plural when asked by Dennis O’Driscoll whether “Bogland” shows him developing a public perspective. “It may have said ‘we’ but it was still all me,” Heaney asserts (O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones 90).

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the conclusion to “Bogland,” the speaker’s tone becomes touched by awe, and the child-voice of “Death of a Naturalist” returns: Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.7 The speaker has moved from what is to what seems, from fact to myth. The appropriative act of “stripping” layers off of Ireland’s body becomes a quest for the mythic center, and correspondingly, power shifts from the digger to the land, which withholds its core. Heaney recounts how, as a child, he was frightened away from potentially dangerous explorations of local bogs by the story, perpetuated by adults, that the bog was bottomless; here, the child’s fear combines with a very adult desire to strip away layers of mystique, to feminize, sexualize, and possess the land. Because its center is wrapped in countless skeins of soil, it will never be completely defined and lose its glamour.8 This poem presents a nexus of concepts and images useful for exploring the endless metaphoricity of bogland: the vertical dig into history, the horizontal overlap between land and ocean (“the bogholes might be Atlantic seepage”), the bog’s cultural specificity (as a Northern European site), the child’s fear, the spectator’s awe, and the sexual urge to strip away coverings. The poem is based in a collective mythology (“We have no prairies,” “Our pioneers”). Yet the speaker’s fear for his integrity is also behind the poem. Edna Longley critically observes that “the intimation of (masculine) sexuality coincides with a withdrawal from “Nature” when the sensations it offers cease to be pleasurable and controllable.”9 This perception helps to explain the early poems until “Bogland,” with their fear of being “clutched,” but at this point Heaney’s desire to address his loss of control combines 7

Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969) 56. O’Driscoll fruitfully links the land’s evasion of a “last definition” that would fix it in one posture with Heaney’s great capacity for change and development. See “Troubled Thoughts: Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Ireland,” The Southern Review 31.3 (Summer 1995): 654. Although the lack of definition is maddening to the digger of “Bogland,” the maddening quality is also an enticement. 9 Longley, Poetry and Posterity 100. Scott Brewster takes a similar stance within a different theoretical framework, discussing what he sees as disgust, fear, and shame at a mythic female figure throughout Heaney’s bog poems. Brewster, however, correlates this figure with the mother, the merging with whom both “sustains” and troubles the “mythos that would posit a symbiotic connection between landscape, history, and cultural identity”; see “Rites of Defilement: Abjection and the Body Politic in Northern Irish Poetry,” Irish University Review 35.2 (Autumn-Winter 2005): 311. 8

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with his sexual urge in order to re-image the early trope of digging. In other words, this loss of control and pleasure fascinates and troubles him, and his motive is epistemological. The young naturalist becomes an adult excavator; otherness continues to frustrate knowledge. Heaney’s early toponymic poems redress the land’s otherness by consciously “learning” its contours.10 This is Heaney’s second method of mastering the land: he learns and tames it by means of ritualized physical intimacy. Familiarity breeds affection; conscious knowledge ratifies the speaker’s sense of his own boundaries. Place-name poems such as “Anahorish,” “Toome,” and “Broagh” assert his mastery of local phonetics and etymologies, viewing language as material held by the (native) speaker’s body: “My mouth holds round/The soft blastings,/Toome, Toome.” The destructive potential of “blasting” is nullified by the protective enclosure of the mouth; the “blastings” are sensations to be repeated and verbal objects to be caressed. The playful and incantatory repetition of the name is accorded its own line, as the reader is tacitly invited to partake in this enjoyment. The sensual materiality of language, however, bears a broader significance: it serves as a therapeutic ritual. In The Place of Writing, Heaney opines that when a poet’s horizons are menacing, then his need for the “steadying gift” of “finished art” is all the more urgent.11 The child-speaker of Heaney’s early volumes is menaced by the unknown and uncontainable, while his adult speaker is menaced by the specter of colonial aggression. Local toponyms (Toome, Broagh, Anahorish) are pieces of “finished art” themselves—they are quite literally objects of knowledge. Nobody can displace the speaker from his position of control in the toponymic poems, which “steady” his purchase upon the land. The long “Gifts of Rain” details the local, “straw-footed” purchase of a “still mammal” upon his mother earth, a native prologue to the drama of rural life, but the poem appears overly artificial—marked by the self-inwoven similes that Christopher Ricks designates as Heaney’s early hallmark—until its theme is further grounded by “Land,” which extends Heaney’s focus on ritual action as a means of decoding the native earth’s mysteries. The speaker’s repetitive pacing parallels the incantatory intonation of placenames in “Toome” and “Broagh”: I stepped it, perch by perch. Unbraiding rushes and grass 10 In his conscious effort to learn his own land, Heaney breaks with the influence of Ted Hughes. Hughes’ vigorous poems about the natural world influenced Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, Heaney’s first two volumes; however, Hughes’ focus on instinct is very different from Heaney’s desire for mastery. Roland Mathias points toward this difference: Hughes is thrilled at the violence of animal life, the world of predators and survivors, whereas Heaney is sickened by it. The center of Heaney’s poetry is human. 11 Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 132.

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I opened my right-of-way through old bottoms and sowed-out ground ... I composed habits for those acres so that my last look would be neither gluttonous nor starved. I was ready to go anywhere.12 This speaker is learning his place methodically, as the stressed monosyllables of the first line mimic his deliberate movement. The staccato progression of near-iambs in the first three lines break down in the fourth line’s tangle of “old bottoms” and earth that has been overworked for its poetic as well as agricultural fruit. When his focus shifts to contemplation, this staccato effect disappears and the rhythm slows as his perspective lengthens. The relation of identity and belonging is not simple here. Heaney’s detractors accuse him of replaying the time-worn scheme of a Romantic return to origins in order to restore the continuity of time and identity, but this speaker’s desire is not nostalgic.13 The poem is a conscious effort to appropriate the soil in the interest of constructing an identity that masters the self-signifying land. Behind it lies the same fear of the bottomless center that motivated the aggressive “pioneers” of “Bogland.” In order to shape his own self and to protect its integrity, this speaker feels the need to impose his will by “unbraiding rushes,” which exclude his body, and open his “right-ofway” upon the body of the land. As in “Bogland,” he aggressively secures his possession of the feminized land—ornamented with braids, accepting his touch—so that he may “go anywhere” while her body retains his imprint. The lugubrious connotation of “last look” implies an imminent separation, one that motivates the epistemological effort with added urgency. The jauntiness of “I was ready to go anywhere” comes as a surprise: is this a solemn leave-taking or a brassy assertion of ownership? The progress of the poem refuses both options, showing it, instead, as an anxious reaction to an imminent separation from the feminized earth, which refuses to let him go: he becomes the one snared and possessed, his body no longer integral. This is not, however, an actualization of the earlier fear of being clutched by frogspawn because, this time, the act is controlled by the poet’s own 12

Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) 21. David Lloyd is the main exponent of this tendency. Lloyd offers one of the most penetrating and sophisticated critiques of Heaney’s writing, arguing that Heaney’s poetic “offers constantly a premature compensation, enacted through linguistic and metaphorical usages which promise a healing of division simply by returning the subject to place.” In these early poems, however, Heaney allows us to see cracks in the unified poetic edifice, and these cracks are formed by his uncontainable fear of the loss of selfhood. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 20. 13

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imagination. He lies in a “loop of silence,” his ear to the ground, enclosed within the assonantal echoes of his own words, until he is claimed in a ritual of betrothal: I expect to pick up a small drumming and must not be surprised in bursting air to find myself snared, swinging an ear-ring of sharp wire. His ensnarement begins with a “loop of silence” that the speaker fills with music created in his own mind. The language reveals its own artifice to stress that this ritual of kinship or marriage is still governed by the poet, yet his control falters, his rhetoric tripping precisely in moments of selfreference—“I expect to . . . ,” “and must not be . . . ,” “to find myself . . . ,” phrases that stand out from these short couplets. His desire to ritualize, domesticate, and eventually master the land is the poem’s main theme, but it is not an easy or smooth process. The awkward prepositions and verbal forms of this closing stanza, however, weaken the control that they claim, despite the orchestrated percussion of “surprised” and “bursting” (an aural effect heightening the performance of ensnarement). The rhyme of “swinging” with “earring” is not conclusive—the poem ends with “sharp wire,” whose chime with “bursting air” imparts an unexpected pain that it does not mollify. Any effort to re-mythologize the land will be disrupted by such specific, unmythical sensations—sharp pain, submerged fear, and patterns of domination that cannot be mastered by the poet. Heaney is hearkening back to Yeats’s advice that Irish writers consciously “fix” the landscape upon their memories in the interest of re-mythologizing Ireland. Jahan Ramazani points out the interest of Yeats’s “cosmopolitan nativism” for postcolonial writers, and notes that the effort is complicated (or stymied) by a realization that the native space is, ineluctably, intercultural.14 “Land,” however, does not account for this intercultural character, but he posits the land as a single entity in order to safely trope a ritual of establishing belonging. It may be that Heaney’s effort to gain control over his self through his surroundings necessitates this stress on land 14

Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 41. For a comprehensive discussion of Heaney’s feminine symbols and marriage motifs, which frequently serve the purpose of poetic self-legitimation, see Karen Marguerite Moloney, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007).

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as a unitary body. At the same time, he realizes, once more working against Yeats, that the maddeningly unstable, “melting,” not-quite-defined character of this land cannot be celebrated in a heroic mode, as Helen Vendler notes of Heaney’s bog bodies.15 The culture of land (like the rhetoric of native soil) is not unimportant for Heaney’s work, though, and the fact of colonial dispossession combines with his fear of losing selfhood; these two factors gain prominence until they explode Heaney’s tropes of mastery. The poet’s fear of his otherness to the land is parallel to his fear of discovering otherness within his self; his most sustained effort to forge a unity between land, self, and community is enacted by burrowing into the “word-hoard” of atavism. This is Heaney’s most extended effort of mastery: it is a project of re-mythologizing his place so that the self is both creator and object and discovery. Although Heaney reaches back to preChristian Northern Europe for his grand metaphors, his need for a ritual relationship to his place is partially religious. Edna Longley claims that the “decorative tinge that Heaney imparts to violence and to history derives from a ritualising habit, which itself derives from his religious sensibility.”16 Decoration, ritual, and religion form an interesting triad of concepts that link a poem such as “Land,” with its earring of wire both ratifying a marriage and displacing the speaker from a too-easy communion, with a poem such as “North.” The speaker of “North” does not in fact “go anywhere” far from home (horizontally) but travels back in history (vertically). He comes to a secular Atlantic shore, looking out at “unmagical” islands which are merely “pathetic colonies,” until he is “suddenly” quickened into vision. His tone becomes reverent and solemn as he hears voices “lifted . . . in violence and epiphany”:17 15 Heaney does, at times, play with a heroic mode of description or narrative, but almost always subverts or modestly disclaims such intent. Like Zagajewski, who also attempts such a mode very occasionally in his early verse, Heaney realizes that this is not a mode in which he can belong. Vendler opposes Yeats’s “insistence on marble or bronze as the aesthetic equivalents of flesh” with Heaney’s “response,” which insists upon “tar, petrified oak,” mud, “roots,” stained skin, in its portraits of exhumed bodies. We may press her point further: Heaney disclaims the equivalence for stylistic, cultural (i.e., he refuses the role of bardic celebrant), and psychological reasons (he seeks a land that answers his need to overcome fear and assert control). In a different vein, Seamus Deane usefully complicates a reading of Yeats’s “The Statues” in an early political essay by opining that its “diagrammatic feeling” may be threatened by eruptions of “unbridled” feeling and looser form. Deane, “Yeats, Ireland and Revolution,” The Crane Bag 1.2 (1977): 56; Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 205. 16 Edna Longley, “North: ‘Inner Émigré’ or ‘Artful Voyeur’?,” Curtis 83–84. Longley believes that Heaney’s poetic catalogues level disparate experiences in a faintly archaic litany; she implies that his religious sensibility is largely responsible for the obfuscatory myth-making of these poems. 17 Patrick Crotty, “All I Believe That Happened There was Revision,” Curtis 195. In opposition to Longley, Crotty believes that one of Heaney’s positive stylistic innovations is his “impersonal, sacramental idiom.”

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. . . ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. ... Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.’18 The speaker wishes to communicate with the genius loci of the North and to trope his surroundings as physical objects (“the hammered curve of a bay”) in his temporal “return” to an originary sacredness that will sanctify his work as excavator and justify the violence of clearing his right-of-way, which is not given readily—he finds only secular, “unmagical” force where he desires myth. He is ready to accept the linkage of violence with epiphany and to revel in the frisson it elicits. Instead of recuperating a myth of power, however, his own excavation may reveal Ireland as another “pathetic colony.” These voices are what he wants to hear, no matter if they be deafened by secular power or the result of a fable constructed to encourage and justify an assertion of individual belonging. The poem’s force depends on an elision of the personal with the historical, as consideration of history becomes a return to (his own) origins. The metaphorical scheme of “North” has famously occasioned skepticism and protestation, but what is at stake here is not whether “North” accurately diagnoses the roots of contemporary violence but whether its force confers the identity so avidly sought by Heaney’s speaker, a conclusion at least partially corroborated by the poet’s own statements in interview.19 The resonant echoes of “burrow” and “furrowed,” “clear” and “feel,” “trust” and “nubbed” add cogency to the poem’s implicit parallel. They possess the material heft of “Toome” and “Broagh,” as individual words gain gravity from their isolation in short poetic units (“coil” and “gleam,” “clear,” “bleb” and “icicle”).20 18

North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) 19–20. “They were . . . [n]ot quite an equivalent for what was happening, more an attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic. . . . The Bog Poems were defenses against the encroachment of the times, I suppose.” Such defense is motivated by a desire to protect and ensure one’s individual integrity; “there was always a real personal involvement” with such a project. Henri Cole, “The art of poetry: LXXV” [Seamus Heaney interviewed by Henri Cole], The Paris Review 39.144 (Fall 1997): 115. 20 Heaney also breaks ranks with the Irish literary devices that he used sporadically in previous poems. Bernard O’Donoghue points to the Gaelic rhyme scheme called “deibidhe,” wherein a monosyllable rhymes with the unstressed syllable of a two-syllable word (“wing” and “breaking,” for example, in “Digging”), as a device that Heaney tried out and then rejected. Heaney 19

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The images here seem imposed, almost fated, a quality that allows him to fulfill his own mandate to reinforce the communal character of his poetry in a manner similar to Zagajewski’s early political work as part of the Generation ’68, to “search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” His emphasis on the need to address “our predicament” stresses the basis of this project in a sense of real and imagined community (a topic much discussed in Heaney’s essays and lectures), which is crucial for Heaney’s evolving relation to belonging: whereas Zagajewski’s mythologization of Lvov relies on an individual relation to this imagined ideal and entails a break from social commitment, Heaney’s mythologization of the Irish land and the “fabulous raiders” who shaped its history relies on communal ties. The individual is put into service for the people, as the poet’s technique is “a gift for mediating between the latent resource and the community that wants it current and released.”21 The latency of the “resource” is stressed in order to focus attention upon the given objectivity of the metonym. It is a gift to the poet-as-representative. Despite the fact that the “I” of “North” is social, though, the poem remains haunted by a sense that he has a private “return” to make, a personal need to come to terms with a threatening land. The speaker’s desire to construct metaphors for a common identity based on shared space in fact redresses this need. The community is, in Heaney’s early work, a refuge, a therapeutic as well as threatening entity. In his Northern poems, Heaney formalizes and metaphorizes this threat (yet does not, as Lloyd holds, aestheticize it in false harmonies), thus raising historical circumstance to a symbolic power.22 This helps to overcome the initial fear of the young speaker. We will see Julia Hartwig undertake a symbolic formalization of her own history to an even greater degree, in the interest of grand psychological and epistemological displacement, from a strictly individual (noncommunal) perspective. Heaney, conversely, seeks to face into historical circumstance, to the initial distaste of reviewers such as Edna Longley and Ciaran Carson.23 “North,” however, lays bare its own fictions, exposing the “pathetic” and “unmagical” nature of its environment, and the “fabulous” nature of its waking dream vision. The poet writes a noteworthy contradiction into the very poem that, ostensibly, works to concretize and legitimate his identity: namely, that if states, in interview, that “I have played with notions of Irishness and so on, but that’s almost literary convention now, to talk about the loss of the Irish language . . . All that’s true and yet it’s all over you know.” It is not entirely over, though, since the speaker of Heaney’s poems is perennially enmeshed in the cultural power struggle that takes place in contemporary Ireland. See Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994) 18–19. 21 Both citations are from the early essay “Feeling into Words,” contained in Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations 41–60. 22 The phrase comes from The Place of Writing 46. 23 See Longley and Carson in O’Donoghue 69–70.

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he burrows the intellectual “gleam” of his “furrowed brain” in the wordhoard, then he will relinquish his longed-for control over language and its capacity for accuracy and judgment. If, on the other hand, he must keep his eye “clear/as the bleb of the icicle,” then it cannot be immersed. It is a choice between giving himself as the bridegroom to the earth (in “Land”) and to language (in “North”) and taking the material that is available. This choice corresponds to a metapoetic dichotomy between a view of the poet as a receptacle for inspiration and a view of the poet as a creator (maker). Just as the low vowels of “burrow,” “furrow,” “trust” and “nubbed” contrast with the keenness of “keep,” “clear,” “bleb,” and “icicle,” so also these different aural effects highlight the distinction between participation and judgment, “knowing” through tactile trust and cultural immersion and keeping the eye clear as a bleb, a pocket of air, in an icicle. Trusting and knowing may— perhaps must—part ways. This is the greatest problem of “North.” There is ambiguity in the relative powers of the determinate word-hoard and the speaker: if he lets words take on narrative agency, then the poet is little more than a ventriloquist, a transparent medium instead of a creator. Heaney has, however, been accused of misusing a poetic power to prescribe right and wrong, a power that he does not actively seek, preferring to explore possibilities of allegiance (such as granting violence its own “deplorable authenticity”24) and “mediating” rather than prescribing any course of action. At the same time, if the speaker takes himself as an exemplary figure who serves as a mouthpiece for communal sentiments, then he must accept the responsibility of this self-conferred status.25 Must the exemplar also be a moralist? In terms of North, does giving voice to atavism entail accepting its perpetuation? Ciaran Carson believes it may, holding that Heaney “seems to be offering his ‘understanding’ of the situation almost as a consolation” as an “apologist” for the “situation” of the Troubles.26 Poems are taken for 24

These phrases come from “Feeling into Words.” While these chapters focus on Heaney’s poems, his essays and lectures offer a rich vocabulary with which to discuss the poems’ complex figurative work; essays such as “Feeling into Words,” “Belfast,” and “Irelands of the Mind” offer fascinating autobiographical grounding for understanding the ramifications of his exploration of belonging. “The Sense of Place” importantly discusses Patrick Kavanagh’s statement that the poet “might take part but . . . could not belong” to “the people” (Preoccupations 138); sixteen years later, “Frontiers of Writing” discusses Heaney’s own ability to “take part” in a celebratory Oxford dinner while feeling that he “could not belong” to the English culture that was treating him with kindness and generosity at this occasion, occurring on the same day as a second hunger striker died in Maze Prison (The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995) 186). In the interest of concision, these essays are not discussed at length here, the poems being given pride of place. Heaney’s move from Northern Ireland to the Republic is likewise not discussed in detail; it does, however, form a substantial component of my discussion in a separate book, In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (forthcoming from University of Toronto Press). 25 Neil Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary,” Yearbook 17 (1987): 121. 26 Carson, “Escaped from the Massacre?,” The Honest Ulsterman 50 (Winter 1975): 183–86. Eugene O’Brien also discusses this view at length in Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers.

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political assertions, yet concomitantly, this viewpoint divests the speaker of the legitimation he seeks in the poem. It assumes that a poem can be read as a unified statement, formed by the nefariously single-minded linkage of images and situations into an “inevitable” agglomeration, rather than as an attempt to find one’s footing in a “word-hoard” which may be both coercive and empowering. The deep motive here is the poet’s wish to assert an imaginative network of symbols that let him seek belonging in a self-imposed history that is by no means “objective” or inevitable. He wishes to “trust the . . . treasure” that his “hands have known” and is no longer physically fearful, yet as he knows more, he trusts less. The speaker calls himself to trust what he knows, but concomitantly realizes that certain places and forces cannot be known— they miss definition, melting and spreading, ensnaring and sucking him into their messy realm. He could trust his place in “Toome,” when he could hold it within himself, but cannot any longer, as trust and knowledge cross paths in North. The question of trust is also a question of belonging, here within one’s physical and historical identity, which are interwoven in Heaney’s bog poems. Similarly to Zagajewski, Mahon, and Hartwig, Heaney must come to terms with the fact that identity is shaped by history and that the notion of belonging becomes complicated by the uncontrollable, often undesirable violence of this history, which does not always allow itself to get transmuted into symbol or be positively controlled. During this difficult stage, the speaker gradually realizes that knowing history will not necessarily result in an empowering self-knowledge, that it may actually diminish trust, and even negatively affect his sense of self-placement (that is, within the temporospatial coordinates which exasperate and appall the other three poets).27 Whereas Heaney’s bog poems are thrilling events in language, playfully experimenting with archaism and dialect, this very thrill commands attention to a degree that impedes knowledge of a “hieroglyphic peat” that “cheeps and lisps” but does not allow the speaker to fully comprehend its hieroglyphic code.28 The fantastic, “fabulous” elements of his land obfuscate, not clarify, knowledge; they trouble the poet’s epistemological project. He has achieved linguistic mastery over his place, organically linking word to material image, and has created a mutually reinforcing situation in which his imagination summons the very images in which he wishes to dwell. The 27 The relation of the poet to history at this point of his writing career is almost opposite to that present in Zagajewski’s poems. Both poets begin with the sense of a self that is threatened by its surroundings. In Zagajewski’s case, politics can over-determine language, and is tyrannical. The speaker feels that he might be swallowed by history; the self is insubstantial, without a strong core. Heaney also fears for his selfhood in his early poems; however, he manages to create a system in which politics is governed by imagination in North. The central problem, to both poets, is that the wrong type of belonging will swallow up the self, not empower it. Heaney discovers that he may not actually possess the type of knowledge, or control, that he has sought. 28 “Kinship,” North 40.

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land is mythic; the poet, alive to the treasures of the word-hoard, summons its images and events. In this paradigm of belonging, the poet’s place invites intimacy. Why, then, would the speaker feel “lost [and] unhappy” if he has discovered himself so much “at home”? His effort to fuse a private with a historical perspective results in a poetic identity that begins to seem “other” to the very poet who so consciously created it.29 This is the great paradox of Heaney’s bog poems. Belonging may actually be displaced rather than affirmed by a dig into history. Otherness is not beyond the speaker any longer, in a clutching, ensnaring landscape, but has emerged within the code of images that he brought into being, seemingly in order to redress his primal fear of the land’s otherness, to assert the integrity and strength of poet-excavator. The unifying function of his “northern” images comes from their temporal framework, as sameness of time smoothes over difference of or within identity, turning territory into tradition, and the divided, heterogeneous people into the single constituency of “the North.” The effort to find unity within difference clashes with the revivification of ancient history. A paradox is created: the images of conflict used to reflect warfare do not contain the differences motivating warfare. The “iron flash of consonants” does not image the country’s division, but merely presents the capacity for violence in language itself. The scholarly effort to attack, defend, and understand North proves the power of its intervention, but it does not explain or pardon conflict. Perhaps explanation cannot pardon, and knowledge does not entail belonging; perhaps knowledge of history need not entail knowledge of the self that is “lost” in its home: 29

Edward Larrissy gestures toward this interpretation when he asserts that the speakers of Death of a Naturalist and North both form an array of metaphors (whether “little” or “grand”) that “make a gesture at giving meaning to a fragmentary and inexplicable world in such a way that the world remains essentially fragmentary and inexplicable.” Larrissy goes so far as to say that we are almost invited to feel the absurdity of the comparison of Iron Age Europe to Northern Ireland, a point that Heaney allows (they are “[n]ot quite equivalent”) but generally disavows when he claims them as “an attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic” (Heaney in Cole 115). The fragmentary quality that Larrissy underscores results from the inadequacy of these metaphors to encompass the speaker’s sense of being “at home.” Edward Larrissy, “Things, Descriptions, and Metaphor in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry,”The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 229. Elsewhere, Heaney hints at the insufficiency of such images to communicate personal identity by stating, “The “Northern” emphasis of the imagery and mythology in North was all very well—but it only represented one part of me.” Heaney goes on to explain his felt need to express the Roman Catholic part of his character, “the person who lived in a folk church.” These remarks by Heaney hint at some telling partialities and dichotomies. To start with, he implies the coherence of these images to adequately communicate an essential “Northernness,” but their inadequacy to represent the creator who desired them weakens this implicit claim, and the statement that his metaphorization of “Northernness” cannot account for Catholicism severely undermines the efficacy of this “rhyme” between the contemporary and the archaic. Remarks by Heaney cited in Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) 259.

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III Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out there in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.30 “The Tollund Man” attempts to situate the sacrificial victim within the speaker’s Christian framework of martyrdom and redemption as the poet considers whether he should “consecrate the cauldron bog/Our holy ground” in order to hope for a possible resurrection. Its structure moves from evocation to invocation, which is then lost. Heaney views it as “a prayer that something would come of [the murdered dead],” a hope that as the sacrificial victim germinates into spring, so present-day violence will lead to eventual resolution, but the prayer fails.31 The speaker is left with his “sad freedom” and a realization that, though lost in another place, he has trapped himself in the constructed “home” of a metaphoric system. Within this system, he can chant names but not communicate—his vatic function does not correspond to an ability to resurrect the dead, to revivify the wasteland of “old man-killing parishes.” The poem, however, succeeds in casting Heaney into “a new field of force.”32 To start with, his use of local place-names is different here, as the poet’s earlier confidence in his ability to turn the name into an aesthetic object, to caress that object and present it to public view, could not be farther from his present state of mind. These names are metonyms of foreignness. The foreignness inheres not merely in their linguistic structure 30 Wintering Out 47–48. This poem is actually from the volume preceding North; the “Northern” poems are present in several volumes, though North contains the greatest concentration. The first poem pointing forward to later bog poems is “Bogland,” the last poem of Door into the Dark (1969). 31 Heaney in Cole 115. 32 Heaney in O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones 157. “The more I talk about those poems [(i.e., the poems of Wintering Out)], the more I see that they were about the need to break out of the consensus that Ulster was ‘a good wee place’, the need to get on the road to Aarhus, to acknowledge the lostness and unhappiness of ‘home’” (150).

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but in the gradually perceived foreignness of the bog poems’ own space. Uttering the Danish names precipitates a revelation of his outsider status. His communication with local inhabitants must be nonlinguistic; his ability to speak for the Tollund Man, who cannot speak for himself, is thus called into question. Although the man is initially seen as a biological specimen and the speaker’s pilgrimage to this strange relic is cast into the future (“Some day I will”), the thematic fulcrum of the poem is the point at which the immediacy of identification takes over a conditional evocation. As in “North,” the imagination takes over purported fact and the poem moves and shifts between subject and object, in no way imitating the static repose of its eponymous figure. The speaker’s contemplation of the Tollund Man intensifies his awe until benevolent spectatorship becomes active involvement, and as the man approaches the status of a religious relic, the speaker’s dread of his own position grows. His desire to “pray/Him to make germinate” the dead constitutes a rhythmic upheaval within the poem, thus connoting the impossibility of this central optimistic vision, and concomitantly of his own active capacity. His “sad freedom” does not lead to its desired result, while the “freedom” of the man himself is debatable. The poem is commonly interpreted as an act of identitarian confusion in which the speaker elides his own position with that of the Tollund Man. Neil Corcoran asserts that this elision of identity supplies the poem with emotional sustenance. Its mythical elements are dissolved into something “sharply immediate: the pain of personal incomprehension, isolation and pity.” Both Tollund Man and the poet are, in a sense, indecently exposed.33 At this moment, his control over the subject-matter that he so consciously evokes slips. After the tacit realization (occurring offstage, as it were, in the gap between Part II and III of the poem) that his prayer is implausible, his religious awe wanes and is replaced by childlike befuddlement (“Watching . . . pointing hands,/ Not knowing their tongue”) leading to a conclusion that sounds like a selfcastigation (“I will feel lost”). This famous moment, although occurring in the earliest bog poem, proleptically announces the inability of this grand effort to establish a space of full belonging. Perhaps the temporal gap between Iron Age and the present day is too great, and ends up nearly swallowing the speaker. Zagajewski’s traveler experiences such a moment when he realizes, disoriented and increasingly fearful, that he wants to assure himself he has a “return ticket” to “the ordinary places where we live.” He, too, has located his sense of belonging in a state that finally reveals an otherness that 33 Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) 79–80; see Dillon Johnston’s discussion of this point in “Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 113–32.

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may be threatening. Heaney’s speaker yearns for the stained “repose” of the awe-inspiring, yet aesthetically manageable victim, whose appearance is more consonant with his desire to believe in spiritual transformation than is the condition of “slashed” modern victims, and his yearning encompasses his need for appropriative ritual (the Tollund Man’s body is apprehended feature by feature) and for amorous relationships. Jahan Ramazani notes that Heaney’s bog elegies can be seen as a species of love poetry, although here the speaker’s amorous involvement participates in the very destruction that he supposedly bemoans.34 Desire and belonging, however, part ways, as the amorous poet comes to the realization that his home is elsewhere. He leaves himself “out there” where other bodies (pointing hands, foreign “tongue”), his own active body (“Saying,” “Watching”) and his mind (“Not knowing”) are disunited. The links do not form; the North begins to be demythologized.35 The difficulty of interpreting exactly where the speaker is lost and where at home reveals how deeply this poem is rooted in a crisis of identity. Its potent images, like those of “North,” fuel a strong desire to belong in them.36 This author’s “sad freedom” inheres in the fact that his vocation is chosen, while the glamorous language of “old man-killing parishes” (evocative, nostalgic, eminently quotable) mediates between the poet’s desire to be rooted in actuality and his deeper desire to solipsistically belong in his own space. It is a surprisingly Yeatsian desire for a poet who has a sharply ambivalent relation to this earlier proponent of heroic martyrdom—“those images that yet/fresh images beget” command more of the poet’s desire than his “actual” position. Heaney’s urge toward the spiritual is fundamentally different from Yeats’s—there is no complex system upholding his evocations, and he strikes down instead of reaching up for his metaphors—but the yearning to inhabit a symbolic system which he constructs in his poems is parallel to Yeats’s desire for Byzantium (which is delineated—and glamorized—according to his desire, just as Heaney’s archaic Jutland reflects the poet’s own longing). His need to create this system is rooted in a personal fear that also has a political dimension: the land is imperfectly owned. The digger’s need to strip the land is also a need to expose its history of ownership, but this may not have heartening results unless one digs deeply enough to uncover 34

Ramazani 342. It is instructive to apply Peter MacDonald’s statement that there is danger in making sense of atrocities by making them sensible; a good poem, he argues, shows that sense is not made so easily, and that the poet’s control of language in these matters can be an illusion. “The Tollund Man” bears out the truth of this statement. Mistaken Identities 49–50. 36 James Simmons argues, in a negative essay, that the poem is evasive, puzzling rather than illuminating, and thus fails (a rather problematic argument). “The Trouble with Seamus,” Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 39–66. See also Peter Levi’s discussion of Simmons’ critique of Heaney, “Scythe, Pitchfork and Biretta,” Poetry Review 81.2 (1991): 12–14. 35

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a glamorous Iron Age. As the modern legacy of English colonialism actually seems less “real” than this earlier victimization, so the question of engaging postcolonial identity becomes (temporarily) displaced.37 John Comaroff notes that certain “factions” of a hybrid culture will turn against its hybridity in the name of boundaries violated, and wish for totalizing perspectives.38 Although Heaney certainly does not write from a factional position, he indeed largely submerges the actual factionalism of Ireland in his evocation of ritualistic sacrifice. We are all, he implies, descended from “those fabulous raiders.” Such a totalizing historical metaphor is created both to address the political impasse of sectarian war and to assert the strength of his own selfhood: he no longer expresses a tentative, fragmented subjectivity but is a strong boundary-crossing figure in his role as mythologizer. He digs, uncovers, and creates. Comaroff’s hypothesis is surprisingly relevant to Heaney because his early feeling of imperfectly realized selfhood underlies this attempt to cohere identity through literary metaphorization. “The Tollund Man” is a landmark poem because it shows the speaker that he has not, in fact, fashioned a space for himself to belong in the here and now. David Lloyd has mounted the most serious attack against Heaney’s poetic strategies. Interestingly, Lloyd believes that the insufficiencies of Heaney’s poetry stem from its basis in the concept of identity, which keeps him from addressing the contradiction between ethics and aesthetics: in turn, the conflicts Heaney poses are “delusory” and falsely resolved. Lloyd (like Edna Longley) situates Heaney within a nationalist cultural project that promulgates a metaphor of rootedness in the primary soil of Ireland. He is justifiably angry at the way Heaney’s poetry has been used to support a tribalist view of the Irish conflict—although he does not sufficiently separate the poetry from its reception—and he undermines the perceived harmonies (or, at least, closures) that Heaney’s work offers. To Lloyd, Heaney believes that place is an image of continuity in which identity reposes, and knowledge can never be a knowledge of difference: “The signs of difference that compose the language are underwritten by a language of containment and synthesis, that is, ‘the living speech of the landscape,’ which is in turn identified with the poem itself, the single, adequate vocable.” Language, in Heaney’s poetry, 37 A clear, if obvious, parallel can be made here between the four poets in this study: each one seeks a place away from the unbearable conditions of belonging in one’s immediate historical circumstance. Mahon and Hartwig contemplate the most definitive break, idealizing a “place out of time” as well as out of the speaker’s cultural space. None of them, though, can remain in this separate place and poetically inhabit it for good, because of their sense of the self ’s incomplete privacy. There is an inner compulsion in these poets to reckon with the histories, personal and social, which impelled their imaginative flights. The pattern repeats itself in various figurative frameworks. For Heaney, the poet returns to the specific childhood place in order to reckon with large-scale cultural dispossession. 38 John Comaroff in conversation with Homi Bhabha, “Speaking of Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation,” Relocating Postcolonialism, eds. David Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002) 28.

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always performs a ritual of synthesis to Lloyd, while the poet is the stable center in a tableau of identifications. Lloyd theoretically articulates a view of Heaney that is quite common, echoing the spirit of many other critiques of the bog poems with considerable sophistication and nuance, and is worth honoring as one in opposition to the current argument. He holds that the ending of “The Tollund Man” shows how the potential alienation of not knowing the local language is overridden by a sense of “at-homeness” that is “always available to those whose culture is a question of reterritorialization,”39 not allowing that there be a difference between the speaker’s desire to invest foreign words with meaning and an actual reterritorialization of meaning. He also does not recognize the distance between reterritorialization of another culture’s signs and the act of reinhabiting one’s home culture (a difference central to “The Tollund Man”), and re-inscribing it with a meaning that itself has been thrown into crisis (Lloyd might say, a delusory crisis). Furthermore, there is no unified set of meanings that Heaney imposes in the bog poems; “The Tollund Man” is the most obvious example, since the speaker’s inability to “make germinate” corpses through prayer reveals the poem’s inability to reterritorialize, either literally or symbolically. Lloyd’s critique represents a prevailing tendency to read Heaney as a more unified poet than he actually is, and, as Patrick Crotty notes, as a thinker more “exercised by questions of national identity” than he truly is, a reading only possible when one elides “textual engagement and indictment.”40 A close engagement (psychological and empathetic rather than purely political) shows that Heaney is, to extend Crotty’s point, not concerned with national identity as much as that of his personal, vulnerable self, his home community, and his family. Heaney’s attempt to trope the land as something to be learned does not end in the triumphant imposition of a constructed code of meanings onto it but, rather, initiates an exploration of his own dispossession. In “The Toome Road,” a childlike speaker wakes up to find “armoured cars/In convoy” near his home, camouflaged with broken branches, soldiers standing at the ready. How long were they approaching down my roads As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping. I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping41

39

Citations taken from Lloyd 14, 20, 23, 27–9. Crotty links James Simmons’ inflammatory denunciation of Heaney with Lloyd’s, arguing that neither adequately engages Heaney’s actual poems but focus on large-scale politics, Simmons from a “liberal unionis[t]” position and Lloyd from a Marxist one. “The Context of Heaney’s Reception,” The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 53. 41 “The Toome Road,” Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) 15. 40

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He asserts that the “omphalos,” central point, of his land remains “untoppled,” but his sense of belonging upon and “keeping” his home earth is toppled indeed. The fear of an unconscious loss of power motivating the early poems now joins with a conscious dramatization of dispossession. The bellicose encroachment of the convoy is felt as an almost-physical violation, yet its harm is compounded by the fact that it has been happening for longer than the speaker can remember. His local identity is thrown into question, both in the present and retrospectively. Is this “one morning” a landmark event or have similar scenes been purposefully left out of earlier poems about rural life? Heaney has written allegories of colonial violation before,42 but the threat here is only implicitly colonial; it may be any intrusion of the militarypolitical upon a familial space. The soldiers may well be Irish. This land cannot be unified in a transcendent conception of Northernness because it is fractured within. Heaney’s poetics change as he breaks apart the idea of mastery in order to represent a condition of fracture. In “The Toome Road,” his lines are longer than the “drills” of “Land” and “North” (10–13 syllables per line), implying a different audience;43 he can no longer claim the “rights-of-way” appropriately cleared in “Land” as definitively his. The poem makes a brief attempt at casual anecdote (“One morning early I met. . .”) but the entrance of “armoured cars” puts the reader on guard: this will not be an emotionally casual meeting, though Heaney’s use of the phrase “neighborly murder” in North conditions one’s reading of later poems about the local.44 The poem’s form and tone maintain an uneasy tension between outrage and bemused acceptance. “Warbling along on powerful tyres” enacts a minor shift in rhythm (the iamb struggles to assert itself with partial success) and a major clash of registers: powerful tires are not readily associated with birdsong, and the preceding mention of “armoured cars” and “convoy” introduces a military vocabulary that continues with “camouflaged” and “headphoned soldiers.” Assonance links unlike elements in a pattern of discord, not unity: the broken pastoral is menaced by the long-term “approach” of otherness, casting doubt upon its ownership. Yet the speaker insists upon “organicizing” the scene: perhaps his desire to defend his pastoral kingdom impels him to naturalize the obviously inorganic. The poem’s assertion of an “untoppled” “omphalos” is prefigured by the poet’s ability to enact this transformation. The careless joy of “warbling,” however, counterpoints the sinister mien of these soldiers, as the country’s sleep implies its helplessness if faced with 42 For example, “A New Song,” “Act of Union,” “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” and “The Betrothal at Cavehill.” 43 See Tony Curtis’s “A More Social Voice: Field Work,” in Curtis 97–127. Heaney’s rhythms, and sense of rhythmic audience (or “contract” with his readers) have been studied in detail by Jason David Hall in Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 44 The phrase is used in “Funeral Rites.”

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attack and the speaker’s “rights-of-way” could be occupied by force. The paradoxes of ownership are touched upon, though not belabored, in this poem: “How long were they approaching down my roads/As if they owned them?” Can the “omphalos” be owned, displaced, or destroyed? These questions emphasize the scene’s fragility. The tree-branch camouflage recalls Macbeth’s seemingly impossible prophecy that Birnam wood shall come to Dunsinane. In the play’s denouement, Birnam wood does indeed arrive in the guise of soldiers thus camouflaged. The improbable ring of the original prophecy heightens Macbeth’s sense of crisis, and unavoidable downfall, when it comes true. Is there an inevitable crisis in the future of this poem? Its sporadic rhymes create a false sense of security—perhaps this scene is harmless, and its melodic chimes harmonize a fundamentally stable scenario. The few nonrhyming lines (four in a 17-line poem) and the odd number of lines prevent it from being a closed formal structure, emphatically not a pastoral sonnet. Its threat is not overcome, and the poem’s Greek lexical borrowings do not archaize and therefore ennoble its conflict. Concord, and ownership, cannot be achieved by a desperate assertion of stability or, aesthetically, through rhythmic and melodic harmonies. “The Toome Road” asks Heaney’s readers to reconsider the unity of local places, such as the eponymous village street that proves pervious to largescale forces of dissension. Identity will always be provisional if it can be intruded upon so easily. The cozy world of Heaney’s early poems is revealed as a construct fashioned in order to assert the primacy of the personal omphalos over other political divisions. A recent poem, “The Loose Box,” revisits this terrain on a more metapoetic level: Patrick Kavanagh, Heaney’s early patron poet, states . . . there’s health and worth in any talk about The properties of land. Sandy, glarry, Mossy, heavy, cold, the actual soil Almost doesn’t matter; the main thing is An inner restitution, a purchase come by By pacing it in words that make you feel You’ve found your feet in what “surefooted” means And in the ground of your own understanding . . .45 Beginning with a few lines to the loose box itself, a “hayrack” of “silked and seasoned timber,” the poem seems to betoken a nostalgic visit to Mossbawn, not an exploration of dispossession. The voice of Heaney’s poetic forefather is not summoned through the immediacy of vision but comes through from a distance, a distance that the reader is invited to contemplate, since the speaker’s need for this voice from the past, his loss of “purchase” in his 45

“The Loose Box,” Electric Light (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001) 15–18.

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current position, motivates the poem. There is no specific land present, only the desire for land as an abstract emblem (“the actual soil/Almost doesn’t matter”) that is re-materialized by one’s choice of adjectives. Its tone is conversational, even awkward (“a purchase come by/By pacing it. . .”), which results from the programmatic act of listening to “an old recording” of Kavanagh and applying his “old” words to the present. “The main thing” is the need for restitution. A defense of the invisible “omphalos” in “The Toome Road” is lacking here—the speaker’s uncertainty regarding its presence leads him to ransack a storehouse of adjectives, hoping that their enumeration will eventually produce a generalized sense of “purchase.” His need for “an inner restitution” implies an original act of dispossession that is a legacy of colonialism. Heaney’s sense of displacement has rarely been as submerged and deeply felt as here. “Pacing it in words” recalls when he “stepped it perch by perch” in “Land,” and the earlier poem’s surprising mention of “my last look” could correspond to a fear that the land, not the speaker, may be taken away; “The Loose Box” lets one know that it actually has been, and that “purchase” must be consciously achieved because it is not given as a birthright. “Health and worth” can only be psychological because the Irish land’s failure to consistently nourish, and the flow of financial “worth” out of Ireland and into England, are well known facts. There is a notable lack of “health and worth” in Kavanagh’s own poetic tales of the land.46 Can Kavanagh teach Heaney how to find them? The question remains open; the poet’s pleasure at feeling into the word “surefooted” seems to be merely linguistic and not a viable solution to the deeper problem of dispossession. Psychological worth cannot provide full restitution, and the play of language cannot obscure or redress the land’s history. The reader is left wondering if the speaker will continue to fear a lack of health and worth in his relationship to the land; just as in “The Toome Road,” his resolution seems fragile and temporary. A sense that place is imperfectly owned animates “The Loose Box,” and although the myth of Antaeus (who gained strength from touching the earth) is belittled as “pap for the dispossessed” in an earlier poem,47 the later poem implies that the dispossessed may need this sort of myth. Ireland’s colonial past precludes a sense of full ownership on a grandly diachronic scale, and it intrudes between the mythic scenarios of the Northern poems and the speaker’s present-day attempt to own the language of land. The poem in which Heaney most powerfully critiques his previous personae (excavator, public mythologizer) is “Exposure.” Here, we see that the poet cannot fulfill a simple socio-political function because he is situated in between definitional terms; he is not a unified subjectivity. Vendler notes Heaney’s 46 This is most evidently true of The Great Hunger (1942), but also of Kavanagh’s early and middle-stage work in general. 47 “Hercules and Antaeus,” North 121–22.

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endless capacity for self-transformation—“Exposure” gains strength from its “rapid sorting of self against almost any available ‘other’”—while Corcoran points to his capacity for self-criticism, abilities that poignantly come together in an extended questioning of the speaker’s role and the concept of responsibility: “Scrupulously self-critical, [Heaney’s poetry] has made constant inquiry of its own resources and potential, of its affiliations and responsibilities, of, in the end, its own exemplary status.”48 Whereas this connotes a positive quality, the speaker of “Exposure” is “exemplary” by virtue of his vulnerability, beginning his poem by situating himself in darkness, cold, and discomfort, and considering the quality of his own displacement. His self-questioning, and his figuration of ideal inspiration, sets an example for Heaney’s later work: the comet, seen as a “million tons of light,” will be opposed to a more bearable “small light” in “The Haw Lantern,” and the speaker’s trouble with self-definition will indeed prove exemplary: I am neither internee nor informer; An inner émigré, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows49 Heaney’s poem is suffused with the sorrow of separation, but the circularity of “weighing and weighing” his troubles does not lead to decisive action. He is, indeed, neither internee nor informer, nor actually an “inner émigré” if we take the poem to be autobiographical—Heaney has chosen to move from the North to the Republic, and has not been forced. Nor is he, for that matter, a “wood-kerne,” a term used to designate Irish soldiers who took to the forests in action against the British (possibly taken from Spenser’s 1596 A View of the Present State of Ireland, a work he knew well). These two terms make reference to political sources of threat, yet the speaker is incapable of political action, and is troubled by this position. The poem’s lyricism is not extroverted (it does, using Mill’s term, sound overheard), 48 Neil Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary,” Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1987): 117, 121. Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 89. 49 North 72–73. This is the last poem of North, and the responsibility it contemplates may well be the responsibility that Heaney has consciously assumed by writing his social allegories and constructing a myth of the violent North. The poem may also be read as a self-indictment for his 1972 move to the Republic (it is often read as such), three years before North was published. This is, however, a rather too biographical reading on its own, since the resonance of the poem goes further than this, implying a broad identitarian crisis.

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and serves to separate the speaker from the public world, as he weighs his decision to step away from the communal role attempted elsewhere.50 He feels embattled without having battled in the usual sense of the word, much as Zagajewski’s wanderer does not always wander, yet holds onto this identity for its admittedly irrational truthfulness to the self. Over and over, Heaney has troped his speakers as outside, beyond, or involuntarily caught by history. Mahon shares his interest in these positions even though he explores different identitarian postures toward them. This poet is both alone and lonely, fractured within and unable to counter a threat that no longer emanates from the land but from well out and beyond, while the physical landscape now provides “protective colouring” rather than an erotic thrill. He feels that he has lost his bearings, unsure if he is acting positively, using his work as an instrument “for the people,” or whether he is working for himself (eventually in Station Island, he will tell himself to work for the joy of it); if for himself, then he needs to redefine his identity, which has constructed itself on a communal foundation. If he indeed writes “for the people,” then he needs to confront the chasm between the vita contemplativa and vita activa, realizing that his people may require action as well as—or more than—evocative poetry. The speaker’s politicalhistorical situation is unexplained—readers work by inference to connect “Exposure” to Irish history—yet inexorable: the speaker cannot protect his community from the armored cars of “The Toome Road,” and escapes from “the massacre” to protect himself from a hostile environment. The poem questions the very possibility of heroism in this environment. Suffering does not lead to redemption in the form of clear political solutions. The poem demonstrates the inability of this speaker to fit into a historical paradigm of responsibility and active involvement, a paradigm that partakes of the Romantic heroic mode; Julia Hartwig will also question why she was not given a transcendent sign, perhaps like Heaney’s missed comet, that may guide her to right action. “Exposure” records a diminishment of hope in the self and in community, which subdivides into “internee” and “informer.” This diminishment heightens the speaker’s hope for the hyperbolically, but beautifully, conceived comet, his sign from above, whose “million tons of light” might annihilate the dreariness of this landscape and provide an ideal shared by all. “Master, we would see a sign from thee,” ask the Biblical scribes (Matthew 12.38), a demand whose disappointment is intricately figured by Eliot’s “Gerontion” and, perhaps, Heaney himself, if we view this portrayal of grand hopes diminished in religious terms. The Romantic quality of Heaney and Hartwig’s wishes for guidance from above is shaped by the Catholic background of 50

One may contrast rhetorical gestures such as “O charioteers” (“The Toome Road”) and conversational phrases such as “you’ve found your feet in what “surefooted” means” (“The Loose Box”) with the lack of such social gestures in “Exposure.” The poem is directed inward.

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both the poets; Heaney’s example of restorative language that leaves one “speechless and renewed” is Jesus’ writing in the sand, which leads to peace and a cessation of violent punishment. Not quite a miracle, this act is one of “pure concentration” that exerts as well as demonstrates power.51 The speaker of “Exposure” does not expect, of course, to take the place of Jesus; neither will Hartwig’s speaker. His longing for an intervention, however, secularly figured as a comet but hearkening back to Eliot (of “Gerontion” and Four Quartets, which end when “the fire and rose are one”) and Dante, represents a need for transcendent and not just earthly guidance. The “fabulous raiders” and mysterious land have not satisfied this need, which is equally important for securing his poetic identity and allowing knowledge of his place to be more than merely material. It would be satisfying to conclude that the language of lyric epiphany triumphs over all others, but the poem does not offer such a gratifying conclusion. Heaney’s Northern poems have located the speaker in an imaginative place that he cannot permanently inhabit, and the consequence is his sense of “exposure” in the here and now. He has created a home in words, but this has trapped him in a circular relationship of mind to language that diminishes his ability to see the transcendent comet, if indeed it exists for him to view. He has not fully explored the raw insufficiencies that lie concealed under the often-harmonious melodies and rich imagery of Heaney’s explorations of self and identity; hence the harrowing question, “How did I end up like this?” We are left asking how the speaker will remake himself as an active agent, how he will move beyond the narrative of frustrated desire that has marked his early work. He is stretched between his wish for heroism and a need to expose himself further in order to bring to light his fragmented subjectivity. He is in between solipsism, surrounded by his own “let-downs,” and subsumption into history, an escapee defined by the conditions he flees; he is caught between the all-consuming land, the false categorizations of his political system (internee, informer), and an almost-visible yet evanescent transcendence.

51 The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987 (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) 107–8 (this discussion occurs at the end of the essay entitled “The Government of the Tongue”).

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6 Examining the structures of selfhood: Seamus Heaney Heaney’s focus on ritual and myth has left him lost in the home he has created, but instead of constructing a new space for belonging, the poet turns his attention to the way in which his mind creates such structures. Heaney’s poetry takes a metapoetic turn in its effort to expose the basis of the speaker’s in-betweenness. He concentrates upon self-questioning and absence rather than establishing coherence of identity through mastery, as in previous poems. The poet reconsiders the basis of his poetic position by opposing universalism with emplacement. He rethinks the nature of his obligation to the people. All four poets in this study feel that their “society” obligates them, even while it is not always clearly defined. This feeling creates an inner compulsion to reckon with the public nature of the poet’s role, even if, like Mahon, they repeatedly assert the privacy of the voice (and although public assertion does not always mesh with poetic practice), and while their literary traditions often encourage them to view public and private realms in terms of a continuum they seek to dichotomize the two. By laying bare the sources of the self, Heaney’s later speaker considers how the writer fills absent spaces with “signatures on [his] own frequency.”1 His newly abstract examination of selfhood gradually becomes an abstract view of the perceptual process. Heaney’s intellectual and poetic negotiation of belonging and identity culminates in a view of in-betweenness that is empowering, but is not implicated in a mythology of signs and portents (such as in “Exposure”). The land is itself a set of contradictory, selfcontesting signs. The poet cannot escape to an omniscient or a transcendent position beyond this system, but he finds a ground to stand on between dispossession and ownership, between the unmasterable movement of history and an imaginative space. He cannot control the meaning of his place but 1 “Station Island” XII, Station Island (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985; first printed 1984) 94.

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he can connect some fragments of meaning to create a new poetic persona that is inevitably ironic yet optimistic that, through the personal agency of the poet, some vestige of unity between self, culture, and place can be established. After the poetic speaker connects a loss of transcendent guidance (the comet of “Exposure”) with the insufficiency of definitional language, he seeks to sweep the slate clean through a series of self-interrogations. Identity is no longer something that must be attained through ritual and myth. Since his search for belonging depended on mastery of language, this is a prime target for Heaney’s later questioning. In the lyrical “Glanmore Sonnets,” the poet couches a resolution in the words of a neighbor: “‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over/With perfect mist and peaceful absences.’”2 These lines may be read in reference to Heaney’s own effort to reach through the mists of history to archaism, in which the very distance of Heaney’s mythologized Northern history has created a “peaceful absence” of a sort; the poet may project his own interest onto his fabulously unverifiable raiders. As the Tollund Man is beatified by the sexual act of inhumation (“Those dark juices working/Him to a saint’s kept body”), so the poet becomes lover, worshipper, and teacher—an exalted position for one whose earliest verses were suffused with self-doubt, and Heaney is too scrupulous not to question such positioning. His self-criticism identifies a tendency to mythologize and beatify rather than tell simple truths: “‘You saw that, and you wrote that—not the fact./You confused evasion and artistic tact.’”3 The mouthpiece is his cousin, Colum McCartney, whose death Heaney had commemorated in high elegiac style. In “Station Island,” the poet confronts figures from his past in an extended mea culpa. The poet takes such criticisms to heart, and his development undergoes another dramatic turn as he accuses himself of misusing his linguistic talent, of confusing the possibility for art’s self-containment—its ability to breathe life into imagined figures—with the communication of truth. Lyricism may be confused with “tact,” but the perfect rhyme of such lines (and many others of “Station Island”) shows that the beauty and closure of aesthetic form may, indeed, be coupled with self-denunciation. The “fact” may be burnished, not effaced, by a poetic tact that is not evasive. His real “evasion” is not the lack of blood and gore or the denial of violent conflict but the evasion of the fact of self-division—an evasion accomplished by the acts of mastery discussed in Chapter 5. The speaker has marshaled his poetic resources to keep order in his childhood idyll and in a fabulous pagan history, respectively, and the psychic divisions within his self and language have only been intimated. 2

“Glanmore Sonnet” VI, Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) 38. “Station Island” Part VIII, Station Island 83. For an excellent extended reading of “Station Island,” see Peggy O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 3

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The politico-linguistic drama of English displacing Gaelic hid, in Heaney’s early poems, the more personal drama between the speaker and his own language. Heaney has pointed to the land’s dispossession but has assumed his own possession of expressive capacity. Now, in Part IX of “Station Island,” the poet finally examines himself without myth or nostalgia: “‘I hate how quick I was to know my place. /I hate where I was born, hate everything/That made me biddable and unforthcoming.’” His access of self-contempt is brief but intense and comes as a surprise to readers who have accepted the Arcadian myth cloaking Mossbawn.4 Of course, the place is not at fault but its eulogist is, and this statement is another quick evasion, having a broader audience in mind than the poet himself. “Place” may also imply “placement” in its many senses—historical, social, and geographical—and may refer to Heaney’s historicizing. His allusions to martyrdom and postcoloniality may well be part of the “place” he turns against—in other words, one formed through, not just anterior to, his poems—as well as the sort of circumscribed identity that these conditions push him toward (“knowing one’s place”). Stan Smith believes that Heaney’s own reputation (which is, at this point in his career, prodigious) is the object of the poet’s censure: “That artful double-take identifies that intimate knowledge of his original place, for which English critics first praised him. . .with his “biddable” readiness to accept his place as a subaltern warbler of native woodnotes in the metropolitan scheme of things.”5 The actual work of Heaney’s poetics undermines the unity of the native place, yet careful readers are left with Smith’s impression that the poet is artfully playing a role, fracturing himself within in order to cohere a reputation. Yet this very reputation as “subaltern warbler” allows Heaney’s open self-criticism to have a strong effect: his self-repudiations spread outwards. Later in the poem, James Joyce’s ghost urges the poet to “keep at a tangent,” informing him bluntly, “‘That subject people stuff is a cod’s game’” and “‘You lose more of yourself than you redeem/doing the decent thing.’”6 These words bring the speaker’s focus back to himself, since the blame for “doing the decent thing” has shifted rather quickly from him to his place. He is ventriloquizing his refusal to believe that place carries absolute obligation—it is far from Mahon’s biting and blunt refusals, but at this point the two poets cross paths thematically, as the seemingly rooted Heaney claws at the “biddable” decency that has made it so easy to oppose him to his Protestant contemporary. Now, in the l980s, Heaney’s critiques, 4

Heaney has stated that he was very conscious of “having Arcadia as a home” in a personal interview conducted at Harvard University on 19 October 1998. At the same time, he felt at the time that he had not quite given voice to a full and complete nostalgia. 5 Stan Smith, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005) 111–12. 6 Citations from Station Island 93.

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turns, and refusals begin to reveal a surprising parallel to Mahon: just as the former derogated his “sanctimonious silence” among the light and shade of Northern history, loudly announcing a nonconformism that relied upon a tacit summoning of the very vocabulary he found antithetical, so also Heaney undergoes an apparent breast-beating in “Station Island” that depends, nevertheless, upon acts of ventriloquism that clarify and justify the speaker’s publically proclaimed choice. We cannot blur the obvious cultural, tonal, and developmental differences between the two, but such differences have been given pride of place in most literary criticism; instead, it is valuable to note equally important parallels in the process of thinking that their poems undertake, and to consider how each poet sounds the note of frustrated desire in mid-career. The quality of belonging, Heaney and Mahon both wish to assert, is personal. One’s self is lost or redeemed by writing politically “biddable” poetry, however “wretched” the poet’s rage for order may seem among the burnt-out detritus of historical events. As both poets discover, the selfsatisfactions of refusal must be confronted as well as the consolations of ready belonging. Smith posits that the words of Joyce’s ghost “deconstruct prescriptive myths of Irishness,” implying the importance of this moment as a fulcrum; yet rather than insisting upon one path of escape—such as Mahon’s beloved trope of exile—the ghost alerts the self-transforming poet to the “plurality outside the circle of prescriptive and proscriptive language.”7 Although it may be “decent” to engage the history that stultifies one’s land (we may remember Mahon’s Fire King lamenting his people’s demands), “that subject people stuff” is familiar enough to be disparaged as unequal to the poet’s talent. There must be more to literature than a lament for dispossession. Prescription of subject-matter quickly becomes proscription of “tangential” subjects. Keeping “at a tangent” does not entail engaging the experience of cultural marginalization but writing on one’s own, “for the joy of it.” It is fitting, therefore, that one of Heaney’s landmark poems from his next volume (The Haw Lantern) is entitled “From the Republic of Conscience.” He is not, however, directly taking the advice to “keep at a tangent,” but writing out of a deep obligation to lay bare the source of his identity, down past the too-obvious paradigm of “that subject people stuff.” This is an attempt to “redeem” the self by positing it as somewhat “lost.” The speaker is placed in a foreign “Republic of Conscience” which forces him to accept a double displacement, one from his usual spatial surroundings and one from his temporal surroundings. In this situation, two negatives do make 7

Stan Smith, “The Language of Displacement in Contemporary Irish Poetry,” in Kenneally 65. Smith discerns a similar message in Yeats’s poetry, which inspires Heaney by its selftransformation, casting off its old mythologies and re-examining its own claims. See Smith 73–83.

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a positive: the self re-examines the basis of its identity by moving through space and back in time. Dispossession and deterritorialization begin at home, in the substance of the local and in one’s personal “allowance.” The poem queries identity by asking with what one identifies, as immigration clerks at this republic ask the speaker to identify his grandfather and recite “traditional cures and charms” to prove his belonging. . . . that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen. He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.8 Thus situated in a local community, the speaker is free to enter the republic and, what is more, to become “a dual citizen” of this unsituated realm and of his “home,” enjoined by immigration officials to take on an ambassadorial role, splitting the self (“their behalf in my own tongue”). This splitting will be further metaphorized in “Terminus” and “Making Strange”; its inverse incarnation is the transmogrified King Sweeney of Sweeney Astray (1983), whose “easy sense of cultural affinity” with disparate British and Irish territories is, Heaney holds, “exemplary” for contemporary residents of Northern Ireland.9 Heaney has never before attempted such a bold combination of the abstract and the empirical. He owes this new style in large part to the Eastern European poets (Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz) whom he admires. The poem represents a new stage in Heaney’s self-questioning, and its obvious foreign influences strike out “at a tangent” from his previous exemplars. The language of poetry can be enriched by encompassing both panoramic and closely focused visions, involving both concrete and abstract views of the self, which is no longer securely autobiographical—the “I” here appears quite generic. Are we watching a cosmopolitan poet view himself from a sophisticated distance or is a native returning home, to use the binary urged by “Making Strange”?10 8

The Haw Lantern (London: Faber and Faber, 1987) 12–13. Introduction to Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983) n.p. 10 Eugene O’Brien is one of the few scholars who explicitly commends Heaney for illustrating the changes and inconsistencies within the singular speaker’s identity. In a political context, his ability to engage in “polyglossic enunciation” of different points of view allows Heaney to write about Northern Ireland without merely succumbing to sectarianism, and in a linguistic context, it shows that “language can also be the vehicle where such a sense of fracture [in subjectivity] can be seen as positive, allowing for development and change within the parameters of identity.” Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers 31–34. 9

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The “I,” in The Haw Lantern, has become a new entity altogether. Whereas the weakness of “From the Republic of Conscience” is its overt allegory— which diminishes the sense that we are privy to a real personal drama—this same quality is also refreshingly new to Heaney’s readers and demands attention. Andrew Waterman’s criticism of such poems—that too many constitute “a mulling-over and embroidering of the lesson rather than its imaginative application to further experience”11—is actually the very point at issue: this is, in many ways, the most scrupulous stage of Heaney’s selfcriticism and the most radical of his experiments, as an experiment with abstraction and allegory provides a means of self-assessment. Heaney’s desire to embrace abstraction gains strength when it actualizes the imperative to re-enter the local. His original impulse to master identity by mastering place undergoes nothing short of a revolution. After the astringent self-criticism of “Station Island,” Heaney seeks to repossess authorial selfhood by examining its basis—the impulse for artistic creation. One must remember that this self is literary, and at this stage, consciously so. He is aware that he lives in words—he is created by them, develops in them, and is critiqued by readers through them. When Heaney interrogates the self’s foundation, he interrogates its existence as an artistic impulse. This fact of identity is ultimately more important than politics, geography, or religion. A difference between identity as a fusion of essential givens—birthplace, nation, religion—and identity as continual self-production is important here. In his early volumes, Heaney explores the primordia of an essential identity, most notably the specific tie between man and local earth. He then turns his attention to identity as self-production in a creative context—the “I” as maker of metaphors. This is a conceptual shift. The writerly subject’s identity is formed through the repeated act of writing. At the base of his identity is his relation to words, sign systems, “markings,” and his ability to fill a “blank” space with signs. This shift involves a view of place as a staging ground for authorial (not ethnic) identity—a place as a page. A place is a locus that is more or less amenable to self-expression. This relationship has been present in Heaney’s poetry all along, but here he no longer focuses on the type of place that may or may not be suitable, but looks beneath its cultural inscriptions to consider place in the abstract. He has been too quick to know his place, so now he un-knows it: I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source ... Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere

11

Andrew Waterman, “‘The best way out is always through,’” Andrews 30.

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This purgation occurs upon the death of the poet’s mother, who is now “beyond” what is “listened for.” The “Clearances” sonnets are extraordinary in that they are both metaphorical and performative; the term “elegy” reveals its insufficiency: The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances . . . High cries were felled and a pure change happened.12 Heaney’s choice to employ a language of “space,” “emptiness,” “nowhere” and “clearance” is powerful and new. This is no longer allegory. The symbolic resonance of physical events fits in so well with the poet’s new mode of writing that it surprises the reader to learn that these events are, actually, factual. In these two “Clearances” sonnets Heaney has managed to fuse the power of the abstract concept (absence, empty space) with the emotional intensity of personal elegy. At the same time, he maintains a strict decasyllabic line. Loss is not expressed in rhythmic upheaval. Instead, loss is sublimated so that it becomes the occasion for new creative understanding. Heaney’s poems have sought to ritualize their relationship to an actual place (“I stepped it perch by perch”) because of the self’s instability. Now, the speaker creates an inverse correlation between outside loss and inner fullness that allows him to contemplate disabling conditions without fear. Agency subtly moves from actions to abstractions: a “pure change happened.” At this new stage of Heaney’s work, the stress is no longer always on the agent, as emphasized by the abstracting effect of the passive voice: physical space “is emptied” and conventional “high cries” of mourning “are felled.” The causal agent is the event of death. The emptied space, literalized and psychologized, takes on agency also: it “penetrates” clearances in the mind in an appropriative act, and “a pure change happened” that is more powerful than the physical cries. The abstract noun (“space,” “change”) is active enough to stage its own poetic event, while physical phenomena lose power. The poem is taken over by the power of these nonhuman, abstracted actors (death, space, change). The speaker is struck by the richness of abstract “space” as opposed to physical “place.” The dramatic quality of “utterly,” repeated twice in one line, intensifies the link between emptiness and potential until his thought of walking takes on the quality of revelation. The Heaneyesque adjectives “heft” and “hush” are transmuted into “a bright nowhere,” venturing into a terra incognita that is “beyond silence listened for” and therefore opening new spaces of knowledge. This is, perhaps, the marginal space beyond the already-inscribed, textually layered metaphor of the bog, a “bright nowhere” that has not been interpreted and placed. 12

“Clearances” VII and VIII, The Haw Lantern 31–32.

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This turn in Heaney’s poetry is usually connected to the deaths of his parents, yet this is too literal a reason to ascribe. We should again bear in mind his self-accusatory turn against what he “glazed over” with “perfect mist and peaceful absences” in “Station Island” as a strong motive against a more conventional—or at least more aestheticized—elegiac project. “Clearances” and “The Stone Verdict” (on Heaney’s father) do not aestheticize. This increases the trust with which he can approach his own language, the trust that had eroded after his efforts at mastery and belonging-in-language had let him down. The word “trust” is seen by Christopher Ricks as one of the key words troubling Heaney in the middle stage of his career. As Heaney moves out of the “darkness” suggested by the advice-giver of “North” (“compose in darkness”), he finds that he can no longer “trust the feel of what. . . your hands have known.” Trust must be earned through and by clarity: if certain kinds of trust can repose in darkness, then, that is not the sort Heaney now wishes to earn. He is purposely exposing himself to the “clear light of day,” penetrating the “clearances” that now stand open, exploring the sort of belonging made possible when the familiar object world is transmuted into a “bright nowhere.” Such exploration of “clearances” and “nowheres” takes place when Zagajewski vitiates place in “I Walked Through the Medieval Town,” and, as we will see, when Hartwig erases the very place she conjures in “There Is Such a Town.” Perhaps—despite the eagerness with which Heaney’s readers seize upon his interest in the object world—this sort of empty space will allow for a fuller type of belonging, more deserving and earning of trust, for the searching, unstable self. The process of plumbing a “nowhere” continues in Heaney’s poetry through acts of defamiliarization. “Making Strange” is the most overt instance, in which the speaker is a mediator between a visitor (identified as Louis Simpson) and a native (Heaney’s father), the wide world and the local place. The situation is rather schematic: “I stood between them,/the one with his travelled intelligence/. . . /and another, unshorn and bewildered.” The speaker is forced to assume a “middle voice” between the self-contained cosmopolitan and the bewildered farmer in order to make each accessible to the other. Heaney reveals that he felt compelled to textualize the awkward situation—“my father came up. . .and in a sense I was almost introducing him as subject matter.”13 The poem has been amply considered by scholars, as it re-establishes a frequently-studied binary. Its most surprising insight occurs at the end: the speaker looks on himself “. . . reciting my pride/ in all that I knew, that began to make strange/at that same recitation.”14 The speaker’s pride distances what it claims to know; his interpretation of this pride signals that distance has already been achieved between him 13

James Campbell, “The Mythmaker” [interview with Seamus Heaney], The Guardian 27 May 2006. n.p. 14 Station Island 32–33.

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and his recounted speech (he recites his pride, not his knowledge). These lines create layers of detachment. “Recitation” of local attributes creates distance toward them, as a public, formalized act of speech drives a wedge between word and reality, and the effect is that trust may be lost—yet here, it is a trust of self. The poem zeroes in on the most interesting “making strange” of all: the new bewilderment of the speaker at himself, the most “well-travelled intelligence” at the start of the poem with rights to both local and cosmopolitan truths. “Making Strange” turns into a pun, moving from the local Irish meaning of acting shy before strangers to a second meaning—making one’s self and language strange, even to one’s self. An absence intrudes itself into the speaker’s utterance. The speaker hears the distance between word and reality in “Making Strange,” just as he sees the absence of the hewn tree “ramifying endlessly” in “Clearances.” “Terminus” may be read as a companion poem, exploring the ground between two forms of identity: If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney and a dormant mountain. ... I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks Suffering the limit of each claim. ... I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.15 The poem displaces the language of the organic belonging from its own preconditions. Heaney recognizes the necessity for such displacement in an early essay when he states: “if this was the country of community, it was also the realm of division,”16 but does not explore it so fully until the 1980s. Although the poem considers his childhood and uses regional diction (“When I hoked there . . .”), the poem definitively steps away from earlier evocations of Mossbawn, instructing us to now view it as a place “of division” and of “second thoughts.”17 His mind announces its own division ambiguously, unsure, despite the poem’s assertiveness, whether one who “[suffers] the 15

The Haw Lantern 4–5. “Mossbawn,” Preoccupations 20. 17 For one who has read Heaney’s poetry from beginning to end, this poem comes as a surprise: if we are still in the realm of poetic autobiography (Heaney affirms the autobiographical elements of his work), then why haven’t we encountered bolts and boundaries before? Is this the same childhood home, the same boy? This surprise shows how convincingly Heaney has indeed mastered his place and created a coherent myth of home in his earlier poems: “Terminus” does not seem to “fit” into the earlier landscapes. 16

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limit of each claim” has a more or less limited perspective than one whose thoughts need not be followed by “second thoughts.” It is difficult to express division aesthetically without appearing programmatic (the same difficulty is visible in some of Hartwig’s early poems). Local and abstract truths merge here, as they did in “From the Republic of Conscience,” but the poem is clearly a project. Selfhood is purposefully reduced to binarism in “Terminus.” Each couplet provides a first and second thought, although they are not antithetical but supplementary. Such supplements are not always limiting to each “claim” (just as “second thoughts” do not necessarily invalidate the first). It is not easy to harmonize the couplets into synthesis. “Making Strange” has shown the poet taking pride in his balancing of two identities, inviting us to consider both the finesse and the necessary compromises involved in the venture, one of which is the stereotyping of complex realities into simpler binary terms (“travelled intelligence” versus “unshorn and bewildered” farmer). The poem appears satisfied with its own achievement, setting apart pairs of emphatically end-stopped lines in formalized—almost didactic—subdivisions of its own content. Whereas “Terminus” implies a single boundary, the poem is about doubleness and in-betweenness, although its division into three parts, not two, hints at an uncanny sense that the poem winks at its own efforts—not to annul them, but to communicate the comic potential of schematizing one’s relation to place. Its division into parts and separate, easily-quotable lines, its multiplication of images, the multiple means of subdividing space mentioned in the poem (into baronies and parishes; by means of drains, and streams; weighing by scales), and even the different modes of language available to the poet (dialect, Standard English, cliché) are viewed just slightly at a tangent, as the poet told himself to do in “Station Island.” As one of Heaney’s more abstract poems, it seems to second-guess its own abstraction, not sure if it believes in the structural principle of division-asbalance. The poem shows how sensations can be “second thoughts” and vice versa, how action can be second-guessed by sensation. The idea of identity as consistency is effectively nullified. This speaker pulls apart the conditions of myth-creation, showing “the limitation of each claim.” Curiously enough, a position in between can also be seen as a position of centrality. The poet may be at a tangent to his own work, and to the idea of stable identity, but he is also more “central” than ever before as he consciously balances different facets of his selfhood. The poem ends with an image from Irish history: the “last earl” is Hugh O’Neill, fighting Queen Elizabeth’s English troops in Ireland. After Elizabeth sent the Earl of Essex to bring down O’Neill, the two earls became caught up in negotiations while, apparently, standing in the middle of a river. Although Essex was persuaded to withdraw English troops

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in 1599, the victory was short-lived,18 though their midstream arbitration passed into historical legend. The incident disproves the idea of historical determinism and, from the perspective of Heaney’s “Terminus,” illustrates the value of changing identity (i.e., by crossing “sides”) and thereby thwarting history. This ending opens the poem out from its main personal/allegorical binarism to illustrate the potential of a boy caught in the middle to become a historic mediator. Vendler opines that something “gilded and heraldic” enters the poem’s diction as it plays out the Christian proverb “Everyman to Earl.” How could a poet not have second thoughts when discourse itself offers him with every etymology and cross-reference?19 The myth of the “omphalos,” the center of the world that resisted military encroachment in “The Toome Road,” is hard to mesh with “Terminus,” where discourses, landscapes, and ideas are in flux. The concept of “second thoughts” is extended in the sequence of “Squarings” in Seeing Things (1991), twelve-line poems that form a series of conceptual explorations, sometimes referring back to themselves in a continual series of supplementary thoughts. This is a shift away from Heaney’s earlier focus on instinct. He lays bare the process of cognition. If the poet gradually realizes the impossibility of mastering the bottomless center of the land and its claims upon the self, here he takes a further step and explores the impossibility of mastering the self ’s perceptual processes.20 The process of re-thinking the self from an in-between and/or tangential position is the newly established focus of Heaney’s work. The act of thinking is foregrounded. Exploration of identity increasingly includes recognition of misidentifications and reidentifications. This recognition goes a considerable distance toward a view of identity as change—the process of identification through second thoughts and re-thinking—rather than identity as a tribal essence. The poet has, so far, been remarkably sure of his ability to write expressively, out from himself, once he could place that self in a confident speaking position. There is little fear, in “Clearances,” that the “bright 18

The English Charles Blount finally accomplished Elizabeth’s will by routing Irish forces at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601; O’Neill, the “arch traitor,” was sent into exile in 1607. The story is told in more detail in Andrew Murphy, Seamus Heaney (Devon: Northcote House, 2000) 11–14. 19 Vendler, Seamus Heaney 123. Vendler views the notion of “second thoughts” as central to Heaney’s work: “As his intellectual and moral horizons widen, Heaney’s ‘second thoughts’ become fundamental to his development” (10–11). Read in this light, “Terminus” may be viewed as a poem reflecting upon Heaney’s poetic practice. 20 In an early essay, Timothy Kearney discusses Denis Donoghue’s view that Heaney’s transcendence of the self allows him a natural continuity with the landscape. Kearney believes that there is a risk at the base of this poetry, a “risk of confronting the strain between communal and individual values which lurks at the heart of that endeavour.” Yet Heaney does confront it by exploring how the mind fills absence and how perceptions become part of cognitive patterns. See “The Poetry of the North: A Post-Modernist Perspective” in The Crane Bag 465–73.

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nowhere” of absence could indeed be kept inside the poet’s mind. This is the last myth that Heaney safeguards—the myth of the power and consistency of the poetic imagination, in particular its ability to use language as redress, or as constructive material for an essentially healthy goal (expression as restitution). Speaking about the land brings worth, claims the speaker of “The Loose Box,” but is the speaker’s mind always trustworthy? “Terminus” sets the stage for further explorations of self-division and in-betweenness, which are continued in “Squaring” xix, in which memory is seen as an orderly city. It is either a postulate (“if we take memory as . . .”) or a simile (“memory is like . . .”): in both cases, the exploratory nature of this language act is emphasized—Heaney comments that he feels “a definite desire to write a kind of poem that cannot immediately be ensnared in what they call the ‘cultural debate.’”21 Fittingly, the speaker is making himself a student of mnemonic theory so that his mind can learn to interpret its own contents “in meaningful order.” The practice is one of fixing mental associations: Ancient textbooks recommended that Familiar places be linked deliberately With a code of images. You knew the portent In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.22 “Squarings” are not panoramas but small experiments with perspective, lacking the conclusiveness of sonnets. This poem makes modest claims for itself—it merely illustrates an idea from a book instead of prescribing a course of action, and its motive is simply self-knowledge, or even more humbly, knowledge of one’s own memories. Its writer is present in the cognitive impulse behind the poem, and it is useful to note how different this poem is from Heaney’s early works, when the writer was physically present in the squelch and plop of tactile language. This sort of verbiage, which overdetermined the land’s hold upon the speaker, is cast aside in his new explorations.23 The subject of the poem is not the texture of his personal memories but “Memory” in the abstract. His guides are “textbooks,” not bog bodies or modern figures. The speaker is a pupil, blinking and concentrating, not attempting or claiming mastery.

21

Heaney in Cole 106. Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) 75. 23 It does come back in some poems. Heaney’s shifts in style are not absolute. The central problematic of determining identity reveals how Heaney changes the way in which he thinks and feels through language, but there remains a certain type of diction that we can identify with him (disparagingly referred to as “Heaneyspeak” by his detractors, it is marked by an overuse of idiosyncratic diction). 22

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The poem’s conception distances the contents of memory, which is initially seen as a sort of stage set rather than a living city, “well lighted” by the textbook’s clarity and “well laid out” by the textbook’s rules. It seems as though the poem’s descriptions are watched over by a force or principle of order, so that the mind, by implication, cannot overmaster its given surroundings and choose the actors in its drama. It can only approach selfknowledge by “haunting” itself, so that the conscious will is a mere ghost in contrast to the solid fund of memory. It is embodied in the patient student who concentrates rather than consecrates. The poem’s impulse is towards the ritual of academic study, not religion, yet the word “portent” hints at a sense of ominous process. It is emotively different from the comfortable resonance of “familiar” and the analytical tinge of “code.” Portents can be understood through familiarity (haunting what is already known) and by means of analysis. Yet there is nothing portentous about this carefully controlled scene. The speaker is guided by a textbook, not by the mysterious aura of the soil, as before. His “code of images” is knowable, as opposed to the bottomless center of the bog, and the speaker does not need to take on the aggression of the forcible excavator. He can learn himself through reading, watching, and concentrating. Vendler characterizes these poems as afterlives of a sort: “If the imaginative importance of a non-phenomenal place ‘utterly empty, utterly a source’. . . was Heaney’s point of origin . . ., then a strange new return to the phenomenal world—but from an almost posthumous perspective— is the point of origin for Seeing Things.” The book asks, “What does the phenomenal world look like contemplated through eyes made intensely perceptive by unignorable annihilation?”24 Vendler thinks in terms of coherent volumes, but the poems shift more organically than she implies, moving from a discovery of absence as a poetically enabling state to analysis of the structures. Instead of viewing them posthumously, we may interpret this particular quality of disembodiment as a type of continued self-critique: the speaker is watching himself. Similar situations recur throughout the “Squarings” sequences. Their self-enclosed brevity makes them seem like games, as does the absence of heavy elegiac matter, and this appearance— not quite levity, but not utter gravity either—extends the generative vision of a “bright nowhere” at the end of the “Clearances” sonnets. The subject matter of identity, correspondingly, has been lifted out of “the doldrums of what happens” materially. It has become dematerialized and, here, intellectualized as a matter of concentration; elsewhere, it is a matter of transcendent attunement. The above-cited poem seeks to systematize inner processes so that one’s own selfhood is objectively available as a physical scene. How to belong in the mind displaces how to belong on the land as the poet’s pressing concern 24

Vendler, Seamus Heaney 136, 138.

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in The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things, where learning the mind’s identity— how it works, what it contains—is an act that is metaphorized in a stunning variety of ways, from the parabolic “From the Republic of Conscience” to the visionary “Clearances,” orderly “Squarings,” and extended metaphorical evocations of “Markings.” Heaney now takes the imperative to know himself to a further level, negotiating belonging by studying the systematics of perception: We marked the pitch: four jackets on four goalposts, That was all. The corners and the squares Were there like longitude and latitude Under the bumpy ground, to be Agreed or disagreed about When the time came. And then we picked the teams And crossed the line our called names drew between us.25 Familiar places are, here, quite deliberately linked to “a code of images,” as suggested in the earlier “Squaring,” yet the “portent” in each scene is up for debate, as is the portentous quality itself. His comparison of “objective” measures of space (longitude, latitude) with a hastily constructed soccer field underscores the question mark lurking behind this neat, confident poem. It is quite basic: do these human subdivisions of space carry deeper resonance? Is there something profound about borders, terminuses, “the limit of each claim” suffered by the divided yet liminal child? Should we take the poem’s metaphor seriously or, in a manner that Zagajewski would perhaps appreciate, recognize that tenor and vehicle sometimes are in tenuous relation (or that the tenor has stolen away from beneath the poem, as in “The Settle Bed”)? The poet destabilizes his categories as he creates them. The possible political resonance of the poem is, perhaps, too obvious when the children “crossed the line our called names drew between us.” Yet “Markings” does more than confound our politicized notions of centrality and marginality, and he political is rarely the deepest level at which Heaney’s poems may be read. Heaney focuses on conditions of betweenness and centeredness; his attention to the way we generate borders shows that every center is constructed and provisional, only coming into existence by erasing or ignoring other demarcations of space.26 The mind’s capacity to move from an active verb (“We marked the pitch”) to a completed scene (“Markings”) shows how so-called objective truth is constructed. If the center cannot hold, it will be established again. Afterwards, we will believe that the markings 25

“Markings,” Seeing Things 8–9. See Srikanth Reddy, “The Bastion of Sensation: Stationing the Self in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” Journal x 5.1–2: 87–108.

26

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“Were there” like the geographical divisions that schoolchildren learn to accept, and this belief allows the game to proceed. They are doubted only “when the time came,” presumably if one team wished to claim a point in their favor and hence instrumentally, although it is tacitly obvious that the “bumpy earth” does not give itself to boundary-drawing so easily. The affection coloring the poet’s memory, however, pushes away any intimation of political danger in the act of division, and encourages the reader to perceive markings as aesthetic, not instrumental. The poem’s second section becomes a hymn to the aesthetics of marking, lines of string tightly pegged in a garden or marking out a house’s foundation, fresh wooden boards “spick and span” upon the earth. We may guess that Heaney’s father (who upholds “rigor and correction” over “fanciness” in another poem27) is the addressee (“You”), but its imagery makes every reader respond to the satisfying neatness of geometry, and the poem is not an elegy but a hymn to the humble embodiment of abstract ideas of order. Firmness (of contour) coexists with delicacy of human touch attempting to dig or build correctly, afraid to upset the shapes that seem to transcend the earth on which they are humanly created. The speaker insists upon their transcendence into art and, concurrently, the childlike fascination with the artistry of markings, as the child’s perspective functions as a portal allowing quicker ingress to the imaginary and aesthetic—let prosaic adults concentrate upon work, the poem implies. The game’s score is not at stake, nor the composition of its sides, nor the farm labor of staking out vegetable plots. The speaker does not rue his inability to follow men like his father, as in “Digging,” but confidently relates his delight in the aesthetics of geometry. This is a major shift in the speaker’s conception of how he can allow himself to belong on the land, and to what sort of identity such belonging leads. He is coming to terms with “second thoughts” by writing about the structures that precede thought. Markings are used to systematize one’s perceptions, to give a shape to experience; if one forgets the shape through fascination with experience itself, then recalling it will be a “second thought” that puts the first, amorphous experience into “meaningful order.” This concept is plumbed to reveal that order is also based in aesthetic desire. There is very little that is inherent. If this seems an overstatement, it is so because the earlier Heaney swung quite far toward believing in a predetermined word-hoard. His new position also provides a way to prove himself against the clutching earth—this poetic mind creates the signs that it places upon the soil. It is responsible for its own signifying system. The armored cars of “The Toome Road” violate the borders separating the bucolic from the military, but these borders can be redrawn, though the outrage of psychological violation cannot be explained away or transcended easily.

27

“Squarings” xxxiii, Seeing Things 91.

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Heaney’s focus is on enabling conditions here, not disabling ones, and his rediscovered markings “marked time and held it open.” They are, in another metaphor from the poem, a doorway, both to the poet’s desire and to his perceptions. There is something utopian about such an enterprise, in which images of openness are equated with conditions of knowledge. The doorway is an implicitly inclusive image. It has been noted that Heaney’s vocabulary in this volume of poems is “opulent in its lexicon of luminosity”— there is brilliancy, radiance, blazing, glitter, etc.—and the metaphysical imagination is eminently capable of seeing through a glass brightly.28 This repeated vocabulary evinces a desire to pull apart the dichotomies that have fueled conflict (within the self and within the culture) and see radiance in the in-between. The poet’s focus is now on moments that “held [time] open” rather than nodes of historical conflict. The image of “the last earl on horseback” in “Terminus” extends the moment of successful negotiation indefinitely. Heaney’s statement that the poet writing in “demeaning conditions” needs to find a higher ideal above these conditions29 does not explain his new style completely. His decision is more than political—it reflects on the poet’s ontology and epistemology. Knowing one’s self does not have to entail digging down, the poet now realizes, but can be accomplished by looking “up” towards the abstract, learning how the mind perceives and understands its own systems; knowing one’s place entails knowing how one sees and understands. He has, perhaps, interpreted the physical vocabulary of groundedness and rootedness too literally thus far and now realizes that his sense of identity can be strengthened by a newly meta-reflective process. The poet’s elaborate myths of bogland, Northernness, and native soil have, at this point, become blocks to achieving knowledge of self and place because of their all-encompassing, omnivorous nature, and his new focus is liberating, even “radiant.” In Heaney’s later poems, self and place are viewed from the perspective of one who is divided in between the local and the abstract, an ambassador from the Republic of Conscience whose task is to shuttle between republics. This is a new and empowering view of in-betweenness, but does not entail forcing disparate elements into unity. What happens when the markings delimiting place do not match the speaker’s desire? “Tollund” revisits old terrain with a new perspective. It is often read as the poet’s affirmation 28 Neil Corcoran quoted in Tim Kendall, “An Enormous Yes?: The Redress of Poetry” in Curtis 235. John Desmond points to the “metaphysical order” so visible in these middle-stage poems, which, Desmond holds, informs Heaney’s view of language itself, which is “rooted in a transcendent order of being” that manifests its value in concrete language, and allows itself to be glimpsed in flashes of illumination. Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009) 2–3. 29 “Place and Displacement” as contained in Finders Keepers 128.

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of “the potential of his nation to escape the seemingly endless ravages of sectarian strife,”30 written as it was upon the occasion of the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland, when it seemed as though the North might not be irredeemable.31 Having made his pilgrimage to Danish Jutland, he encounters the “hallucinatory” yet “familiar” scene of fields with “traffic sound” around them. There are certainly picturesque elements here—quiet “quags,” bog fir and grasses, a peaceful landscape recalling the utopian elements of John Hewitt’s Freehold to a poet consciously seeking to depict a sort of idyll.32 Its markings are cultural as well as topographical. It is slightly marred, though, by a sophisticated urban presence that imports traffic, technology, and kitsch into a landscape that is half natural and half manmade (“landscaped”), leading the poet to remark, “Things had moved on.” If read in step with the loosely iambic meter of the poem, the phrase does not appear ironic, but if given its own rhythm—“Things had [indeed] moved on,” with a long pause—then an atypical sarcasm enters the poem, one that turns against this new sophistication, establishing the speaker’s distance from it. Such details lead Jonathan Hufstader to claim that “‘Tollund’ is a postmodern poem, blithely demolishing a single myth into showers of commercial fragments, an older poet’s benevolent joke about his youthful seriousness,”33 yet the poem itself moves on beyond its ironic re-viewing of a place where the speaker feels neither lost nor unhappy, but perhaps too much at home, in order to venture an unironic concluding portrait of people attempting “a new beginning”: . . . we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe, More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning 30

Floyd Collins, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity (Newark: The University of Delaware Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003) 193. 31 Seamus Heaney, “Further Language,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 30.2 (Fall 1997): 7–10. 32 The “Townland of Peace” is actually a section (III) of John Hewitt’s utopian poetic sequence “Freehold.” Longley usefully explains Heaney’s use of Hewitt, who wrote “Freehold” as an idyllic vision in a time of war (during the 1940s). Longley, Poetry and Posterity 305-8. John Hewitt is usually associated with Irish regionalism; he, like Heaney, is an Ulster poet. 33 Jonathan Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999) 82. Edna Longley, usually a strong critic of Heaney, applauds the attempt to harmonize his old imagery with an urban world that, she believes, he has held at bay all this time; interestingly, she reads “Tollund” as a poem of acknowledgement, in which the translation of mythic history into so-called heritage is accepted, even while the poem has a parodic tinge. Longley, Poetry and Posterity 308. In a different piece, though, she notes the ambiguous status of the “we” in the poem and their position “beyond the tribe,” opining that the poem’s conclusion is salubriously complex and yet rather weak. Longley, “Northern Ireland: Poetry and Peace,” Ireland: Towards New Identities?, Ed. Michael Böss (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998) 117.

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And make a go of it, alive and sinning, Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.34 In “The Tollund Man,” the speaker’s sense of cultural otherness conflicts with his knowledge that he has helped to mythologize its world, and is therefore (forced to be) at home in it. The earlier speaker, however, evokes a deeper sense of local magic than the later one, even when—or perhaps because—the invocation and evocation takes place in his mind (“Some day I will go,” he promises in the earlier poem). Considering the resolutely untechnological nature of the world Heaney has celebrated throughout his career, this new sophisticated melody rings false, and does not quite work to harmonize an urban with a rural sensibility. The interconnection of modern, prehistoric, and literary realms would be a happy discovery for the poet who is on a quest to redeem a violent history, and yet this reconciliatory poem puts its final stress on its place “beyond the tribe,” making a “new beginning” rather than continuing the past. The poem, though, is not quite as brightly optimistic as Heaney himself would believe when he announces, “I can now revise the words that concluded my poem on the Tollund Man and say with gratitude that in the old man-killing parishes I am no longer lost and unhappy, but find myself welcome, happy, and at home.”35 In fact, “Tollund” is structured around ambivalence, which is its major theme: if “Terminus” is structured around the ambiguity of dwelling in between, “Tollund” expresses the oscillation between sides, between irony and absolute sincerity (such as the deeplypitched “Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad”), nature and industry, tourism and at-homeness, signs in black and white, footloose and at home. The ambiguous speakers’ situation “beyond the tribe” could be an offhand relinquishment of Heaney’s former rhetoric of tribalism, whereas “The Tollund Man” was emotively focused by its identification of the speaker with an interred victim. Perhaps relinquishment of tribal belonging allows the poet and his companion to re-imagine a postlapsarian “new beginning” beyond the claims of Christianity; in this case, it is the rift between pagan and modern Christian societies that allows this re-imagining. The dissimilarity of this Tollund to the previous one allows for renewal. “Tollund” represents a very different mode of writing about place than one is used to from Heaney. Its markings are not utopian lines pegged out in a family garden, but they take their place in a postlapsarian and even posthumous framework (“ghosts who’d walked abroad,” perhaps of sacrificial victims or their celebrants, as the speaker’s former personae haunt the poem). 34

The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) 69. Seamus Heaney, “The Man and the Bog,” Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and Wetland Archaeology, eds. B. Coles, J. Coles, and M. Schou Jorgensen (Exeter: WARP, 1999) 6. This was originally a speech given upon the occasion of a major exhibition at Silkeborg Museum in Denmark. 35

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Moreover, the poem tacitly puts the earlier Tollund into question even while literalism would detrimentally flatten both poems—“The Tollund Man” invokes and evokes, it does not rely on mimesis—and “Tollund” remains a striking piece of literal revision, seeing anew. The poetic use of history should not be taken for objective truth. In its very ambivalence, the poem implies that the self’s subjective needs will create or deny the conditions of belonging, not the given facts of geographical, historical, or religious affiliation. “We” are “[u]nfazed by light,” and feel freedom because we are able to choose, which is not to say we will choose well. Ambivalence, in-betweenness, and irony are strong positions in this poem, which thrives on disunity. Agency is located in a split consciousness that is not “placed” in a single perspective. Its ambivalence contains different possibilities for the poetic voice: he can turn back to the “quags” specific to his local place, he can ironize his current placement, he can speak in easy colloquialism (“make a go of it”) or in impassioned cadences (“Ourselves again, free-willed again”). Each of these choices will be interpreted in terms of identitarian fidelity or rupture, but they are both available to one who has overmastered his fear of losing selfhood. He can negotiate the conditions of his own placement. This negotiation focuses Heaney’s later tripartite sequence “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” a more abstract poem altogether, in which the speaker awakes to sense “Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain,” a sense that “History [is] not to be granted the last word/Or the first claim. . .”36 This recognition was, in fact, made earlier, in The Haw Lantern’s attunement to a spirit-life beyond what we listen and look for. Its conclusion is, in fact, remarkably similar to that of “From the Republic of Conscience,” in which the speaker became a “dual citizen” operating on behalf of his local, earthly community and the abstract “republic of conscience”: this newly risen man takes his bearings, gathers a “bunch of Tollund rushes—roots and all,” and walks out into the (modern-day) street. Heaney’s next volume, the elegiac and autobiographical Electric Light, proclaims that “negative ions in the open air/Are poetry to me,”37 hearkening back to the metaphorical field of “Clearances.” Heaney revisits his childhood territory against a backdrop of literary references; the implied presence of these influential authors, ranging from Shakespeare to Zbigniew Herbert, creates a different sense of belonging, not to a tribe but to a community of influence. The speaker’s urge to codify memory in “Squarings” (“You knew the portent/In each setting, you blinked and concentrated”) can be seen in poems that blend reminiscence with allusion. This is, perhaps, an attempt to unite intuitive and intellectual realms: “On Sandymount Strand 36 District and Circle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006) 53, 56. The entire poem is on 53–58. 37 “At Toomebridge” from Electric Light (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) 3; later citation from “Vitruviana,” Electric Light 61–62.

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I can connect/Some bits and pieces,” he declares, in the hope that the ground of literature and the detail of personal memory can form an anti-WasteLand unity. His ability to connect, though, is based on a new realization that agency can be located in heterogeneity, even while Heaney still has harmonizing ambitions for poetry. Such ambition is, perversely, what keeps Heaney from pushing himself into radically new realms of encounter in Electric Light and District and Circle: the need to connect, to only connect, is their major concern, although the poems are evocative, elegant, and unify several strands of the poet’s work. The poems of these volumes reach back into earlier territory (even as far back as Death of a Naturalist), whether temporally, thematically or metaphorically. The elegiac project of Electric Light and District and Circle is at least partially motivated by the poet’s persuasion that the past is made of richer stuff than the present. Considering the menace that permeates Heaney’s earliest work, it is an ambivalent proposition, yet the elder Heaney longs for “a chance to test the edge/of seggans, dialect blade/hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand/than what is common usage nowadays:/ sedge-marshmallow, rubber-dagger stuff.”38 The poem, addressed to George Seferis, insists upon the “this-worldly” presence of concrete details, including the self-signifying name (“Cape Sounion, its very name/all ozone-breeze and cavern-boom”), which are opposed, perhaps, to the weighty absences that occur in Seferis’ poems (and which, in turn, may be opposed to the bright emptinesses of the “Clearances” sonnets). The two Nobelists here represent two positions, the Greek poet “intent upon an otherworldly scene” at the edge of “not-remembering” and the Northern Irish poet intent upon remembering the values stored in the past. Both poets share a preoccupation with history and a fondness for scenes of Platonic or Dantean revenge, but Heaney casts himself as the remembrancer for whom the past is a wordhoard of brilliant and obvious value. His preference for the Irish “seggans” over the Hellenic “asphodel” is justified as a momentary participation in a “harder and more hand-to-hand” reality. It hearkens back to the hard-edged artifacts of North and to the jagged leaves of “Holly” (Station Island), in which the real, unadorned leaves are associated with the burning bush that announces the presence of God to Moses. In the earlier poem, the speaker is “almost” a doubter in need of a miracle; in the later poem, he furnishes the miracle for himself by caressing the iconic dialect word. This poet is no longer Incertus, Heaney’s schoolboy nom de plume. The confident use of colloquialism present in “Tollund” and “To George Seferis in the Underworld” places him in contemporary reality. Dialect is equated with the past. The values that he holds dear, however, are most evident in the “hoar and harder” past, and are not common “nowadays.” Emblematic of its power to resurrect and renew is the much-studied Tollund 38

“To George Seferis in the Underworld,” District and Circle 23.

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Man himself, who comes to life in “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” a sonnet sequence, in order “to revel” in a reawakening of originally germinal images, situations, and words. In this way Heaney justifies his turn back to the past. The “hand-to-hand” materiality that was the bedrock of his poetic is here allied with a high-stakes authenticity (as opposed to “rubber-dagger stuff”). In this almost Benjaminian maneuver, real, hard-edged, traditionladen experience is put up against diminished, reproducible (as the “waxyleafed stuff” of “Holly”) contemporaneity, in which commercialized and thereby diminished experiences must disappoint.39 In an effort to invest such diminished experiences with the aura they lack, and which is necessary for the translation of experience into poetry, Heaney looks back. When he looks back, he re-establishes the identifications that “Tollund” temporarily pushed behind the scenes in its eagerness to “make a go of it” in a new, commodified world. When we query the basis of the poet’s sense of belonging, and of his linguistic identity, we are brought back to the originary ground of the earlier volumes, albeit in a softened and darkened guise, peopled by shades who impel him to again seek his familial earth. The elegies of Electric Light are, however, followed by a number of resurrections and revivifications in District and Circle, and the focus of the poet splits between memorializing the authentic, irreproducible past, and describing moments of revivification. In such moments, what establishes inter-subjective identity is, curiously, not subjectivity at all, but the physical body. This began in “The Tollund Man” as a process of physical empathy (or, imagined sympathy) and was syntactically established by the ambiguity of subject and object positions (“Naked except for/The cap, noose and girdle,/I will stand a long time”), and is forwarded here by the later poem’s amazement at his “unatrophied” body. In a curious metonym, the man (who speaks in first person) is allied with the bog peat itself, that kind, buttery soil that the excavator had feminized in “Bogland.” He feels “that same dead weight in joint and sinew” and yet the cauldron bog’s material is thoroughly consecrated in “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” as the “so long unrisen” man is miraculously resurrected, “like turned turf in the breath of God” (54). The body becomes a vehicle of identification, as the speaker in “District and Circle” focuses on the shared physical experience of underground passage (20), and a material that is divinely inspired in the most literal sense. Indeed, 39

In her review of District and Circle in the Daily Telegraph, Caroline Moore points out what she sees as a false linguistic opposition at work in this poem: both the Irish “seggans” and the English “sedge” are, in fact, derived from a root meaning “to cut,” and are therefore equally blade-like; yet Moore does not choose to pursue a hard-edged conclusion herself, but to opine that despite the dubiety of his etymological play, Heaney takes a genuine pleasure in dialect and etymology on which we should not cast too much doubt (“The Parochial Pleasures of Famous Seamus,” Daily Telegraph 9 April 2006; www.telegraph.co.uk). This is an apt conclusion, for what is at stake is not just etymology but the speaker’s cultural identity, which establishes itself by means of certain acts establishing cultural belonging; etymologizing is one such act.

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body takes precedence over land in this volume, as its mortality, and the myths we construct to counteract our mortality, becomes a predominant theme. The speaker’s troubled belonging is no longer the central problem of his poetry. In fact, the most uneasy parallel of these poems—one created by metonymy and parallelism rather than metaphor—is that of the human body and the soil in which the Tollund Man was buried and to which one must return, as a Christian teleology of death and redemption coexists with that of the pagan underground voyage. The specifically troubling phrase, in “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” is “that same dead weight,” with its implicit embodiment of the preservative peat (peat as corpse) and objectification of the human body (body as peat), and its echo in “The Nod.” In the former poem, sodden peat forms a “dead weight” on the Tollund Man’s body, kindling a feeling of sympathy with a victim who is, in this sonnet, compared to Christ—he, too, feels “that same dead weight” in his own body until he is exhumed and feels “the breath of God” granting him new life, and granting the poet a moment of reprieve from thoughts of mortality (especially given his previous identification, this poem performs an act of psychological, not just mythical or imagistic, rescue). “The Nod,” on the other hand, moves back to childhood terrain. It is divided into two sections which begin, benignly enough, by describing Saturday evenings spent in town with the speaker’s father, and the poem works by parallel association: on the one hand, boy and father stand in line at the butcher’s to buy beef. Neatly parceled but oozing blood, it is “[l]ike dead weight in a sling,/Heavier far than what I was expecting,” paid for by coins that deftly summon those required by Charon for passage into the underworld. On the other hand, “the local B-Men”— seen as neighbors toting guns—stroll the Saturday evening streets, nodding past the speaker’s father in moments of recognition they are compelled to acknowledge but wish to hide, as if “they’d aimed and missed him/Or couldn’t seem to place him, not just then” (34). As in “District and Circle,” their traffic is in recognition (17). Father and son, however, are paying for passage to the family home, to safety. The mythic archetype works in reverse, as does Heaney’s traditional theme of placement. Being “placed” within the minority Catholic community may produce conflict; rather than being nourished by place, life is kept safe by a studied avoidance of placement. The gaze of recognition is one of hostility. Knowing one’s place includes knowing when to carefully avoid placement. The most extraordinary feature of the poem, though, is its imagistic parallel. The “dead weight” of the beef summons not just the possible weight of a corpse (let us not forget that the “B-Men,” or Ulster Special Constabulary police force, were known for carrying out revenge killings against the Catholic population of Northern Ireland) but the weight of the Tollund Man’s body before he rises from the peat in a manner fusing pagan and Christian tropes of sacrifice and resurrection. The intricate composition

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of District and Circle brings together these characters in a palimpsest that redresses the fact of mortality with which the volume grapples. Although the bleeding beef summons the specter of political threat—reprisals that leave their victims “parceled,” as it were, in skeins of explanations that cover over the blood-lust motivating such killings—it also summons the man whose “dead weight in joint and sinew” was, in fact, not entirely dead at all, as he ends up coming back to earth in springtime. The echo across these poems is deepened yet more by local echoes within this modified Petrarchan sonnet, as its single-sentence sestet expresses momentary wonder by means of a series of clipped rhymes bringing together the neutral “town” with the infernal journey “down,” the climactic “past him” and “missed him” in a stifled rhyme, as a look past suddenly grants freedom from danger, and the potentially unlyrical “B-Men” and “not just then” effects a quick release of tension—death will not come “just then,” after all. In the words of an earlier poem, “here is a space/again,” opening a life-giving brightness similarly to the clearances and emptiness of The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things. This complex focus upon imminent death and renewed life continues in Human Chain, Heaney’s 2010 volume, which enters entirely new poetic territory. Heaney’s desire to know his native land becomes both more basic and more abstract in “A Herbal,” a sequence that forwards the revivification motif of District and Circle in a manner that pushes out politics altogether. This particular land is not viewed as contested postcolonial territory, but as the main actor in a grand elemental drama. “A Herbal” meditates upon the intertwinement of death and natural life, this time without a central speaker, an unusual departure for Heaney. We see, instead, biological life acting upon itself. Its surprising influence, of Guillevic’s brief, disembodied lyrics upon his native Bretagne landscape, written in a minimalist style at once bleak and humane, leads Heaney to write in a newly de-subjectivized form. “When the funeral bell tolls/The grass is all a-tremble,” reacting to the cataclysmic event of human death with sympathetic reaction.40 Although there is a central speaker in Guillevic and Heaney’s herbals, the primum mobile is the landscape, or perhaps more accurately the spirit of place. The Breton poet’s natal Carnac is “far from everything,” as its life “proceeds beneath time” in a mythic and archetypal register.41 Heaney’s landscape is localized by references to broom, whins, hawthorn, and bracken, yet still retains this archetypal quality, which is heightened by the sequence’s 40

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) 38. Heaney is most influenced by Guillevic’s volumes Carnac, written when the poet was in his early fifties and was retiring from a life in government (first published in 1961, translated by John Montague and published in a bilingual edition in 2000), and L’Herbier de la Bretagne (1974; contained in Étier: Poèmes, 1965–1975, 1979). 41 See Stella Harvey, Myth and the Sacred in the Poetry of Guillevic (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), especially her introductory discussion on 3-4, where she examines Guillevic’s use of “indefinite temporal markers” to eerily displace these ostensibly rooted, placed poems.

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meandering meditation upon death. In opposition to Heaney’s elegies, death is here a universal property. He comes closer to believing with Larkin that it is no different whined at than withstood, a philosophy he had previously lamented.42 His focus, though, is not upon the slow dying of the organic world but upon the knowledge gained through life and the continuous renewal of this world after one figure’s death, a focus shared by “The Tollund Man in Springtime.” The speaker’s absence from “A Herbal” is significant even if it is not echoed by other poems in Human Chain. Identity has become more fluid than before, less a problematic troubling than a node or magnetic point toward which things coalesce. The “purchase” evoked in “The Loose Box” has been found in this spare description of confessing one’s fears to trees and seeking therapeutic pleasure from the scent of herbs (Human Chain 41), a more comforting “treasure/your hands have known” than the rocks and blades of “North.” The speaker situates knowledge of the world—couched in a generic second-person pronoun—in sensory experience of the land: If you know a bit About the universe It’s because you’ve taken it in Like that, Looked as hard As you look into yourself, ... Because you’ve laid your cheek Against the rush clump (42) We do not see the underworld literally below ground, as in “District and Circle”—this world of psychologically medicinal flora is “woven into. . . Itself,” a nest-like enclosure of “crosshatched grass blades” (43). The knowledge it offers is gained through participation in an embrace as broad as it is deep, one marked by reciprocal sustenance rather than aggressive excavation. “A Herbal” presents a fundamental and salubrious mode of knowledge that is also a mode of communion, offering understanding through being. This basic idea is not radically new for Heaney, but its expression is. Guillevic is a poet who famously eschews metaphor, preferring direct statements of comparison for their straightforwardness; Heaney’s own sequence achieves 42 See “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin” (The Redress of Poetry 155–59).

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a grandeur of plainness, a jewel-like clarity, due to his adoption of the Breton poet’s form. The poem challenges us to “take in” rather than to imagine (in direct contrast to “North”), and to simultaneously depose the self from its (imaginary) pedestal in order to reach a greater knowledge of its surroundings. This is a radical reimagining of belonging. Heaney does not stop writing direct evocations of named places, persons, and chronologically specific events in his recent work; this autobiographical exploration continues unabated. It is, however, joined by the majestic work of “A Herbal,” in which self-examination is radically transposed into an earthly attunement that, strangely and beautifully, joins the world of the dead (“Everywhere plants/ Flourish among graves”) with the bright world of growth, questioning of selfhood with examination of an elemental yet welcoming natural environment. Even as he soberly considers his own mortality, Heaney offers the physical world not as consolation or as metaphor for the afterlife, but as confirmation: an “elsewhere world” is present beyond tension, beyond politics and even religion, in this central image of a green world “Where all is woven into//And of itself.”

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7 Holding one’s self outside: Julia Hartwig One cannot define the “I” in the writings of Julia Hartwig. Her critics have done their best to define her through style, proclaiming her a “Classicist” poet and rarely probing deeply enough to reckon with the disconnected, disjointed speaker of her poems.1 In Hartwig’s early work, before the 1990s, the speaking self is virtually devoid of outside attributes, is often disconnected from her own life-material, and defines herself through abstractions. Unsurprisingly, Hartwig’s poetry does not satisfy our desire to discover the identity of her poetic speaker; of all the four poets in this study, she is the least present in her early work. The political rebel and would-be ethicist of Zagajewski’s early work, the farm child with a deep fear of the psychologized land in Heaney’s first two volumes, and the rebellious early Mahon, refusing to allow his hometown to extract more than casual pity, are all available to us as distinctive personalities. We can feel the biographical, psychological roots of their rebellions against home; we understand why they refuse to belong to such a home; we can trace the arcs of their thinking with some sense of how those arcs are grounded in a particular type of self. Hartwig is different. She, like the other three, refuses to ground herself in a home, refuses to define home simply, and feels that she lacks the agency to adequately voice a stable identity. She feels some of Heaney’s fear and expresses some of Mahon’s rebellion. The rock-bottom self, though, is maddeningly difficult to grasp in her work. Her emphasis on writing through abstractions, symbolic scenes that appear divorced from “actual” life, and her marvelous ability to slip through our fingers just as we think we have pinned her down, create the most extreme dissipation of identity that we have considered so far. Hartwig’s key abstraction is “duality” (Polish “dwoistość”). She uses this keyword to designate a being that cannot be situated but perpetually holds 1

Two of the main critics who associated Hartwig with classicism were Ryszard Przybylski, whose book To jest klasycyzm [This Is Classicism] (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1978) had a considerable influence upon later scholars, and, to a lesser degree, Wojciech Kaliszewski in his article “Klasycyzm i Julia Hartwig” [“Classicism and Julia Hartwig”], Więź 6.356 (1988): 95–101.

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itself on a borderline; the dual being is an eternal other. The main problem facing her poetic speaker is the question of how to locate agency for the divided self-as-other. Reckoning with the self is a challenge for Hartwig. Her poetry moves from viewing the self as a blank to defining it through its duality, concealing it in abstraction and symbol, and, lastly, forcing it to confront absolute foreignness as a test of inner coherence. Hartwig’s “American Poems” mark a watershed moment in the middle of her career, as the speaker’s travels in the United States impel her to reconsider the categories of identity and alterity. Her desire to embody an abstract form of otherness—to be an impersonal symbol, a nexus of abstract concepts— clashes with the physical, emotional, and resolutely un-abstract otherness of the foreign landscapes, people, and narratives that she confronts. Hartwig’s style undergoes a radical shift at this middle point, as the situation of twoness becomes a question of cultural belonging. She never discards her early surrealism and interest in abstract symbols, but does undergo a dramatic process of transformation in which, curiously, her encounter with foreignness enables and motivates a journey toward self-situation. We are unsure, reading Hartwig’s early work, exactly who the speaker is. This uncertainty is unusual in the context of Polish poetry after World War II. Hartwig’s work gained prominence in the late ’60s and early ’70s2 at the same time as Zagajewski’s Generation of ’68 came of age. The socio-political focus of this group was countered by a movement called “The New Privacy” (“Nowa Prywatność”) that focused on the personal self, but Julia Hartwig belonged to neither of these groups, and retrospectively—in contrast to Zagajewski—it is hard to situate her poetic debut in the landscape of Polish poetry. This is all despite her early political involvement: she undertook heroic work for the anti-Nazi, underground Home Army (AK) during World War II, postwar diplomatic work as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Paris, and was romantically involved with a reporter (Ksawery Pruszyński) who also served as a diplomatic representative of the Polish government abroad. In short, Hartwig’s life was bound up with the politics and history of her day until the 1950s, when she returned to Warsaw, ceased her diplomatic work, and Pruszyński was mysteriously and tragically killed in a car accident in Germany. Her verse avoids commentary on this difficult time; she does not directly relate experiences, react to Poland’s political situation, or, on the other hand, display an art-for-art’s-sake preciosity. Hartwig has not written manifesto-type books or essays about her own writing, as Zagajewski and Heaney have. She has given very few interviews and her “travel journal, ” 2

Hartwig’s earliest poems appeared in the 1950s, but she has chosen not to reprint them in later compilations of poems, and they are generally referred to as juvenilia. Her first major volume, Wolne ręce [Free Hands] was published in 1969, a very late debut for a poet born in 1921 (which may also explain the relative paucity of critical material on Hartwig, as opposed to the material on her near-coevals).

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Zawsze powroty (Always, Returns) is surprisingly straightforward, without the sort of philosophical self-reflection and meditation on one’s own art that Zagajewski includes in his prose. Other poets of her generation—that of Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, the “great generation”— achieved a fame that overshadowed that of their peers, while Generation ’68 created the next major literary event. These circumstances may explain why Hartwig has been unjustly overlooked by Polish literary critics. She has only recently been translated into English (2008). This situation exists partly because the speaker of Hartwig’s early poems is so difficult to situate that political, historical, or biographical readings would be hard to sustain without forcing the material. With the exception of a few poems such as “Lublin Elegy,” her work rebuffs such approaches, which are based upon an anterior belief in textual situatedness. Hartwig significantly admires contemporary American poetry for its unpretentiousness and lack of “false lyricism,”3 voicing special admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s aloofness from poetic coteries. These 2003 remarks belie a certain pride in her own lifelong aloofness.4 Hartwig holds herself outside. Her early work consists mostly of short prose poems, sketching out a complex scene and then quickly withdrawing. The speaker is a voyeuristic presence waiting to prey on whatever perceptual material she can gather: “I lie in wait for your dream,” she intones, troping herself as a monstrous presence who cannot be delineated because it is always waiting, gathering material (“I am the phantom of your nights”). The artist is a predator and lacks a core. It is sinister because it is faceless. The artist is held in thrall to the “dream” of the reader, who must complete the dream-work of the poem. Its language revels in its sinister atmosphere: “How little I want from you, my transcript. Save me only the freshest memories.” And yet, ultimately, “the incorrectness of [my] expectations will suffice.”5 3

Julia Hartwig, Introduction to Dzikie brzoskwinie. Antologia poetek amerykańskich [Wild Peaches. An Anthology of American Women Poets] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2003). Hartwig translated several of the poets herself. 4 One should note that Hartwig’s marriage to Artur Międzyrzecki, also a poet, now deceased, has led some scholars to mention both poets in one breath, but they are usually treated as two separate talents. One exception to this practice is Maria Janion’s observation that they are both “extraordinary poets of form” (“wybitni poeci formy”) whose craftsmanship may serve as an example to future poets and readers. Maria Janion in interview with Zbigniew Benedyktowicz and Czesław Robotycki, contained in “Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś” (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 1996) 73–115. 5 In Polish, the first sentence reads, “Czyham na twój sen.” The poem is untitled. The latter two lines read as follows: “Jakże niewiele od ciebie chcę, moje dyktando. Oszczędź mi tylko wspomnień najświeższych. . . . wystarczy niepoprawność oczekiwania.” The poem originally appeared in Wolne ręce (Free Hands,1969) and is reprinted in Julia Hartwig, Wybór wierszy (Selected Poems) (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1981) 215. This volume reprints most of Hartwig’s early poems, before 1980. Hartwig has not been thoroughly translated into English and I move between my own translations and those of John and Bogdana Carpenter from In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems, which is the largest collection of translated work

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This strange, short poem is animated by a certain tone of voice but not a fully-faceted speaker. The lyric speaker waits but does not act, hovering between the subconscious state of dream and the waking state of composition. Julia Hartwig is an avid admirer of French surrealism, and her early writing testifies to this interest;6 the most common adjective used for her work is “oneiric.” A poem such as this, however, articulates the act of preparing oneself for oneiric vision instead of speaking from inside the subconscious, and as such it is representative of her frequent compulsion to step outside the visionary situation within the space of the poem. The speaker displaces herself from the situation s/he creates, an unusual situation that makes use of surrealist elements in order to effect a displacement of identity. The poem is framed by “Czyham”—“I lie in wait”—and “oczekiwania”—expectations. Its drama plays out between desire (waiting) and self-critical recognition (her “expectations” are incorrect), between the self and the “you,” the word that is her own and the dream that is someone else’s. One may go further to posit that the work of the poem is not fully owned by the speaking self, whose expectations are proven wrong by her surrealist “transcript,” even while she cannot expect more from the work of the poem. She allows the reader to feel the boundary between her mind and her perceptual material. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism—in which the word’s conception of its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object itself, between various aspects of its intelligibility, helps to clarify the type of complexity present in Hartwig’s ostensibly limpid poems.7 Different verbal “intentions” meet in the word, or poetic image, and her emphasis on dream, on the subconscious, highlights the limits of intelligibility, whether social, imagistic, or psychological. The object’s verbal intelligibility is complicated by the poet who brings it into being from what are apparently the recesses of her unconscious mind; such a situation purposefully casts doubt upon her own power to articulate, and correspondingly, her power to know. Knowledge is a form of belonging. If the surreal object cannot be known, then a state of belonging cannot be reached; nor can an identity with the object be articulated. Hartwig’s poem dramatizes, in miniature, a situation wherein the identity of the verbal object is taken apart. The act of the poem depends on an interaction between the intelligibility of the dreamt image, which is vivified as an actor in the drama of writing, and the anticipatory speaker. Its (slight) humor fissures its linguistic coherence. The mock suspense of “lying in wait” and affectionate address to “my transcript” allow a gentle irony to pervade the interaction between the speaker and the word. (New York: Knopf, 2008); the same translators also put forth a useful Polish-English bilingual edition, Poezje wybrane: Selected Poems (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008). 6 “Dyktando,” dictation or transcript, evokes the act of transcribing one’s dreams, or automatic writing while in a dream-like state. 7 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays” as excerpted in Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 321–53.

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This speaker is internally disconnected, not integral, a state that renders the notion of unitary authorial intent unfeasible. We are made to interrogate the very foundation of identity, the coherence subtending belonging. In another untitled prose poem, the speaker disembarks a train at its terminal. The scene has all the oneiric qualities of Hartwig’s early work: From the time when I started my journey, being summoned, the sickness took over me to such a degree that I cannot hide it any longer. I am like a child suffering from a rash, but my rash is both funny and astounding. These colorful pictures that appeared upon my skin are scenes from my life. ... If, therefore, I can ask for mercy, if I have any choice at all, I ask for one thing: do not order me to illuminate this series of comics, of which I was the involuntary creator.8 This strange scene uses illness as its metaphor for the disconnection of the “healthy” mind from the biographical events that shaped it. The speaker gains our confidence by confirming his present mental health (the adjectives denote a masculine speaker)—temporal markers such as “From the time,” explanatory phrases such as “being summoned” (“wezwany” in Polish), his aesthetic reservations, his neat separation of lines and indentation (present in the original), and his use of polite language that, once again, adds a touch of dark humor to the poem. These stylistic traits set off the poem as a performance, not an entirely sincere bid for sympathy. The grotesquerie of its situation further distances the reader from the speaker’s undisclosed life-narrative; we are, meanwhile, unsure whether it is within his power to withhold disclosure. He is clearly disgusted at the process by which an individual life turns into a finished biography. The poem’s central image is marked by the strangely believably absurdity of Hartwig’s surrealism, and balances on the edge of the oneiric and the real. Stanisław Barańczak holds that dream allows for multifaceted comprehension: the “blade of a dream” (Hartwig’s phrase, originally “ostrze snu”) is a cognitive weapon allowing one to cut away the veils that obscure the thing in itself. In Hartwig’s poems, to Barańczak, a dream is a clearly illuminated, not obscured, lyrical situation.9 It does not represent flight from reality but transformation 8

Wybór wierszy 226. Barańczak’s phrase in Polish is “wyraźnie ujawniona sytuacja liryczna.” This original emphasis on clarity and illumination is an unusual way to approach Hartwig’s early work. Virtually all of her other critics use terms such as “mystery” and “secrecy”—the brief reviews of Hartwig’s work in Polish literary journals such as Twórczość, Więź, and occasionally Odra, favor such terms. Nobody has fully explored the fact that surrealism (understood as an emphasis on the subconscious and juxtaposition of dissimilar images and personae) may serve the purpose of 9

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of reality, accomplished by juxtaposing seemingly disconnected elements, mixing temporal planes, and allowing objects to change their qualities before our very eyes. In the above-cited poem, the speaking subject is forced to turn into the object of his own gaze and, additionally, feels pressed to interpret his objectified body to others. His theatrical pitch furthers the project of objectification. Following Barańczak’s insight, the poem’s very surrealism—its bizarre, grotesque situation, its transformation of the human body into an actual text of images—allows the reader to see the levels of disconnection within the authorial self and hear his reaction. It plays with the reader’s sense of boundaries—what is unimaginable is imagined, what is invisible (a life narrative) is made visible, a horrific “illness” is merely an act of self-appraisal. The speaker wishes to evade the project of linking discrete scenes into a narrative, and to resist the reification of his life as a finished plot (he does not want to interpret the series and thereby impose a unifying meaning). In many of Hartwig’s early poems, the speaker insists on viewing a situation from two sides, which is a form of avoiding identitarian commitment. The idea that the self dwells on both sides of certain conceptual boundaries— sickness and health, subject and object, the words of a first-person “I” and the perceptions of a second-person “you”—is explored in a number of poems. Hartwig continuously stresses the “duality” of a scene or, especially, the self. In this way she holds identity at a distance.10 The speaker refuses to reveal her external attributes by clarifying her life narrative, but she does try to find belonging in abstract concepts. This is another form of evasion: by highlighting abstract symbols and concepts, she gives fuel to her readers and literary critics without revealing a self through its belonging in a human environment. “I move along this borderline between crippled day and untouched night in an exile’s wagon, under the bright sun in the sky, with a dark sun under my eyelid, not truly independent either here or there.”11 Once again, the image is unusual and surreal, full of details clarifying, not obscuring, the authorial situation of the speaker and his/her relation to the perceptual material. Barańczak points to this possibility but his argument is not sustained enough to draw out the implications of this point. See “Tajemna wiedza snu” in Ironia i harmonia (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1973) 135–39. 10 This impulse may be contrasted with the early poetry of Seamus Heaney, who extends the individual life-narrative into a myth of Northernness, and whose later sense of crisis comes from the realization that the authorial speaker can never achieve full narrative mastery in the way Heaney wishes. The narrative of Nordic origins takes over the self until he feels lost and at home in this constructed fable. Both Hartwig and Heaney try to exert control over the self, Hartwig by strenuously refusing unity and avoiding the construction of (auto)biographical narrative, Heaney by trying to master the narrative of place and to put it in line with his personal narrative. Both poets express a sense of crisis in the middle stages of their writing, when this forced control breaks down; in Hartwig’s work, the most prominent change is achieved in her “American poems” and the work written after them. 11 The original poem is marked by syntactic parallelism: bright sun and dark sun, sky and eyelid, here and there are counterbalanced in Hartwig’s lines. The Polish text ends with the

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that seem portentously symbolic yet resist easy narrativization. The speaker is independent, neither “here” nor “there,” yet the stylized nature of her images underscores the constructed nature of these coordinates. Hartwig’s “here” and “there” are more stylized, literally artificial, than those of Zagajewski, Mahon, or Heaney—her early poems often function on a rather abstract level—yet she proclaims her dependence on these coordinates. If she were “truly independent,” there would be no coordinates, no problem, no motive for metaphor. As it stands, the poem works by a rather theatrical and uncanny oscillation between light and dark, a strange juxtaposition of illness (“crippled” day) and integral purity (“untouched” night). Paradoxically, the speaker defines herself through the dichotomies that she pretends to resist. Unlike Mahon’s dichotomies of chaos and order, which map fairly easily onto a “real” inhabited world, Hartwig’s dichotomies retain an abstraction that heightens their surrealism and yet flattens their affective resonance. Why an “exile’s wagon”? Again, the figure of the exile or refugee, here heavily stylized, proves attractive to a poet who is in flight from the restrictions of identity.12 The pretense of resisting a position between binaries (“neither here nor there”) is not sustained or convincing: in past and future poems, Hartwig does revisit the theme of binarism—of concepts, of the self, of one’s surroundings—with evident authorial relish. In a later poem (“At a Poetry Reading, Someone Said that My Poems Were Full of Sadness”), the speaker is a poet who feels frustrated by the questions and comments of her audience, and does not want to explain herself, to have a false unity (i.e., her explanation) imposed on a diverse oeuvre. She concludes, “Contradiction is my element, the right that I fight for.”13 In the context of Hartwig’s poems of this period, the assertion is a concrete statement of poetic technique. She “fights for” her right by not presenting a fully individuated self that would allow readers and critics to claim knowledge of the poetic speaker. It is a strenuous act, a fight for a certain sort of selfhood that is defined through the word “nieprzynależna,” literally not-belonging-to: “Tą granicą między ułomnym dniem a niedotyczaną nocą posuwam się na wygnańczym wózku pod jasnym słońcem na niebie, z ciemnym słońcem pod powieką, ani tu, ani tam naprawdę nieprzynależna.” “Jeśli,” Wybór wierszy 65. Many of these early poems are not available in translation, and I provide my own. 12 The image has something in common with the closing image of Adam Zagajewski’s “Stolarska,” discussed in “Figuring Otherness.” Zagajewski’s fugitive is “like a starving deserter/in an abandoned circus wagon.” A sense of absurdity permeates the circus, and is also present in the borderline figure of the exile in his/her makeshift “wagon.” He is desperate, inexplicable, and intensely focused on a symbolic journey. Hartwig’s exile, however, is less embodied than Zagajewski’s. Her treatment of the exilic motif will remain far more abstract than that of the other poets considered here, until her galvanizing decision to “tear down the curtain” and let herself form a non-abstract, autobiographically based authorial identity. 13 “Sprzeczność jest moim żywiołem, prawem, o które wojuję.” Original poem “Na wieczorze autorskim ktoś powiedział że moje wiersze są pełne rozpaczy,” Czułóść (Krakow: Znak, 1992) 245.

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process of contradiction, through assertion and counter-assertion, through the rays of a light and a dark sun. It is her authorial “element” yet is not given naturally but must be defended as a writerly prerogative. This language of fighting and rights may well be a reaction to the fact that Hartwig is not defending the rights that most poets in a totalitarian society might consider the most important—the right to oppose government censorship, to fight for political liberty, and to write poetry about history or society that do not follow the party line. In her personal life, Hartwig did take part in protests, signed petitions, and joined a writer’s organization that opposed the Communist regime. In her poetry, she fights for the right to dwell in contradiction, to be split between light and dark in a condition of perpetual two-ness. These personae are not mutually exclusive: the political activist fights for the freedom to write poetry that does not have to choose between the postures of collaborator and rebel, and that does not directly engage political events. The right to employ an abstract speaker that dwells between symbolic binaries is also a freedom. The poet communicates her combination of indulgence and avoidance: We didn’t desire too many experiences . . . . I grow silent and will only answer questions with a gnarled walking stick, using it to point, now to the sky, now to the earth.14 Variety of experience does not necessarily lead to wisdom, the poet implies, and these lines may be seen as a tacit defense of Hartwig’s own decision not to present the authorial self in terms of its experiences. The first sentence is bold: do not look to me, she implies, for storytelling; the later image tacitly adds, do not look to me for realism, verisimilitude. The speaker does not avoid experience but does not actively seek it for a realist, autobiographical writing project. The “we” is undetermined—as Małgorzata Czermińska notes, Hartwig often appears to address herself in the second person or, we may add, in first-person plural, since the interlocutor’s contours are as unclear as those of the speaker.15 Perhaps one can go so far as to posit that she avoids a form of communication that relies on experience, and whose strength is judged by its verisimilitude. Instead, she points to the elemental poles of sky and earth, not striving for imagistic originality. The use of stock symbols and postures (wisdom in silence) delineates a self who is perpetually “other” because she is always, incorrigibly, abstract. 14

“Lata” (“Years”), Wybór wierszy 101. The last few phrases have a “pointing” effect: “wskazując to na niebo, to na ziemię.” 15 Another technique Czermińska finds curious is that of viewing the “I” from what appears a third-person perspective, with the effect that the self is seen from an angle, at a distance. Małgorzata Czermińska, “Żyjąc zyskujemy życie: o późnych wierszach Julii Hartwig,” Księga Janion, eds. Zbigniew Majchrowski and Stanisław Rosiek (Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2007) 208, 210.

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These qualities may account for the fact that Hartwig’s readers view her as a Classicist. At first glance, this appears opposed to the Surrealist moniker, even while these two labels are both used in discussions of her work. Both are used primarily to designate style, and the reason they are so frequently discussed is that the self of Hartwig’s poems is hidden behind a thick screen of style.16 Style and stylization allow Hartwig to shape the speaking self of her poems with great care and control; her technique allows her to take the plunge away from personalization, into a world beyond the self, yet this external world is controlled by the writer and is a product of her desire.17 The heavy stylization of the speaking self may be seen as a form of revolt against typical forms of self-definition focusing on historical and spatial coordinates. The screen separating the stylized world of the writer from the world of the reader creates what Małgorzata Baranowska calls a “Classicist chill” that stems from the writer’s seeming distance from, and even “indifference” to, the real world, which becomes merely a set of objectified images.18 Baranowska is reacting to the absence of a readily apparent self in Hartwig’s poems. She seems to wish for a less “objectified” set of images, by which one may infer that she feels the lack of a “personal” view organized around an individual subjectivity, one which would add warmth to a coldly objective set of referents. Baranowska points to Hartwig’s stress upon duality, but does not discuss the way Hartwig’s poems explore the self through its presence in these images—they are subjectified as well as objectified (i.e., viewed in a dual perspective), since the speaking subject and the images surrounding her are made parallel (a bright sun in the sky, a dark sun in her eyes). The world is organized around the subject’s self-division, its representative scenic attributes (such as earth and sky) allowed to speak 16 Jerzy Kwiatkowski is one major Polish critic who links the stylization of Hartwig’s poems with a sense of distance between speaker and poetic content. He polemicizes with Ryszard Matuszewski, who, according to Kwiatkowski, over-stresses the Classicist distance of Hartwig’s work and does not recognize the variation within her poems. Kwiatkowski recognizes that the nature of the subconscious changes within Hartwig’s work. He also points to the element of humor in her work, which also creates a sense of distance. Jerzy Kwiatkowski, Magia poezji (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1995) 170–2. 17 The idea of style as self-conquest is famously put forward by Yeats. This aspect of Yeats’ thought is complicated by Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially pp. 120–22, in which Kiberd views Yeats’s statements on style in reference to Ireland’s process of decolonization; it is interesting to apply the argument to Poland during its own colonization by the Soviet empire. The idea that style can make a strong social statement is not new or limited to colonized countries, of course, but its connection to the author’s rebellion against current socio-political conditions is important to note, especially since Hartwig writes so few overtly political poems. The conscious stylization of her poems allows her to avoid a certain type of writing, one that would involve greater identitarian commitment than she wishes to accept. 18 Małgorzata Baranowska, “Ale stało się,” Więź 3.557, 140–43. Baranowska singles out the Classicism of Hartwig’s verse in her brief article yet does not explicate her seeming aversion to these Classicist elements.

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for her. The self is, in fact, additionally objectified, since it exists as a set of symbolic attributes whose objective correlatives are drawn from the real world. The problem with these statements lies in the way that the fundamental ideas of Classicism are conceived. The abstraction of the self is widely believed to be a Classicist hallmark, yet there are few poets that participate in such abstraction consistently enough to merit the label. Maria Janion, one of the foremost critics of Romanticism, separates the movements in a broader, more philosophical manner: Classicism is marked by a clear, unsurpassable boundary between art and reality, which do not penetrate each other. Romanticism, on the other hand, wants to make life resemble literature, to tell life what to do—it represents the sovereignty of idea over reality.19 Yet one may ask whether strengthening the Classicist boundary between art and reality may also privilege the ideational sphere—perhaps the heavily symbolic quality of Hartwig’s images, that some call oneiric, others call surreal, and yet others call abstract, may also be seen as manifestations of the sovereignty of idea over reality. Perhaps when an image becomes pure symbol, the “chill” of abstract idea takes precedence over the “warmth” of embodiment. In Hartwig’s work, Classicism and Surrealism represent two formal methods of dissolving and disconnecting the self. Surrealism, after all, can also be seen as an artistic mode that privileges an idea (for instance, an unusual conjuncture; a situation “beyond the real”) over reality, which it bends to the will of the experimentalist. Hartwig has a longstanding interest in French surrealism. Under her own pen, an image may appear more “real” than the thing itself, as in the manifesto-poem “Before Salvador Dali,” in which Godiva falls in love with a man composed of natural formations, a creature formed by landscape: his flesh “is built from cliffs fragile as bone, . . . his hair is the wind,” the air blows through and around him, and yet his form is “beautiful.” There is a paradoxical consonance, in the fourth line, of the original words for “flesh” (body) and “fragile” (thin), with another consonantal echo on “bone”:20 “Ze skał cienkich jak kość zbudowane jest ciało wybrańca.” What seems to be strange is most real; what seems to be fragile is most corporeal and, perhaps, deserving of Godiva’s love. A particular style of writing takes over here: the rock face that the woman chooses as her beloved is described in the tender language of love poetry. The syntax changes subtly as the author plays with the blazon form, enumerating her lover’s physical attributes (literally: “Of fragile cliffs . . . ,” “his hair the 19

My translations and paraphrases (I have rendered “wszechwładztwo” as “sovereignty”). Maria Janion, Introduction to Ryszard Przybylski, To jest klasycyzm (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1978) 5–12. 20 There is a consonantal link between “flesh” and “fragile,” and a weak one between “flesh,” “fragile,” and “bone.”

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wind”). This is lyricism of a certain type: tender, descriptive, slightly oldfashioned. It is countered by the grotesque character of the surreal image. We are told, however, that the lover’s body is beautiful. The poem considers and reconsiders the relation of the author to the image. It reverses its course several times, each reversal signaling a possible change of posture toward its subject-matter. The present tense heightens the immediacy of these moments, and the reader is unsure if the speaker will negate her last claim or change emotional course. This odd love poem starts with a sense of its extreme placement—“Only here” (originally “Dopiero tutaj”), on this island, can Godiva find her lover, implying that a journey has been undertaken, and in this resolutely “other” place, the climactic recognition takes place. The poet herself is taken aback by the strangeness of the scene, as she moves into an anthropologist’s description (we are on “an island” populated by “anthropomorphic forms”) and delineation, letting us know that “after all, this is only a cliff pretending to be bone.” The poem moves between closeness to the scene, as manifested by its careful description and tender subject matter, and a distance from which she surveys her own imagistic creation. As her aloofness comes and goes, so does her—and our—surprise at the oddity of the scene, and skepticism of its truth. Is “truth” a word applicable to a surreal artwork? “Before Salvador Dali” implies that an admittedly bizarre scene carries its own truth, a representational accuracy whose standard of measure is not fully available, at least not to a dourly logical mind (“And yet Godiva chooses him,” the speaker insists). Did she come to doubt love made of flesh and blood? Or maybe she finds that its most realistic depiction is this figure made out of a weathered cliff ... and on a small island far away from here the shadow of a fantastic castle lays itself down clear and more concrete than the thing itself 21 The dividing line between simile, metaphor, and mimetic description is blurred here, creating confusion as to the personages in the poem. Its title alerts the reader to its ekphrastic framework, yet its last dangling, unpunctuated line asks the reader, in utmost sincerity, to question the relative “concreteness” of viewed and experienced worlds. The identities of subject, object, and perceptual act are questioned: the painting—in the speaker’s view—insinuates that a secondary representation may be more real than “the thing itself.” The clarity and emotion that are felt when one is confronted with a representation 21

Julia Hartwig, “Przed Salvatorem Dali,” Czułość 52. My translation.

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transcends one’s experience of so-called real life; the symbol usurps its referent. In the context of Hartwig’s poetry, such a belief stands as a defense of her early mode of writing. By presenting scenes that are peopled with symbolic attributes instead of realistically depicted characters and objects, one gains, paradoxically, a clarity and concreteness that are more true to the subject’s perception than realism would be. This poem places additional screens between the reader and the author. By claiming a greater degree of reality for non-mimetic art, she situates the authorial self in a context only accessible through stylization, fantasy, and a certain degree of abstraction. Clarity is considered a Classicist attribute and by forcibly allying the same concept with Surrealism, Hartwig claims these two formal modes in her project of representing a divided subjectivity. In the poems discussed so far, she has moved from representing a self devoid of objective attributes to showing a self disconnected from its own life narrative (through the trope of disease) to representing the self as a cipher moving between stock symbols (sky and earth, light and dark). In “Before Salvador Dali,” she asks the reader to reconsider the categories of mimesis and illusion. The final level of separation—between represented and “real” object, between metaphor and the thing itself—is put into question, and this furthers Hartwig’s dismemberment of the concepts of selfhood and belonging. At this stage, she queries whether the acts that determine selfhood—such as memory, which creates the self’s sense of a coherent life narrative and builds what is called identity—can be viewed as abstract and therefore impersonal acts that do not result in a situated self. “Before Salvador Dali” shows how the recognition of real feelings (e.g. finding one’s beloved) may take place in a patently un-real space; “Beautiful Sisters” shows a converse situation, in which a view of one’s psychological processes results in an abstract pattern rather than an emotional recognition. The poem starts with a rebuttal, setting it in an argumentative mode: “No,” it states, memory is not solitary but is one of several industrious sisters whose “order” must be kept. The oldest sisters continue growing while the youngest perish “before gaining strength.” The poem’s ending resembles that of “Before Salvador Dali” in its metatextual disclaimer of the primacy of nature: For nature doesn’t rule the family of memory it isn’t an image even a reflection of an image but a separate formation a presence apart In the end we remember only the beginning distant greenery before banishment from Eden22

22

In Praise of the Unfinished 81 (originally published in Czuwanie 1978).

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This poem is noteworthy less for its conceit than for the position chosen by the speaker. Hartwig has not broached the subject of memory often at this point in her writing (we may call the 1970s and ’80s her middle stage), yet when she does, the reader remains shielded from her subjectivity. The poem resembles a set piece in an intellectual dialogue rather than a lyrical vivification of memory as a personal or social act. It is barely punctuated, yet does not sound breathless. Rather, it is a planned series of declarations that organize the poem into four short assertions: 1. memory is not solitary, 2. its pattern should be respected, 3. nature does not rule memory, and 4. at the end we are given the beginning. Each claim is followed by a metaphor or metaphoric gesture (“a reflection of an image”). The impression is that of a series of proofs. This style has the cumulative effect of abstracting memory from personal narrative. As in “Before Salvador Dali,” the poem’s tone changes substantially. The reader’s initial experience of the poem—the title—suggests elements of romance, and its opening continues to hold out the possibility of an extended allegorical narrative. The drama of young death and old growth, though, is counter-intuitive and implausible outside the poem’s allegorical framework (the oldest memories keep growing, while the youngest pass away), guiding us to read in a particular, bounded manner; the next “proof” not only outwardly proclaims the irrelevance of nature but, in its structure, does not allow the reader to grasp a concrete scene—“it isn’t an image.” Memory is a separate formation; the idea is reiterated in “a presence apart.”23 The use of two phrases, in a very condensed poem, to communicate a single thought, lays stress upon this notion of memory as a presence separate from nature whose logic is not entirely human. The passive construction of the penultimate line, and the sudden entrance of the plural—“we remember only the beginning”—sets apart “us” from the logic that governs us, sinking the endpoint of the poem’s argument into the mists of “distant” times. The poem occupies the paradoxical position of logically arguing that we are governed by a logic that is not our own. The form of “Beautiful Sisters” claims agency for itself, while its assertions locate agency elsewhere. One may view this as the endpoint of Hartwig’s exploration of duality: the self, as writer, is both a creative agent and subservient to the abstractions of her supreme fictions. Her decision to avoid personality, to conceive the self abstractly in her poems, leads to this paradox of agency. One could argue that the division of selfhood into binarisms, like the divisions of “Beautiful Sisters” into distinct statements, is an act of power, as the speaker organizes her persona according to self-fashioned principles. She creates the “proofs” of “Beautiful Sisters” even if they argue the idea of unified agency out of existence. Is any act of self-presentation an assertion of agency? Hartwig’s non-personal treatment of the self leads 23 In the original Polish poem, these lines read, “ale pamięć nie jest obrazem ani nawet odbiciem obrazu/ale jakby osobnym formowaniem i osobną obecnością” (without a period to end the statement).

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us to this question. She teeters between a denial of subjective creativity (the author waits for another person’s perceptions in “I lie in wait for your dream . . .”) and powerful acts of assertion (such as that upholding the primacy of representation over “reality”). This conflict is inherent in the act of writing, and the extent to which we correlate authorship with power (or, certainly, authority) is a famously troublesome issue. Should we view statements of authorship, or metatextual moments, as assertions of agency? Iain Chambers aptly identifies the inevitable conflict of agency that occurs within complex writing: “Writing depends upon the support of the ‘I,’ the presumed prop of the authorial voice, for its authority. Yet in the provisional character of writing this structure oscillates, is put into doubt, disrupted and weakened. So we inhabit a discourse that carries within itself the critique of its own language and identity.”24 Chambers’ statements are useful for their view of the “I” as a structure, which is germane to Hartwig’s early work, with its disembodied dualistic speakers; he does not, however, account for the fact that certain writing seeks to smooth over, or even deny, the provisional character of its own utterance. The reader may construe a text as self-doubting or self-disrupting, while the voice within the text may appear authoritative; conversely, some writing explicitly calls attention to its own provisionality. Hartwig’s poems take on the subject of how the “I” constructs itself as an “I.” The self is never fully absent from a poem because it calls itself into being by means of the voice. When the speaker of a poem writes herself into the poem as a divided and abstract sensibility, she is consciously constructing an authorial image but not obliterating all traces of subjectivity even if the subject appears absent and is unembodied. In such poems, Hartwig is putting a certain conception of the self under erasure, namely the idea of a self that is unified by personality, a recognizable character with a life-narrative. The effect of these symbolic, surreal, and abstract poems is to deny her writing this type of unified selfhood. When the speaker of “Beautiful Sisters” debates the agency available to memory, she is making knowledge of the self available only through consideration of the form of knowledge. The voice speaking the poem is itself only a partner in a dialogue, not a free-standing speaker. This viewpoint abstracts identity, moving it out of the social sphere which embodies it and into the realm of pure symbol, which may be viewed as an alternate mode of concreteness holding itself apart from social reference— the symbol is a concrete image, but may lack social referentiality. These poems deny or, indeed, oppose, a cultural materialist view of art.25 Hartwig 24

Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994) 11. One of the most contentious books on authority remains Thomas Docherty’s On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). 25 Benita Parry usefully defines cultural materialism as it developed from Gramsci: this orientation views art as a “specifically coded process of struggle within which consciousness is remade under determinate historical and political conditions” (see her essay “The Institutionalization

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writes in a context where writing and politics both operate by a set of codes that are recognizable to the literary historian, especially one who focuses on writing in totalitarian societies. It is easy to situate writing that conforms to these codes within the materialist framework and to trace the development of an authorial consciousness within it. Yet it would be a mistake to hold that an author such as Hartwig is readily amenable to this approach. The fact that, during a time of Communist repression, just before martial law was announced (in December 1981), Hartwig wrote poems spoken by a voice that cannot be situated, that does not correspond to a unified self, can be viewed as an act of defiance against the practice of reading literature through politics. Janusz Drzewucki writes that she attempts to understand the world through “parahistorical parable and symbolic vision.”26 He implies that her poetic acts appear to be situated above or beyond the historical, thus literally surreal. Drzewucki’s terms are useful for understanding how this type of poetry works. Hartwig’s insistence on such a “parahistorical,” symbolic perspective may be interpreted as a flight from social identity. In her poems, she constructs a chimera of identity cohering around a set of symbolic attributes. She has been struggling, in her poetry, to gain the upper hand in the fight for creative construction of selfhood. The figure whose life narrative was illustrated upon his body refused to interpret the story because it was not told on his terms. The scenes from daily life depicted in the illustrations were overdetermined by his life’s social context, and in order to escape this overdetermination, Hartwig lays stress upon the symbolically divided self who cannot be situated. She opposes the idea that self-knowledge must be socially mediated (Godiva discovers love through fantasy in “Before Salvador Dali,” by realizing that the product of imagination may be more “concrete” and “clear” than the realist’s world, and taking the journey away from realism to surrealism— “Only here,/on an island . . .”). The author’s desire for unmediated power over self-construction leads her to eschew realistic narrative, only in this position she is both an ultimate creative force and a refugee. Her agency is ambivalently construed, either total or not at all. The problem of agency is addressed directly in the fanciful poem “Duality” (“Dwoistość”), where the speaker mediates between two states of being. The of Postcolonial Studies,” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 66–80). Cultural materialism is relevant to our discussion not just because of its popularity as a mode of reading literary texts but because it is worth noting that authors such as Hartwig strenuously defy such a methodology of reading—indeed, she does her best to thwart it, determinedly fashioning a voice that resists this type of reading. At a time when interest in socially mediated forms of identity remains high, an author who repeatedly abstracts the possibility of social mediation out of her writing, through the modes of Classicism and Surrealism as well as in the bold assertions made within her poems, is striking, for she forces us to recognize that certain work actually urges us to read it in a very particular way. 26 Janusz Drzewucki, “Patrz przed siebie,” Twórczość 4.569 (1993): 101–4.

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poem implies that the site of splitting is a “flaw” that becomes a “wound” through which poison is poured. Again, the scene is one of suffering, yet it is not clear whether the speaker is actually disempowered by her duality, or whether she has gained such power through knowledge that she has achieved a perverse type of “salvation”: Meanwhile my fate is elsewhere It lies bound at the bottom of a dark burrow It awaits salvation27 “Duality” works through a series of ambivalent images that yoke together discrepant emotions or actions, with very few verbs to distract attention from its nominal phrases, often oxymoronic or, like Zagajewski’s similes, impeding ready comprehension and unification. The site in the middle of her duality is the “flaw” of the perceiving self; alternatively, the flaw could be inherent in the ambivalence of a situation in which her “fate” is held bound, denied the salvational motion that would turn duality into dialectical movement. Hartwig, like Mahon, uses dichotomies to think through the problem of belonging, yet is also threatened by schematization: the “fate” of the human speaker lies “elsewhere,” awaiting revival, the chaos of unschematized becoming. The poem provides a useful counterpart to the clear intellectual exercise of “Beautiful Sisters.” Its fulcrum is an image of the speaker as a “docile slave with the scepter of power in my hand.” Her position as mediator gives the semblance of power—it is the power of diplomacy between options, of negotiation—but the power is illusory because she is in thrall to each side, both to life’s “benefits” and to mortality. The ultimately unknowable character of her “fate” conveys a final helplessness. The ability to articulate lack of agency, the poem implies, does not fully compensate for the lack. Moreover, the mediator’s ability to communicate her position is complicated by the imperfect conditions of her own iterability. She is capable of self-expression (holding the “scepter,” or pen, that gives the illusion of capacity) but the condition she aims to express is caught between terms, not yet possessed in a way that would be empowering. The ability to assume power depends, the poem implies, on the ability to articulate one’s subjecthood. Hartwig has always been aware of the problematic relation of identity, self-articulation, and writing. Her ability to conjoin psychic and discursive realms has, so far, depended on her ability to think through the situation of duality and disconnection. She has un-situated the self through different stylistic means, and in “Duality” she removes the speaker from the position of articulating subject. “Duality” ends with the subject’s “fate” victimized, 27

Wybór wierszy 156. My translation.

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bound and buried, with no hope beyond an implausibly grandiose “salvation” (Polish “zbawienie”). It is “elsewhere” from the speaker. The way in which Hartwig crafts the situation of the self forecloses conceptual harmony, even if her poems offer a modicum of aesthetic harmony in its stead. The Classicist principle of aesthetic harmony sometimes triumphs in poems that inscribe psychological disharmony—this is another, perverse, form of “duality.” The problem for Hartwig’s writing is how to progress from a situation wherein the speaker has been effectively written out of the authorial position; how will self-representation be accomplished, and from what vantage point? The convincing erasure of agency that takes place in these poems leaves the author at an impasse. Her use of abstraction to un-situate the self has been pushed to its limit. She is caught between self-abnegation and the recognized necessity of imposing a writerly voice. Anna Nasiłowska considers this inbetween self in a slightly different context, stating that Hartwig’s work “moves on the border of what is expressible.” The border between “the sober ‘here and now’” and the “undefined ‘sometime and someplace else’” is unstable. It has an existential character; it does not correspond to a Freudian dream because it can be, and is, seen in the light of day. Nasiłowska believes the Polish avant-garde poet Bolesław Leśmian exerts an influence upon Hartwig coextensive with that of French Symbolism and Surrealism.28 Her concern with what is expressible pinpoints the problem that Hartwig encounters when she denies the speaker of her poems belonging in the very persona, and life-narrative, of the speaker. The space of the elsewhere, the “undefined ‘sometime and someplace else,’” holds more interest for her than the “sober,” easily-defined world. Hartwig’s view of selfhood confronts an ultimate stage of disconnection when the self is reified into an object, and viewed from an undefined position. Her ultimate denial of belonging in the space of the poem occurs when the subject becomes available only as a surface, not an interior. The self is associated, by metonymy and contiguity, with a decorative object: In a small Venetian coral ... colorful snow falls inside peacock feathers drift by ... and bells toll inside the glass in voices now high and now low A head looks at the coral 28

Anna Nasiłowska, “Poezja jako sposób poznania,” Odra 5:414 (1996) 61–64. I have translated the abstract noun “wyrażalność” as “what is expressible.”

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the coral looks at the head they look inside each other at forgotten pictures surprisingly alive again29 The poem is entitled “What is Inside” (“Co jest w środku”), and its tone mimics an adult speaking to a child. There is a radical simplicity in the notion of the coral bead regarding the human head as a spherical object, yet it is unironic and therefore uncomical—instead, it is disarming. The frivolous preciosity of “colorful snow” and “peacock feathers” is out of place in Hartwig’s work, and signals that the ornament is a device used to experimentally vivify an alternate mode of seeing (one that may, however, be taken ironically). The gaze of a decorative jewel is not to be taken seriously but makes possible a comparison that upsets the categories of subject and object. If one finds the bead, snow and feathers to be merely decorative, merely juvenile, then perhaps the same can be said of the mind’s contents. This is a classic reversal of perspectives. The speaker is reduced to a head whose contents may also be the object of fanciful speculation. It may be reduced, like the bead, to its surface, and the question of interiority may be frivolous. Her voice, like the imagined bells, may be reduced to its alternating pitch, now high and now low. The viewer’s interior may merely correspond to her objective attributes. The idea of situating the gaze outside the reified self, which is part of Hartwig’s desire to explore the possibility of viewing the self as an “other” by taking apart the concept of identity as completely as possible, finds its ultimate manifestation in the “American Poems” written in a space foreign to the speaker. This project was motivated by novel experiences: the poet was given a series of scholarships and visiting scholar appointments in the United States in the early 1970s, which gave rise to a series of poems later collected under the title Wiersze amerykańskie (American Poems). This new situation allowed her to push her longtime interest in radical otherness, duality and mediation, and the problematic conditions of agency into a new thematic arena. Hartwig explains, “[my] travels were the source of many poems. Something happens in daily life wherein a change of rhythm reveals new images, gives one the sense of self-renewal [poczucie odświeżenia samego siebie]. In everyone dwell dormant, unrealized possibilities, longings. Travel awakens them.”30 This experience also allowed her to construct a separate narrative within her oeuvre. Hartwig’s poems have been focused on a cluster of themes but have not, until this point, been articulated by a single authorial consciousness (a 29

“Co jest w środku,” Obcowanie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1987) 5. Julia Hartwig in interview with Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić, Gazeta wyborcza 6 May 2001, wyborcza.pl. 30

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personality) maturing through time. One begins to sense this consciousness in the American poems. Stuart Hall, whose cultural theorizing has the potential to shed most light on Hartwig’s evasions of identity, maintains that identities arise from the narrativization of the self; this act, Hall holds, may be partly constructed within the symbolic and imaginary realm as well as within the material environment. Hall crucially holds that identity is construed as a process, not a fixed point.31 In other words, it is formed in movement. The view is broadly applicable to both Zagajewski’s wanderer and to Hartwig’s deracinated traveler, for whom mutability has been associated with evasion of identity rather than narrativization of the self. The question is now how and why she seeks to narrativize the self. Hartwig’s desire to convey the experience of foreignness leads her to consider the act of identity formation. The unknown territory of the United States—with which she wishes to acquaint herself—provides a challenge to her previous way of writing, because it cannot be readily subsumed into the symbolic mode she has used thus far. When the poet looks to her surroundings, she is confronted with a new impenetrability. They cannot be readily abstracted or allegorized. Otherness is no longer contained within the self but it is a cultural and perceptual condition that she feels compelled to confront. In “Beside the River” (originally “Nad zatoką”), the speaker slowly grows comfortable with the “borrowed” objects of a strange house, even while the earth appears to turns more quickly than normally.32 This small detail signifies both the acceleration of her search to confront otherness (which is not, as in Heaney’s work, a search for mastery, but a search to define the self in relation—not in dominance) and her sense that this search is being accelerated by forces beyond her control. The drama of Hartwig’s early American poems takes place largely through sound. Visual perceptions do not mark cultural otherness as much as the calls of birds or the strange sounds made by foreigners: in “Kiedy co mówimy”—“When We Speak What”—a madman howling on a crowded city street causes the speaker to suddenly realize her own foreignness, realizing that she, too, is a social outsider. In the same way, putatively minor sights and sounds cause her to suddenly question her position, asking how she relates to these new stimuli. The very banality of such situations (for example, the cacophonous birdcalls of “Beside the River”) testifies to the speaker’s need to leave the surreal for the real once the latter becomes, or seems, menacing. The juvenile fear that spills into the poems

31

Stuart Hall, Introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1996) 1–17. 32 “Nad zatoką,” Wybór wierszy 104–5. First published in Czuwanie (1978) and reprinted in Wiersze amerykańskie (American Poems), 2002, a volume that gathers all of the American poems but does not reproduce them in chronological order. Several of the poems, this one included, are marked “1970–1974” in parentheses after the poem.

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is an almost-comical manifestation of Hartwig’s broader, deeper drive to flee the confines of selfhood. The poetic speaker tries to overcome the threat of absolute foreignness while maintaining her position between the unknown and known, yet such a position is precarious. Her liminal and mediative position—as one who transforms the unknown into the known currency of poetic symbols— may be liberating (the unknown land does not press her for sociopolitical commitment) but also uncomfortable, and Hartwig does not present it as an altogether positive choice; the fear underlying these poems is significant because, to use Bishop’s terms, it shows that lack of imagination may become recognition of imaginative limitation. Hartwig is uncertain how to respond to her changing environments, and constantly readjusts her emotional position. An innocuous image can signify either pastoral charm or menace: three birds fight for space on a tree branch, a lyric miniature that expands into a dark Zagajewskian vista: The cardinal’s song grows more and more fierce his throat pulses with ecstasy and fear as if now the sun were to vanish for good when inexorable dusk comes around Meanwhile a limping woman takes up a garden chair approaches the veranda shaking dew from bent grasses lights a lamp puts on the kettle for tea through the screen one can see her moving shadow33 The speaker is emotionally on edge. Quarreling birds become harbingers of apocalypse in a rather sudden tonal crescendo, one not fully justified by the work of the short poem. Its significance depends upon its place in the American poems’ travel narrative. As the speaker apprehends threat in the foreign, albeit banal, Midwestern landscape, elsewhere spiked by white picket fences and menaced by growling dishwashers, she loads her poem with hyperbole (“fierce,” originally “gwałtowny,” carries overtones of violence; “inexorable,” originally “nieodwołalny,” suggests her powerlessness to alter a condition that forcibly imposes itself). The mysteriously hurt woman who exits this overloaded scene also seems to leave the last vestiges of life itself, becoming a shade (Polish “cień,” shade or revenant), her moving shadow seen through a thin screen that fails to conceal the dark world irrupting into Hartwig’s seemingly innocuous scene. All in all, the scene is markedly prosaic, and its mystery spurious. The speaker appears to be provoking or eliciting a frisson from otherwise neutral stimuli. Their melodrama allows her to craft an image of otherness that can be minimized, hence confronted and eventually naturalized. 33

“Middle West—wieczór” [“Middle West—Evening”], Wiersze amerykańskie 14.

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The myth of the American frontier lies behind this visitor’s concern with space, and it combines with Hartwig’s fear, metaphorized in “Duality,” that her individual fate may be bound and buried in an underground burrow, a space she cannot reach. There is a constant sense that the speaker may become disabled by an unknown enemy or by her surroundings themselves. Hartwig’s early American poems are underlain by a sense of menace based in the struggle of the self to assert agency against foreignness. This is a struggle inherent in the process of identity formation, and it accompanies Hartwig’s stylistic progression from highly symbolic, abstract poems to a more mimetic way of writing. She does not dispose of symbols, allegorical situations, and abstractions altogether—her interest in space as a complex symbolic arena remains strong for several years. The difference in style, though, is clear. These poems become the grounds of a confrontation between the speaker and an otherness that threatens to shut her out or even harm her. There is a sense of extremity in the new place (“here, at the end of the world”). It will take a continued effort to feel that she can stand up to this foreignness, to match it by an assertion of individual will, since this must involve a new view of subjecthood which begins to involve the self in a narrative that creates identity. Hartwig writes several poems that usher in this newly mimetic style, recording unexceptional details viewed through a tourist’s eye, such as the sight of tidy rows of suburban houses or the dry hills of the American southwest. There is virtually no surrealism in the poems. People are elements of place or subjects of picaresque anecdotes. Occasionally, however, the question of travel itself, its motivation and its endpoint, focuses the speaker upon new questions: Did we need to sail for this all the way to the other end of the world to the other side to look into the aged eye of Providence?34 Hartwig does not generally revise her poems upon reprinting, but one salient exception is this ending of “Waiting By the River” (“Czuwanie nad zatoką”), a much-anthologized poem. Later versions omit the last line, so that the poem ends, unpunctuated, with “to the other side.” These lines, perhaps deliberately, echo Elizabeth Bishop in “Questions of Travel”: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?,”“What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun 34 Wybór wierszy 112. Originally published in Czuwanie (1978). The same poem is reprinted in Wiersze amerykańskie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2002) 8-9, the most recent collection of all the American poems. The revised version is already present in two earlier volumes of selected poems: Nim opatrzy się zieleń (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1995) 53 and Wybór wierszy (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2000) 189.

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the other way round?,” and “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come/to imagined places, not just stay at home?”35 Hartwig has proclaimed her love of Bishop’s poetry, and the theme of travel is one of many characteristics the two poets share. The question of how the imagination profits from travel is important for judging the degree to which the new place is perceived as foreign—the recognition of similitude between one’s known world and the foreign place, and then between the imagination and the imagined place, is a step toward acculturation. Such recognition effects a modest psychological homecoming—the feeling that “this” has been seen before, and the comfort of being able to utter the question “Did we need to sail for this . . .,” shows that an arc has been established between past and present, there and here, and a narrativized identity becomes discernible. Place becomes subjected to the speaker’s critical gaze (“Did we need to sail for this”), but so does she, even while the poem does not follow the providential gaze to look upon the speaker. In a sense, it is lack of imagination that impels this act of re-imagining: the poet is galvanized by her living conditions to figure this different relationship of self to place, and these new conditions of agency. Perhaps a voyage to “the other side” was necessary to explore a fresh perspective upon self and place. Hartwig states her intent to establish a mutual relationship with her new place, not to remain an outsider. “I seek an understanding with all of this,” she writes in a long poem set in the American West (“All This Was Not Created for You”).36 In the 2002 “Afterward” to the American Poems collection, she definitively links the poems to her actual experiences, emphasizing the process of acclimatization: her writing “absorbed the whole essence of my wonder for this continent, which I had to learn from the beginning, forgetting the experiences of old Europe.” Yet complete social identification was neither necessary nor accomplished: “we were connected to American universities, but as temporary envoys we didn’t have to identify ourselves too strongly with that university community where many of our friends, who were poets and professors, could never find their place.”37 Her emphasis on forgetting the old place is curious, given that Hartwig has written hardly any poems firmly rooted in “old Europe”; her writing has always resisted acts of identification until the American poems. Her old aloofness from externally imposed communities is, meanwhile, frankly admitted. While she writes warmly about particular friendships and generously praises other writers, Hartwig also relates that she consciously attempts not to read others’

35

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) 93–94. These lines come from the poem “Questions of Travel.” 36 The poem is “To wszystko nie zostało stworzone dla ciebie” [“All This Was Not Created for You”], originally in Obcowanie 80–83. 37 By “we” Hartwig refers to herself and her husband Artur Międzyrzecki. Wiersze amerykańskie 81–82.

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work while composing her poems.38 She is motivated by a desire to stay independent from cultural influences. Her time in America may have been so poetically fruitful because of her clear separation from home, which allowed her, in turn, to write mimetically without having mimesis communicate full belonging (i.e., using the descriptive mode to situate the self). Her speaker no longer fixates on communicating the abstract position of a disconnected persona but on using mimetic, realistic writing to negotiate a shifting sense of (relative) otherness. There is a distinct change in the American poems written after the mid-1970s. They edge toward a reciprocity between place and person. The speaker keeps balancing herself on a borderline, but gives voice to moments of communion with the foreign land, though rarely with its people: You have no illusions All this was not created for you And yet you take your own portion And believe that only you Can gather in your sight all that is out there to see Detecting more than a bird seeking prey To feel fear and joy in the face of extravagant space Which is content in itself and your body poses questions From which your mind shrinks ... I seek an understanding with all of this My kinsmen are dry thistles and reeds by a dusty riverbed My kinsman is a blackbird sitting in a local willow I recognize his yellow beak and shining black feathers39 The speaker’s surrogate “you” is directly available, not just situated but an active perceiving agent. This creates a performative situation in which the self is doubly present, as an actor in the poem’s drama and as the orchestrator of poetic effects. Self-presentation is achieved through rhythm as well as “plot”: the hurried elision of two clauses in the first and seventh cited lines, the breathless repetition of “And . . . And,” and the incantatory repetition of “My kinsmen . . . My kinsman” speed up, add suspense, and then slow the reader’s work. These are acts of control. The poetics of self-presentation (can) inscribe empowerment. Hartwig’s rhythms and figures call attention to the authorial presence, signaling an additional level of agency over the speaker’s mental process. She has absorbed this novel cultural material thoroughly enough that she can theatrically stage her own psychological 38

Julia Hartwig, Pisane przy oknie (Warsaw: Biblioteka “Więzi,” 2004) 161. “To wszystko nie zostało stworzone dla ciebie,” Obcowanie 80–83, also Wiersze amerykańskie 21–26 (no revisions).

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acculturation, presenting it as a series of self-conscious realizations that become deliberate utterances. Hartwig’s previous images of incapacity are absent. Instead, the speaker is tempted by artistic arrogance (“Only you . . .”), an illusion that could heighten her sense of communion (only she can penetrate this landscape’s essence), but the egotistical sublime is not for her. Her self-reflection reaches a point of balance between the illusion of egocentrism and the selfabstraction of Hartwig’s other poems. This balance is communicated by a fairly even rhythm after “only you” (the Polish lines hover between ten and fourteen syllables) and is present in the reciprocal satisfaction of the land, content in itself, and the speaker enjoying “[her] portion” of it. The verbs associated with the speaker indicate capacity, unlike the passivity expressed in “Duality”: “take,” “believe,” “gather,” “detect,” “feel,” and “pose” work together to establish her as an active agent who not only perceives but “gathers” “all that is available” to create a unified impression. Space is extravagant and unmasterable but it does not threaten or exclude; her fear does not restrict her position within space. The old motif of self-division is still present, albeit conventionalized into an opposition of body and mind that is not, in this new context, disabling. The mind’s retraction does not prevent it from seeking understanding later in the poem, and fully entering the environment that threatened annihiliation in “Middle West—Evening.” The vagueness of “all this” is rectified by the eventual precision of “dry thistles” and “dusty riverbed,” scenic details with which the speaker claims affinity. The poem forces itself to confront the specificity of the speaker’s surroundings, to confront the issue of situatedness directly and concretely. Hartwig essays this difficult task in a newly realistic descriptive mode. She does not altogether banish her permanent concern with disconnection by using a new realism to forge connection, but her travel poems introduce the important question of motive as well as acculturation (how to overcome foreignness, how to melt into a landscape). Their sensory immediacy leads the speaker to an eventual, hard-won recognition of likeness, one that is not abstract but embodied. Her initial experience of cultural otherness has led her back to examining the nature of the self. It has led her to consider how similarity to the self is recognized, and how the ostensibly foreign place may be understood so that its elements (birds, thistles) become “kinsmen.” The next major stage of Hartwig’s work will be to confront the personality of the self, the contours of its narrative identity, topics which she has chosen to strenuously avoid in her early work, holding it away from mimesis.

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8 Learning to speak from inside: Julia Hartwig After the watershed moment of the American Poems of the 1970s, Julia Hartwig focuses on coming to terms with the individuality of the poetic speaker: her biography, her relation to “home,” and her part in a social and familial narrative. The self takes on personality largely through its narrative connection to the home place, yet Hartwig has strenuously avoided this connection. Her poetic speaker struggles with an initial conflict of impulses, as a sense of exigency to take on the return motif (temporal return to memory; discursive return to a family story; lastly, physical return to the home city) wars with a powerful aversion to homecoming. This aversion, however, undergoes a transformation itself in her middle and late stages: the poems move from plain statements on authorial impenetrability to a figurative series exploring an escape from selfhood, even a surrender of individuality. Here the speaker does not work through abstraction, as in Hartwig’s earlier poems, but through detailed description and historical reference. She feels the need to situate herself in a historical narrative but cannot fulfill a prophetic role, feeling she has not been given “a signal.” Although this feeling could be viewed as a gendered reaction, on the part of a female poet unable to become a male bard, Hartwig’s speaker longs for anonymity and ahistoricity, frequently avoiding contemplation of her personal attributes (whether gender, age, or nationality). Her ultimate desire is to inhabit a city created by the poet and then erased before it is tainted by memory or history. Inversely correlative to Zagajewski’s “medieval town” in which one can take or leave identitarian commitments, Hartwig’s city allows itself to become a gloriously blank slate. This stage in the figuration of belonging is common to the work of Hartwig, Heaney, Zagajewski, and Mahon. All four poets create a fantasy of placelessness that lifts an imagined city (or, in Heaney’s case, a familial space turned into a “bright nowhere”) into a space beyond the deforming pressure of history and power (Mahon’s abandoned garages perversely fulfill this function, as urban ruins are “washed clean” and reimagined; the blank page of “Ovid in Tomis” is the blankest slate of all, as writing itself represents “exile” from an ideal purity free from identitarian commitment).

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The details of Hartwig’s personal history, especially her mother’s early death, most probably underlie her initial insistence on authorial abstraction and her later compulsion to confront an extremely painful narrative. The liminal position in between then and now, or there and here, is not permanently tenable unless she comes to terms with the content of both halves of these dichotomies. She needs to confront the source of her anger with the past, the reason why the city of her childhood is not seen as “home” and the exigency that leads her to confront it. In Hartwig’s most recent poems, she forces her speaker to revisit Lublin, where Hartwig lived as a child, and consider its claims upon her. The confrontation is necessary but not happy: she cannot feel belonging but feels trapped within her own biography, unable to reconcile her authorial power with a sense of helpless incomprehension. Her desire is not to belong statically in a single home, but to belong in moments when the self is fully engaged in its surroundings, troping belonging as a fleeting and ultimately lost succession of specific situations.1 A famous early poem (“Ghosts,” originally “Myślimy”) tacitly expresses a need to situate oneself in the present moment and to act therein: whereas we think that ghosts “may appear” to us “some time,” in fact they have already spoken and we must reckon with our responsibilities in the present. Likewise, we think “that the moment of trial will come,” unable to accept what we have endured already. Most poignantly, We think: starting tomorrow we will really live. But this is already life, and some of us are dead for good.2 The poem rests upon a structure of temporal keywords: “some time,” “already,” “may appear,” “will,” “dead.” Their ironic point is that it may be more difficult to accept an accomplished event than a hypothetical one, 1

Hartwig evokes an identity that can be called “synchronic,” in which the self identifies with elements of specific situations, but does not express itself as consistency over time. This abstract concept is clarified in an essay by Roderick Chisholm in which he sets apart two conceptions of identity, one that equates it with consistency over time and one as a “doctrine of temporal parts.” For every period of time that an individual thing exists, there is a temporal part of that thing which is unique to that period of time. This idea does not inevitably lead to an infinite dispersal or annihilation of identity, but can be used as a counterweight to the prevailing idea of identity as consistency. Hartwig often uses poems of travel to describe idiosyncratic situations when the speaker feels completely engaged with the scene at hand. Her participation is momentary and contingent upon the unrepeatable events of that particular place and time. These situations often occur in foreign countries, and their exotic locations emphasize their unrepeatability, their distance from the speaker’s everyday routine. Hartwig’s sense of joy in these contingent, transient moments may well be due to her reluctance to construe identity as a unity of past with present. See Roderick Chisholm, “Problems of Identity,” in Milton K. Munitz, ed., Identity and Individuation (New York: New York University Press, 1971) 3–31. 2 In Praise of the Unfinished 58. First published in Chwila postoju (1980), and contained in Wybór wierszy (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1981) 54.

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and their deepest resonance is metapoetic: realization of what has “already” happened delivers a blow to the psyche, as if the speaker is bringing herself, and “us,” up short. The extreme limpidity of the poem’s language, the completely end-stopped lines, and the lack of sustained poetic figures contribute to its frankness. What remains mysterious in this brief, plain poem is its motivating exigency. How can one locate the emotional panic that is conveyed by the morbid culmination of “dead for good?” The contemplative practice of vague hypothesis (“some time”) produces a delicious thrill, while the self-situation accomplished by her realizations is abrupt and painful. The speaker fears being located, and there is an untold story behind her fear. Hartwig does not write the story explicitly, but a reading of her poetic oeuvre fills out its contours. Her fear is temporarily assuaged in the other space of the American poems, with their realized fantasy of belonging elsewhere, yet narrativizing the self while at home involves her in a reckoning of the trials she has already lived through, which are even harder to face than what “may appear.” Her urge to flee the past would be well understood by Derek Mahon, who desires a delicatelyimagined “place out of time” and realizes that learning “what is meant by home” can only be accomplished by situating oneself throughout a long duration, knowing one’s place “bomb by bomb.” The realization, of course, occurs after the evasion has already been accomplished; Hartwig’s poem also records a sense of unmet need—the speaker does not take part in an act that makes her “really live” within the space of the poem. In order to accomplish her reckoning she, like Mahon, must work through a complex series of vacillations. Zagajewski also wishes to flee a historically conceived temporality (“Russia Comes into Poland”) that prevents full belonging; Heaney, while passionately telling the events of his life, is different in that he situates meaningfulness in time past (whether in cultural legend, historical precedent, or his own childhood). The problem of belonging in one place seems inevitably to turn into a problem of belonging in one time. The speaker’s deferral of “really” living is helped along by the troping of memory as pain. In “Museum,” gruesome images of torture are the author’s means of dramatizing a repulsion to remembrance: “The torture depends on cramming things back in their throats/using the tapered utensil of memory.”3 The author praises moments of unclearness and vacillation, opposing them to this torture. The surreal poem is one of the first explicitly acknowledging a desire to escape memory. Who directs the torture is unclear; what is obvious is the agony of its sufferers. Remembrance is not always associated with violence, but always with threat, and the specter of memory is ominous at best. In “Still and Again,” a brief prose poem, the speaker starts by exclaiming “Still there is space, through which a wave of greenery can move freely,” and ends by contemplating a dolorous train that moves 3

“Muzeum,” Dwoistość (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1971) 64–68.

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her backward through time: “I feel a quick joy within myself. . . . But the sun recognizes me. It says: I remember, I remember everything.”4 The joy of movement is replaced by the horror of being recognized, which also signifies being forced to look back. Again, the speaker is passive, and seemingly guilty (“I remember everything”). She is, however, capable of viewing her self with some humor: My I is everywhere. Couldn’t it leave me for a moment? It says to me: Be yourself, now that is something. And another time: Leap over yourself, that is truly an art.5 The poet’s ability to speak of the self as an abstract “I” provides the poem with its gentle humor: unlike Zagajewski’s “I” (in “The Self”), this ego does not try to dissolve itself but stays obstinately put. The poem’s title is “Everywhere” (originally “Wszędzie”). Ridding oneself of the consciously perceived ego would be a relief—it is a pest, a didact, and an obsessive. Although a good hostile confrontation with “my I” is clearly in order, the difficulty of this task is shown by the poem’s mockery of trite exhortations to be yourself (which might be possible if the ego were to leave for a moment). The language here is casual, almost colloquial. It counterpoints the facility of uttering maxims against the difficulty of confronting one’s self. It also, however, evades confrontation by maintaining an atmosphere of levity about the task. The question of how to “be one’s self” by escaping the “I” remains purposefully unanswered, as the poem ingeniously escapes its own desire. This question points to one of Hartwig’s most salient features—her personal reticence. In the previous poem, the self is unavoidable and yet intangible and unreachable. Hartwig is caught between her need to come to terms with her own subjecthood and an instinct to hide. Even if every poem is read as a particular embodiment of the authorial subject, it is difficult to bind together these impressions into a recognizable author as character. Judith Butler has convincingly argued that the subject is constituted by embodying social norms that establish what will and will not form a recognizable subject; our ability to recognize a subject is conditioned by our social vocabulary even while we are capable of altering the norms that bind us.6 This is a basic facet of our contemporary understanding of identity. Hartwig’s cat and mouse game with aphorism in “Everywhere” makes it difficult, however, 4

“Wciąż jeszcze,” from Chwila postoju (1980). Contained in Wybór wierszy 9. “Wszędzie,” Wybór wierszy 50. 6 A concise summary argument of this position is given in Butler’s essay “Agencies of Style for a Liminal Subject,” contained in the volume Without Guarantees: In Honor of Stuart Hall, eds. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000) 30–37. 5

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to pinpoint the subject’s relation to the social. Ironically, though, it is her quality of reticence that provides the most stable point around which we can form an idea of subjecthood; Hartwig’s reiterated strategies of evasion form a recognizable pattern across her oeuvre, even while she studiously refuses to embody a fully recognizable, socialized self. By troping subjectivity in such various ways, she experiments with the possibility of claiming selfrepresentational agency without investing in a single recognizable subject. In her later poems, though, she struggles to make a transition from highly abstract tropes of selfhood to concrete, physically situated, embodied states. In order to make this transition she must confront the social pressures that inhere in her concrete environment(s). She is famous for this reticence: “if she speaks about feelings, it is with such moderation that it seems as if they happened to someone else. She runs away from personal interpretation, and instead, chooses an image or a description.”7 The comment implies that it is difficult for the critic to link Hartwig’s images and descriptions to a personal narrative, though he suspects a “personal interpretation” persists at some level as the not-written. It also reveals the desire to connect writing to autobiography and attach feelings to an authorial personality (one may consider this a “psychological norm”). Another critic hazards a biographical explanation: Hartwig’s distance, her dislike of “extreme expression,” is linked to an early trauma. She exhibits the reserve “characteristic to people who have earlier met with misfortune and managed to toughen themselves, to develop that ‘inner discipline’ that this poet admires so much in ordinary Americans.” This is why it is good “to be among foreigners—[because] nobody will ask you about what is close to you.”8 This 2003 comment appears prescient in light of Hartwig’s 2004 Bez pożegnania (Without Farewell), which suddenly dives into autobiography. Zagajewski echoes and extends this last point: “Julia Hartwig maintained a pose of beautiful otherness toward the world . . . The author of There Is No Answer [(originally Nie ma odpowiedzi)] is incorruptible, her “Lublin Elegy” dedicated to her hometown is astoundingly unsentimental, more than that—full of distance. The poet is always in transit, even at the times she speaks of herself.” She exhibits what Zygmunt Bauman calls the fear of home-boundedness, of being tied to a place and barred from exit.9 Zagajewski identifies otherness with unfamiliarity, lack of sentiment with transit, and 7

Piotr Kuncewicz, Agonia i nadzieja. Literatura polska od 1939 (Warsaw: Graf-Punkt, 1994) 174. My translation. 8 Tadeusz Sobolewski, ““Sprzeczność moim żywiołem,”” Zeszyty Literackie 81 (2003), 109–112. My translation. 9 Adam Zagajewski, review of Nie ma odpowiedzi, Zeszyty literackie 77 (2002) 132; Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity,” Questions of Cultural Identity 31 (“‘Home’ lingers at the horizon of the tourist life as an uncanny mix of shelter and prison”). Hartwig speaks as a tourist even when she begins her poem of homecoming, and ends by rebelling against a sense of obligation toward Lublin.

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these unusual symmetries help to explicate the transition from Hartwig’s early poems: her early escape into enabling abstractions has created, poem by poem, a persona who is indeed “other” to the autobiographical “I” who grew up in Lublin. Zagajewski himself has a fear of home-boundedness and is sensitive to it in others, yet recognizes that Hartwig’s situation actually involves dissociation of different types of selfhood. Thus the speaker engages her “hometown” as if it were unknown and experienced in transit. In order to embody the self, Hartwig considers the expectations that she calls herself to fulfill: “[i]t is time to tear down the curtain, . . . to show what is hidden behind.”10 This dramatic gesture is motivated by guilt, fear, and desire; it is a destructive act directed against her own extended effort to separate personality and abstract symbol. Her injunction is spoken impersonally—a more graceful feat in Polish (“Trzeba rozerwać zasłonę”)— and she concludes, “[i]t is time to teach oneself how to use the word “I” and reconcile oneself to its measure.”11 The odd notion of one’s “measure” makes more sense when interpreted together with the highly autobiographical, and metapoetically poignant, “Waiting for a Signal” (originally “Prośba o znak”), in which an authorial surrogate wonders why he never received a sign: Why didn’t anyone give me a signal why was there no warning no word of encouragement I didn’t know when my time is or who I am12 The unromantic self’s “measure” is modest because no “guardian angel” has dictated her words; what is worse, in the latter poem a figure accuses him of expressive incapacity (“your voice never joined mine”). In both, however, Hartwig avoids an obvious answer: a female poet may not receive a providential sign, and may not be chosen as a bard by her people. The bardic tradition is male. She may not be able to “join” the voice of a male pantheon. Why, then, would she use a male pronoun to ask these questions? It is perverse. The same theme is taken up two poems later in the same volume, in “A Confession”: —Don’t call me for a witness. I won’t be of any use. . . .my thought loses its thread and, fearing the worst, doesn’t dare reach the end. I do not know who I am. 10

“Trzeba rozerwać zasłonę,” Wybór wierszy 71. “Trzeba się nauczyć używać słowa ‘ja’ i pogodzić się z jego miarą.” The same construction is used wherein the impersonal word “Trzeba”—“It is necessary”—stands in for a subjective construction such as “I must.” 12 In Praise of the Unfinished 84; “Prośba o znak,” Obcowanie 113. “A Confession,” In Praise of the Unfinished 74, originally “Wyznanie,” Obcowanie 117. 11

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Both poems are informed by a history of Romantic poetry in which signs are taken for proper poetic occurrences, and the absence of a guiding sign might signal the failure of the poetic task. The implication that identity is formed, or at least helped along, by a providential sign takes the onus of self-definition off the individual, who cannot be “of any use” without this defining sign given by another. Poetry of witness is a large category in the Polish literary tradition, not easily anthologized or summarized. Hartwig mentions Zbigniew Herbert in her prose, and these two poems may be read as responses to Herbert’s famous poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” a forceful exhortation for an heroic act of witness: “you were saved not in order to live/you have little time you must give testimony,” Herbert writes, and “repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I.” One must accept one’s potential for heroism, and beneath it lies the Christian belief in being called by God. Herbert connects this heroism to a pan-historical context, the “company of cold skulls. . . Gilgamesh Hector Roland[.]”13 In Hartwig’s poems, the lack of a calling is felt as an identitarian crisis; not knowing one’s historical place (“I didn’t know when my time is”) elides with not knowing one’s self (“who I am”). Her speaker is neither warned nor encouraged in the manner of Herbert’s envoy. His expectation of a “signal” is, perhaps, what consigns him to his confusion, and the poem may be read as a criticism of the Polish heroic mode. The gender issue persists when “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” is adduced as a precursor: Herbert’s addressee and his heroic tradition are definitively male. Should the speaker of “A Confession” be viewed differently, as a self-abnegating woman protesting her uselessness within the “witness” tradition, one whose fear of rejection by this tradition causes her to cut short the thread of her thoughts? Such a reading is certainly possible, but the frustrating fact remains that such a reading is not readily invited by the poems themselves, which continue to—maddeningly—hold themselves aloof from socio-historical interpretation. Hartwig’s personalization of her speaker, however, does not mesh with the archetypal poet summoned in these poems, justifying a tentative inference regarding her perceived detachment from a bardic tradition. This point is not pursued in many poems, but it lingers on the horizon of Hartwig’s work: could a concrete (non-abstract) female speaker receive the “sign” that is requested by a male voice in her poem, and does she actually wish for it, or is the wish confined to the generic male speaker of “Waiting for a Signal”? Perhaps the conclusion to draw is that Hartwig’s speaker simply does not suffer from a perception of literary-historical unfitness as much as she suffers from a broader perceptual doubt, a disabling self-distrust that cuts short the mental process necessary 13 “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” originally “Przesłanie Pana Cogito,” Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, trans. and eds. John and Bogdana Carpenter (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000) 94–77.

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to progress (“reach the end”) in the project of self-knowledge that she has procrastinated for so long. The fact that progress is connoted at all (“make it to the end”) communicates a desire to believe in a journey motif as constitutive of selfhood. The speaker excuses her reluctance to tear away the curtain separating her words from her life by displacing herself from the exalted place occupied by “chosen” poets, useful witnesses. Why should one care about the life-material of a poet whose mind cannot carry through to its goal, one defined by amazement and fear instead of knowledge, incapable of heroic self-fashioning. The claim of not being “of use” pushes away a lingering sense of responsibility and, perversely, helps to clear a space for the selfdistrustful poet to proceed with her “useless” exploration, quietly refusing to instrumentalize her words. These poems discuss the conditions of selfrevelation. They do not actually undertake it. Hartwig’s readers have noted that personal content hides beneath the surface event of the poem,14 even when that event is self-assessment. The previous two poems justify her escape from the historical conditions of selfhood, claiming the speaker’s unfitness to be a historical actor. This situation leads her, like Mahon, to voice a desire for ahistoricism: To live in this village in Normandy where nobody asks you about anything ... to live somewhat dully normally shallowly to make the theme Vae victis Victoria victis into a mere schooltime lesson on the history of Rome15 This poem presents anonymity and historical “dullness” as conditions of freedom, allowing a guiltless ahistorical existence, and can be taken together with the previous two as a group rebuffing socio-historical interpretation of the self. These poems represent an intermediate step in the author’s journey toward the personal: they summon the specter of a politicized self, only to reject it. The author revels in her fantasy of a place out of time (somewhat similar to Mahon’s Japanese “Snow Party”). Her desire defines her. Here, the lack of a providential sign can be recast as a positive choice for an unburdened subjectivity. 14 Grażyna Borkowska, Małgorzata Czermińska, and Ursula Phillips, Pisarki polskie od średniowiecza do współczesności (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2000) 145. “Her true posture is reticent self-irony, retreating behind a metaphorical image, which shines with many colors on the primary level [of the poem].” My translation. 15 “Antrakt,” Czułóść 72.

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The opposition between “here” and “elsewhere” has hardened into a simple binary, with the speaker schematically placed between historical and abstract space, between archetype and personality. The opening poems of her 2000 volume Zobaczone (Viewed) amplify the desire for anonymity, creating a short series that treats escapism in different figurative contexts. The theme gains complexity as a counterpoint to the author’s stated desire to confront autobiographical material. These are the two extremes between which Hartwig moves, comprising the poems written between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, each side gaining complexity as the emotions attending its figuration deepen and mellow. Thus, her rejection of a historical role deepens into an examination of the urge to flee temporal and spatial coordinates. These poems gradually embody the self by depicting an observer in a precise physical context, yet they move toward a type of belonging that allows one to escape personality: O to look with his eyes ... and to feel the emptiness of the fields not yet awakened under the dull grey sky still colorless To calm the heart with quiet nothingness16 This poem, entitled “To See,” in which the speaker wishes to see with the eyes of another, is matched by three others whose subjects dissolve into their surroundings: a woman sitting by a pond, a man who leaves his garden for the “health-giving monotony” of the empty fields behind it, and, lastly, an undefined “we” whom the rain invites to “Give yourself up why do you resist what is unavoidable.” Despite the emotional atmosphere of surrender, in each case escape is an act of will and, strangely, generates a type of belonging. It is a chosen alliance with “monotony” and “nothingness” in tacit opposition to the social and familial. It is motivated by negative choice against social pressure, as illustrated by the opposition between domesticated garden and open field. The monotony of great space is a hard-won reward, and in “To See” the speaker covets a sort of separation from the human, including from the mind itself (“to feel the emptiness”) that is able to make something out of nothing, to transform separateness into an enabling condition. Emptiness is given color and shape as a positively chosen state. The speaker’s feeling of relief is communicated by a fairly regular rhythm and is attendant upon the transference of desire out of the speaking self. The “quiet nothingness” is perfect because its sight is imagined through another’s eyes, the eyes of a catalyst, and thus no recalcitrant psychological material disrupts this communion. 16

“Spojrzeć,” Zobaczone (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2000) 7. The other poems mentioned are on pp. 5–8.

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Belonging is achieved by feeling emptiness. Significantly, these moments occur exactly before Hartwig takes the poetic leap into autobiography. The process of embodying emptiness through figurative situations is a poetic challenge that provides psychological balance. It serves as an imagistic egress for a speaker whose recurrent fear is to be trapped within an undesired narrative, even while these poems present situations in which belonging is possible. In these poems of flight into nature, landscape assumes the burden of identity, as the “fields not yet awakened” promise narrative development while the speaker remains passive, casting the poem as an act of withholding. Hartwig briefly explores the possibility of full belonging in a place that is put under erasure as it is conceived, thus gaining maximal control over the nothingness that is her most extreme temptation. This is the endpoint of Hartwig’s escapist fantasy. “There Is Such a Town” is a poem remarkably similar to Adam Zagajewski’s fantasy of ultimate freedom and fantasized belonging, “I Walked Through the Medieval Town”: There is such a town where everything is mine but nothing belongs to me not even my own identity drowned in the pearly grey of its architecture its sky and river ... There is such a town no other can be jealous of since it disappears without trace when I lose its sight like a stanza that comes in a dream at night where all that remains in the morning is the certainty it came Like an erased spot in a manuscript17 Whereas Zagajewski dreams of the moment before choice as a time of complete self-realization, Hartwig dreams of achieving belonging after the choice to relinquish identity. Both poets dream of the self ’s dissolution, although paradoxically, the speaker’s poetic identity is formed through this desire and its repeated figuration across time. Likewise, the sense of belonging achieved therein and “the certainty it came” relies on a coherent self to create the fantasy. The unusual idea of discovering one’s humanity (originally “odnajdują swoje człowieczeństwo”) stems from the impossibility of dissolution—here, selfhood is discovered through the experience of nonidentity. The “lesson” of flux forces narrative upon the speaker, and prevents the annihilation (“drown” is a word repeated in the poems just discussed) that she perversely desires. Instead of performing an act of dissolution, the poem ends with a sense of certainty and a material trace of the writer’s agency—the conscious decision to erase, leaving the marks both of writing and deletion, instead of true emptiness. 17

“Jest takie miasto,” Zobaczone 40.

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Belonging is here predicated upon a radical porousness which excludes ownership; Wisława Szymborska’s famous poetic statement that we possess our surroundings “on loan” hovers in the background, but none of her subtle humor permeates this exploration of self-erasure. This is a means of attaining mastery, since the conditions of belonging depend on the speaker’s capacity for vision. The penultimate simile deflects authorial control in the image of inspired dream, but the concluding simile—“Like an erased spot in a manuscript”—returns full control to the authorial self. This metapoetic line may reflect back on Hartwig’s own decision to virtually erase the city of her childhood from her poetry, thus avoiding overt claims of alienation. She has written poems about the pain of confronting one’s life narrative, and the exigency of confronting it, but has not actually written about her home. This allows it to remain unuttered, potential and unowned. When writing is implicitly equated with immobilization, and erasure with potential, the poetic speaker becomes, in turn, imprisoned in a tendency to write selfhood out of the poem. If belonging can only be found in absence or in unbounded, open space, then the reach of poetry becomes circumscribed, and yet Hartwig does not want this: she is happy when a reviewer “noted that [her work] contains fullness, concreteness, logic, order and sensitivity to the world’s material.”18 She wishes to be associated with such positive qualities, yet much of her work is motivated by an absence. The poetic process it impels places positive agency in conflict with the disabling conditions that are also part of the “world’s material.” The poet produces her own identitarian lacunae, erasures in her manuscript. When she writes of her painful recollections of childhood—“no paradise/ nothing one might call happiness/Eternal orphanhood”19—one begins to wonder if this is a repeat performance. There is a theatrical dimension to this constant resistance that complicates the trope of return, so it seems fitting that when she does undertake the long-dreaded return, it is done with a modicum of theatricality. Hartwig’s sustained effort to confront the town of her childhood, “Lublin Elegy” (“Elegia lubelska”) begins with the epigraph, “So I was born on this patch of land/What should I do to feel I belong here?” The poem’s project is confronted aggressively.20 The poem is divided into four sections and four scenes, shifting perspectives yet progressing toward full emotional participation. Its strict ordering is an attempt to control the long-withheld emotion attendant upon homecoming. Ryszard Przybylski holds that it is Hartwig’s prose poems that “rationalize” poetic vision and

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Comment contained in Julia Hartwig, Zawsze powroty: Dzienniki podróży (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2001) 262. My translation. Marian Grześczak, “Pełnia,” Twórczość 4:509 (1988): 95–8. 19 “Żadnych rajów” (“No Paradise”), Zobaczone 43. 20 This effect is noticeable in both the translation and the original: “Więc urodziłam się na tym skrawku ziemi./Co mam zrobić, żeby poczuć się tutejszą?”

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refuse the disorder of “an uncontrolled eruption of images,”21 yet few of Hartwig’s poems approach anywhere close to an uncontrolled eruption, and “Lublin Elegy” is an example of an ordered, formalized poem on a subject that often elicits sentimentality. Its enumerated sections evidence a greater “rationalizing” impulse than the surreal streams of images in Hartwig’s prose poems, even when rationality is intentionally questioned. “Lublin Elegy” begins in the third person, as “she” looks at Lublin from the window of a boarding house (originally “hotelik”)—modest and temporary lodgings, tacitly opposed to a family abode sodden with memories, and befitting the speaker’s touristic perspective. Since location influences perception, she seeks, in the manner of any tourist, to heighten the experience of this particular place, to highlight its specificity: not yet borderlands but already borderlands ... pious chanting in different languages mute air in which moans of the murdered are frozen wailing thrust down a throat then silence huge and final silence in the odor of choking smoke and rags scattered by the wind22 The awkwardness of “not yet. . . but already” dissolves as emotion takes over the poem, which, unexpectedly, becomes a historical lament. Its details are loaded with autobiographical significance: Hartwig’s mother emigrated from Russia with her Polish husband, never fully settling into Polish society. She was an Orthodox Christian, one of the Old Believers who comprise a minority within the Russian Orthodox Church, while Poland was (and remains) overwhelmingly Catholic. Her deep sense of alienation may have been a factor leading to her eventual suicide. This is certainly the great trauma shadowing Hartwig’s memories of childhood, and affecting her view of Lublin. It may well motivate her development of the theme of escape, her desire to avoid self-revelation, and her persistent use of abstraction and impersonality when writing in the first person. These themes, however, extend beyond the autobiography of the poet and involve her in a broader and deeper cultural dialogue regarding the formation and expression of the self. 21 Przybylski quoted in Leszek Szaruga, “Świat poetycki,” Zeszyty literackie 85 (2004): 171–5. He appears to be uncritical toward Przybylski’s comment, citing him as an authority on Hartwig’s work despite the fact that Przybylski is more interested in working out a theory of contemporary Classicism than attending to the true complexities and contradictions of Hartwig’s work. In this case, he attributes qualities to the prose poem that he wishes to see in Classicist work in general, motivated by a desire to view Hartwig as an exponent of this style. 22 Original “Elegia lubelska,” Nie ma odpowiedzi (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2001) 22–24. Quotations in English from In Praise of the Unfinished 97–99.

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In “Lublin Elegy,” a barely admitted memory of her mother’s unhappiness combines with the observer’s jumbled recollection of historical violence occurring around the city. Located in Eastern Poland, near the old region of Galicia where ethnic identity is a point of contestation, Lublin is seen as a meeting point for Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews. The region’s historical troubles provide an emotional vexation that combines with the difficulty, stated frankly in the poem’s epigraph, of viewing this “patch of land” (literally “scrap of earth”) where she happened to be born as a home.23 The speaker’s entrance into her family history simultaneously involves her in the history of the city, region, and country, the perceived violence and confusion of which helps explain her longstanding desire to be separate. These lines emphasize that silence may not signify neutrality, but may be loaded with insufficiently expressed tragedy; one may be “choked” into quietness. The very subtle assonance and consonance of the Polish lines, skillfully replicated in translation, link silence with forcible repression: “nieme powietrze w którym zastygł jęk,” “z odorem duszącego dymu” (italics mine). Hartwig makes sparing use of such poetic techniques. Here, they force home the recognition that silence cannot be dissociated from cataclysm, even if the site of tragedy has been blown clean. The second stanza moves into the realm of familial grief: In the cemetery mother father and sister Mother alone near the Orthodox chapel apart as she must have felt alone leaving her native Moscow its lights and loud boulevards Nearby the grave of Czechowicz ... He alone would know how to lament this city ... to find a prayer for the burning of suffering souls24 Any feelings of alienation harbored by the speaker are temporarily forgotten in the empathetic sharing of her mother’s emotion, as the traveler forgets 23 For discussion of the violent conflicts in this region see Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 24 The citation is from a Czechowicz poem called, paradoxically, “Pastoral Dream” (“Sen sielski”). The images of suffering, burning, and eventual silence may partially refer to the agony of concentration camp inmates in Majdanek, a Nazi camp established directly outside the city of Lublin. Again, historical allusion combines with the personal suffering of Hartwig’s mother and the Hartwig family after the mother’s early death (when Julia was still a child).

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herself. Deflecting the pain that she has finally begun to evoke, she turns to the grave of the poet Józef Czechowicz, who was born and died in Lublin, killed by a bomb at age 36 in the early weeks of the Second World War; the city is commemorated in his “Poem on the City of Lublin” (“Poemat o mieście Lublinie”). His early death connects to (though does not parallel) Hartwig’s mother’s death. The two poems, however, have little in common: Czechowicz’s creates a peaceful portrait of the city based on the balance of figurative elements, delineating its beauty. It is, on the whole, a quietly lyrical poem, very different from Hartwig’s. The city is connected to the life of the earth, not to violent history or to family tragedy. The lines on Czechowicz, however, are a digression within the poem, and the author’s repeated affirmation that “He alone” would know how to celebrate and lament Lublin and its dead displace responsibility from the poet herself. This is not only modesty, but also a disclaimer, excusing the poet who claims she cannot rival Czechowicz. She expresses a sense of poetic incapacity through purposeful awkwardness (“not yet borderlands but already borderlands”) and such disclaimers and deflections. The third section decisively confronts memory, beginning with a particle (“A”) which may be translated either as “And” or a contradictory “But”: And [But] I a small girl at the time drinking in this dark busy world full of noise and shouts in an incomprehensible tongue that suddenly grew quiet on Friday evenings when lights of the lit candles glimmered in windows If we translate the conjunction as “But,” the contrast between the poet verbalizing the disorder of her memory and the “small girl” whose vulnerability is emphasized becomes clear. The original phrase for “busy” is “pełen zgiełku,” full of tumult, and the negative confusion evoked by these elided words—“dark busy world full of noise”—communicates helplessness mixed with incomprehension. In an autobiographical context, this is surprising: Hartwig’s memory of her mother’s death appears clear.25 In the context of the poem, this stanza evokes a mysterious chiaroscuro in which momentary peace and illumination are sensed against a backdrop of darkness and tumult. These lines favor a presentational mode sketching out confused images of conflict but avoiding active verbs. Lublin is being seen in a symbolic mode slightly reminiscent of young Hartwig, who, as a child, is “drinking in” (Polish “chłonąca”) a world that acts upon her, “glimmering” with meaning yet withholding an ultimate significance to its bewildering 25 She has written about the death in her prose works Pisane przy oknie (brief essays and personal sketches) and Zawsze powroty (mostly travel memoirs) as well as her poetic volume Bez pożegnania.

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chiaroscuro. Lamps “throw pale flickering gleams,” alternating light and movement. The stanza moves between glimmering light and darkness, business and prayer, the grounding of proper nouns and the flicker of untrustworthy lights. It creates a pattern of aural and visual opposition and alternation between movement—which leads to chaos and violence—and illumination—which is sacred yet ephemeral. Here, rhythmic and imagistic elements stand in for feelings, as the poet transfers emotion onto images and sounds rather than giving a direct view of the traumatic events behind the poem. The outburst of feeling in the last stanza is, hence, not fully anticipated or explained: O towers of my native city you chased me across the world threatened me I owe you nothing insensitive giants who have survived without shedding a single tear over the city of my childhood She commands the city to “turn away” its gaze and refuses to be a partner in the dialogue that it seems to force upon her, and the child’s helplessness perseveres in the adult poet. The literary pressure to equate return with homecoming is felt as a debt. Her anger at having incurred the debt unfairly is communicated by a suddenly forceful tone, an attempt to end the poem on a dauntless note. The sudden admission that this is “my native city”—hence, an admission of emotional participation in the city’s history—corresponds to the realization that she also belongs to it, and that this city bullies her into remembrance and emotional indebtedness.26 The stanza complicates the relationship between nativity and possession, accidental situation and full participation in place. The adjective “native” need not signal positive sentiment or, certainly, positive choice (one does not choose one’s place of birth, though one may choose to mythologize it, as Zagajewski does). The speaker is not, however, allowed to flee this place, which pursues her unflaggingly. There is a slight echo between “goniłyście” (“you chased”) and “groziły” (“you threatened,” emphases mine), verbs that enclose the speaker and the world within the poetic line. Her reactive assertion in the following line gains its vehemence from the strength of the perceived threat: “nic wam nie jestem winna nieczułe olbrzymy” is the original effect, with three negative particles (here emphasized) underscoring the speaker’s refusal to “owe” a debt to a creditor who has given her such tragedy. This effect is partially continued in the next line: “które przetrwałyście nie uroniwszy ani jednej 26 “Native city,” however, does not originally bear the possessive (“O wieże rodzinnego miasta”—“O towers of [the] native city”). The adjective “my” originally occurs earlier in this ultimate section, comprised of one stanza, and thus its presence is strongly felt, but this small divergence between original and translated texts is worth mentioning.

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łzy.” This time the brunt of the negatives falls on the city, who does not return the speaker’s enforced investment with a tear of its own. When one reaches the last line, “the city of my childhood” is a phrase loaded with an emotional freight that is not fully unpacked. The intense confrontation of the poem has not actually clarified the exact substance of the speaker’s experiences. Hartwig waits until her next volume, Without Farewell (Bez pożegnania, 2004) to fully delve into her well-hidden stories. Readers curious about the poet’s family and childhood are rewarded by several poems in which the remembering “I” steps forward as an elderly poet making peace with her past. A quick glance at the titles reveals how much this project involves addressing others: “About Them,” “Those Who Left,” “Homage to Apollinaire,” “Brodsky,” “Farewells, Greetings, and Thanks.” One of the most wrenching poems is “Calling Forth” (Polish “Przywoływanie”), on the poet’s mother, who was “torn” from her home, here seen as her community of Old Believers in Russia, and only “found her language” during visits to an Orthodox church. The most affecting sections describe the young Julia’s reaction to her mother’s suicide: Small, grown barely higher than the ground, led by the hand, I learned the first taste of withdrawal from what was most close and started to wail that I might not lose it. But it happened that she left. Haughtiness led that soul to a loss of hope so deep that she determined to leave us for good. From such decisions there is no return. When we found her lying in the courtyard that morning, she looked as if she had simply tripped while walking and fallen. O, mother, how could this happen? Of all of us you should have been able to fly.27 The original poem’s movement works through an alternation of imperfective verbs, used for description or repeated action—“she went [to church] every Easter,” “she found” her old language—and perfective verbs for completed actions. “Led” and “learned,” denoting a habitual lesson, are imperfective, yet “started” is, abruptly, perfective, and punctuates the poem by locating an acute moment, when the child suddenly begins to grieve. The last stanza derives its emotional scope from its dream of flying over the earth, extending the mother’s life, opposed to the singular (perfective) event of tripping, falling, finding. The mother’s sense of haughtiness derives from her own 27

“Przywoływanie,” Bez pożegnania (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2004) 23–25.

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lack of belonging, her inability to use the language that she only “found” away from her own husband and children. Confronting the central trauma of her past leads Hartwig back to the condition of not-belonging. The past is marked by lack of reconciliation, both on the mother’s part and on the daughter’s—“how could this happen?” hovers over the poem’s ending as an unanswerable question. The past cannot finally be accepted, and this leaves the speaker in a different sort of liminal state, between a present moment that demands reckoning and a past that cannot be reckoned with. She begins another poem with the question, “When will we return to the interrupted conversation?” The remainder plays out as an act of waiting and wondering, a realization that “Streets and attics where we lived” are “drowned,” and ends with disorientation, as she awakens in the middle of the night, unsure whom she is waiting to meet and what will take place when they do.28 The theme of lying in wait (“czuwanie”) comes up in other poems, and indicates the difficulty of locating or claiming agency; the speaker feels caught between memory and the present (in which she waits to come to terms with the past), and often, consequently, between identities. She is perpetually unsure of her capacity to actively forge a state of belonging with one or another side of a split condition; the effect is that she finds herself “waiting,” even if, as she recognizes in “Waiting for a Signal,” the notion of receiving knowledge from a transcendent source is a disabling anachronism (“I didn’t know when my time is or who I am”). The speaker’s confrontation with her past catches her in a particular type of liminal positoin, one marked by incomprehension and loss of agency over the contents of her own memory. She has learned to speak from inside her personal history, to gaze at the entirety of her life narrative and perform a formal farewell. Yet all of this leave-taking does not produce a sense of harmony with the past, not to mention a coherent narrative of identity. There remains a sense that she does not belong in her own life story; there remains an incomplete identification within the self, a sense that a transcendent concept of identity as inner coherence remains an elusive goal to be achieved. Hartwig’s symbolic treatment of subjectivity may have this originary trauma—the loss of her mother—at its basis. Its effects are both emotional and intellectual. When the speaker faces her memories she also faces an epistemological crisis: she cannot know her life as a unified entity held together by recognizable causal sequences. The incomprehension that leads to internal incoherence is a recurrent theme of several poems after “Lublin Elegy.” The realization that this long-postponed confrontation with the past has not ended with a sense of renewed clarity of vision but with a sense of loss coexists with a feeling of 28 “Long Vigil,” In Praise of the Unfinished 105, originally “Długie czuwanie,” Bez pożegnania 34. The word “czuwanie” is one of Hartwig’s keywords. It is not only the title of an early volume but is used in several poems, from the earliest to the most recent.

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accomplishment, which brings a small modicum of reconciliation. Although the speaker sees “everything” in her life as “incomprehensible,” the act of self-assessment surely betokens a certain panoramic comprehension of life and self: I don’t understand life, I don’t understand death, I don’t control my own dreams, I cannot tell what is me, and what is not and the motivations of my actions remain secrets to me. From the past, nothing lets itself be put in order, the choice only appears to be mine. ... Solitude is much blessed when won with difficulty, when imposed forever it becomes a burden, puts out the light in one’s eye. Where is the grace of astonishment? Total abandonment to ecstasy?29 The poem ends with a deep disappointment similar to the ending of Heaney’s “Exposure,” where the poet has missed a vision of transcendence. “Grace” from above (Polish “łaska”) may not have been received, just as Heaney’s speaker has missed his vision of “a million tons of light,” but the summatory nature of this poem does impart a sense of completion and review that is not unsatisfying. Its sharp realizations seem to contradict its theme of incomprehension. This speaker’s power over her self-presentation in writing is counterpointed with her felt lack of power to order the contents of her life. The poem’s inspiration is, after all, a feeling of lack and its counterpoint, a vision of “grace” and “abandonment” that is, in the context of Hartwig’s life and work, piercingly poignant. This poem plumbs certain affective depths that Hartwig’s more shapely, confidently stylized poems do not frequently reach. Its questions are hypothetical, but the performative act of uttering them brings a certain kind of consciousness into being, one that pushes itself to make a summatory (and, hence, unifying) gesture, even as the gesture communicates incapacity. Despite her insistence that she “cannot tell/what is me, and what is not,” this poet is incontrovertibly aware of her position. She cannot, however, belong in it. Awareness is not tantamount to belonging. There is, oddly, a sense of comedy about the poem’s repeated negatives (“don’t understand,” “don’t control,” “cannot tell,” “nothing”).30 This suggests that they may be part of a histrionic display, affecting yet actually 29

“Gdy opatrzy się zieleń,” Nie ma odpowiedzi 76. My translation. The effect is even stronger in Polish: “Nie pojmuję życia, nie pojmuję śmierci,/nie panuję nad swoimi snami, nie potrafię powiedzieć/co jest mną, a co nie jest/i pobudki moich działań są dla mnie tajemnicze.” 30

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controlled more carefully than the speaker would wish her readers to think. If we allow this comic dimension into the poem, then its pathos diminishes and its self-control, and its authorial comfort, increase—the author knows herself so well that she can, finally, express the authority of self-judgment, which relies on an inner strength that will not crumble if it allows itself some gentle self-mockery (possibly, self-rebuke). The poem’s assertions strike a balance between viewing the self from outside and speaking from inside, as interiority is communicated in a manner free from morbid self-analysis or overbearing pathos. The crescendo of negatives creates a gentle sense of absurdity. This tone connects Hartwig to Szymborska, a poetic contemporary who continually explores the secret logic of absurdity, and whose work is permeated by a unique sense of humor. The paradox of authorial agency is one of Szymborska’s major themes. “The Joy of Writing” views the author as a despot and predator, possessing the ability to weave a net of words that entraps her helpless (here, feminized) subject-matter: “Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,/are letters up to no good,/clutches of clauses so subordinate/they’ll never let her get away.” This is the “revenge of a mortal hand,” the hand of the author. Its complementary poem puts into motion a negated string of actions: “My nonarrival in the city of N./took place on the dot.//You’d been alerted/in my unmailed letter.” 31 These poems are significant for Hartwig’s work because their repetition of negatives creates a crescendo that yokes absurdity with an assertion of authorial power. It is hyperbolic, yet exaggeration, in Szymborska’s work, is not disabling, as it seems to be in Hartwig’s. Szymborska’s poems are underlain by the humor of pushing a concept to its most extreme manifestation or conclusion, yet Hartwig cannot reach a position where the act of verbalization is seen as “revenge” against the disorder of the material. Hartwig’s poem, instead, unseats the author—“the choice only appears to be mine.” Her life imposes situations upon her, and “nothing lets itself be put in order.” Her last two questions can only be read as expressions of pain, even if we allow humor into the poem. When Hartwig confronts her own history, it disables the poetic capacity for self-abandonment that Szymborska lets herself feel while imagining the field of possibility available to the poet as creator. Her wonder is negative, a matter of not knowing rather than giving oneself up to sublimity or beauty. The speaker’s desire for some form of belonging has led her to delve into her sense of self, yet when she does so, she encounters a loss of agency: she sees a self formed by imposed, not chosen, qualities. Instead of aiding her in the project of constructing a recognizable poetic “I,” her journey into autobiography has sapped her already tenacious sense of agency, and left her in a disablingly liminal position of not-belonging. The antidotes to this 31 “The Joy of Writing” and “The Railroad Station,” View with a Grain of Sand, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995) 35–36 and 40–41.

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condition are her memories of travel, when incomprehension, placelessness, and liminality are positive, enabling states: What remained of this is what was written the rest squandered thrown away there where memory could return if it could find the way at least to those hotel rooms which are no longer vacant or to that New York street where the strap of my sandal broke off32 The movement of the traveler is purposeful and does not involve an obliteration of the self, as did Hartwig’s poems of total escape. The poem’s title, both dismissive and far-reaching, is “About All of This” (originally “O tym wszystkim”). The written document remains to immortalize transient states, but the poet does not give herself the credit of authorship (“what was written” remains, not “what I wrote”). Similarly, memory is seen as an abstract actor, but it operates in her individual interest, gleaning bits and pieces that become “what remains,” a stay against despair. “All of this” is a totality that is not ungovernable, even if it can only be grasped through imperfect voyages toward ephemeral spots of time, not closed chapters of experience. The “squandered” material is mourned insofar as it may be germinal for creating a sense of belonging, yet the increasing precision of the poet’s memory throughout this stanza demonstrates that it is not, in fact, “squandered” at all. A longing for permanence bumps up against a desire to transgress what is known, what memory can gather and keep. This desire is crucial for Hartwig’s latest writing. The travels recorded by the poet are not missions; she is not guided by a transcendent sign. They are a string of transient states. The poem ends awkwardly (literally breaking off) in order to emphasize the momentariness of the poet’s situation, its lack of fatalistic weight, its eminent lack of depth. When placed in contradistinction to Hartwig’s confrontation with an agonizing personal history, such levity and momentary illumination are salubrious. This levity becomes somewhat heightened in To wróci (It Will Return, 2007) which, despite its title, is suffused by a sense of helpless joy rather than ominous confrontation; when the speaker asks the world what she is to do with it, we are caught between feeling relief (that this poet who had been so menaced by her past has moved into a celebratory register) and frustration (that the dark emotions so powerfully complicating the poet’s earlier verse have, as it were, been bleached out). Hartwig’s trademark disorientation here turns almost mystical, as the question “What to do?” underscores the inutility of the poet’s emotion, and, when repeated a second 32

The poem is cited in full. “O tym wszystkim,” Bez pożegnania 88.

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time, of asking the question with any hope of an answer.33 Hartwig’s desire for attunement, as mediated by a language that repels theorization, is not dissimilar to the desires of Zagajewski, Mahon, or Heaney, who all wish for a form of belonging beyond tension, achieved by shaping “the most unpromising/material,” but Hartwig has seemingly found more promising material. The lack of dissonance in It Will Return seems out of place, not fully prepared for, and the happiness here is too blurred at the borders: these poems draw sustenance from breadth rather than precision, and situate themselves in a different poetic space from that of, for example, Mahon’s “Under the Volcanoes” or Heaney’s “A Herbal.” Their lack of precision causes their harmonies to seem less convincingly achieved, and less consistently—the mellow brightness of certain poems (such as “The Heart of Day,” quoted above) jars against the twilit gloom of others (“Zone”). Often not situated either in time or space, it is hard, in turn, to situate Hartwig’s quest for reconciliation and eventual belonging in this volume. Its poems must be read metaphorically and metaphysically, but without temporo-spatial coordinates, we run the risk of ponderous over-reading: we journey “always on and on” in “Reflections,” “suppressing the thought there is a limit/beyond which we don’t want to go.”34 Must we impose a limit to the poem’s reach, though, so that it does not lose poignancy by spreading too far outward? Is the limit of our journey a sense of necessary finitude to human life—the desire not to live eternally—or is this limit a matter of textual praxis? Does the speaker not wish to return to the topic of childhood and identity (that is, her specific identity, bound by its undesired coordinates), although it will persist as a limit case? Such questions may impose a topical reading upon a fairly indeterminate poem, yet the question is important for understanding Hartwig’s transition between Bez pożegnania and To wróci and the penetrating yet luminous Jasne niejasne (2009). Hartwig’s most recent poems—again, similar to Zagajewski’s—cast themselves upward and outward, a movement made possible by the forced confrontations of Nie ma odpowiedzi and Bez pożegnania. This is an attempt to spiritualize the position of the self—to cast it into transcendent space—on the part of an elderly poet (in her eighties) who has not been able to secure a sense of belonging during her explorations of history and biography. It corresponds to a movement back toward the symbolic register that Hartwig had originally cultivated, yet this time it does not carry a residue of desperation but the opposite, a sense that even the impossible union of name and self must be seen in relation to divine mystery: 33 To wróci (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2007); English text from It Will Return, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010) 25. 34 It Will Return 35.

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The one who forgot his name couldn’t be let through to the other side And although forgetting was to bring relief and purification it became pain and punishment ... Who among us has such power that the word may be made flesh? the poet? an old baker saying “bread”? Swarms of invisible names circle in the air, homeless What law governs our naming? Yet the giving of a name is festive as we tend to believe that there is still a secret name which comes together with us to earth and to know it we seek continually35 Much has changed since the American poems. First, the disorientation of becoming nameless has been given a religious dimension: we cannot be saved without being christened, a condition that replaces the arbitrariness of the sign with ultimate meaning. Biblical inaccuracy aside, what is relevant is Hartwig’s reworking of two basic themes, naming and forgetting. Because Hartwig’s work had long been governed by a desire for escape from fixed identity, the salutary dimension of forgetting—as relief, as escape, as psychological whitewash—had been naturalized and psychologized. Her desire to tear down the curtain concealing her childhood had occasioned a trauma that necessitated, once again, the creation of new tropes of escape. The current poem weighs psychological relief against (ostensible) necessity. It registers, once again, a compulsion to bring oneself up short, to stage one’s own particular judgment. Forgetting, then, is viewed as a corrupt reprieve. The oblique self-judgment of this stanza castigates the poet’s escape from memory, and more generally from a revelation of personal identity, as the ruination of a higher type of belonging. Just as “the one who forgot” could not enter the gates of heaven, so, she tacitly tells herself, might the poet who purposely forgets also be turned away, perhaps to the purgatory of forced remembrance. Hartwig had, previously, troubled over the notion that one’s life narrative, like one’s 35

“Imię” [“A Name”], Jasne niejasne (Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2009) 13–14.

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name, may not be controlled by the self, but is subject to arbitrary forces. Those forces were frequently ominous, the narrative threatening and even traumatic; these qualities are entirely absent here, as the speaker goes on to question her agency over the word, yet without anxiety or a sense of loss. The poem’s questions signify acceptance. They summon and extend rather than doubt. The poem’s stance toward the Christianity to which it refers is clarified in its image of continual search: “there is still a secret name” we must “seek continually,” and this is the sacred word that will sanctify our life’s work. This is, at its basis, a complete reworking of the grotesque, incomprehensible narrative that repulsed the speaker in Hartwig’s early verse. The poem’s insistence upon teleology is the key to its significance. Hartwig’s search for belonging had led her to and from history, both social (“Lublin Elegy”) and personal (“Calling Forth”). Confrontation had not brought wisdom; knowledge had not brought belonging. Agency was lost; happiness was lost. Clearly, forgetting could indeed have brought relief. Several years later, Julia Hartwig spiritualizes the question of finding identity so that history becomes part of a larger movement toward knowledge. In a manner similar to that of Zagajewski’s work, the idea of the unknown becomes a positive source of attunement; knowing one’s lack of knowledge (i.e., of the “secret name” in Hartwig’s poem) motivates the poet’s work. Poetry becomes epistemology. Zagajewski, in his most recent poems, sees the refusal of knowledge as an act allowing greater attunement with the world than the active pursuit of knowledge allows since it is menaced, not enriched, by the unknown, and because it allows formlessness to become actualized as a state of mind. Hartwig does not share Zagajewski’s method but embraces the same goal as he. Knowledge is necessary but not as an end in itself; the search for spiritual knowledge is what justifies the assumption of control over language. Put differently, the search for ultimate belonging justifies a turn away from personal history, which will only bring with it self-division and a sense of rupture from the “swarms of invisible names” that we utter. Knowledge may be historical, to paraphrase Hartwig’s favorite American poet, yet there exists a supra-temporal sphere of knowledge. Hartwig never settles her battle with the self and its life narrative. She has not found a space of belonging or accepted the past as a positive component of her selfhood, but she has confronted the places and events that had threatened her poems and motivated her elaborate figurations of escape. The “I” is present in her recent poems as a fully realized subject, but she does not altogether give credence to the statement that “the giving of a name is festive,” occasioning celebration rather than grief; celebration is still, however, the dominant mood of this volume (Jasne, niejasne). This speaker will define herself through seeking and finding discrete points of time when she is transported out of herself, into a sort of transcendence,

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to form an idiosyncratic image of belonging that is neither personal nor necessarily permanent. It is an identity that is not based upon solidarity with a group or belonging in one particular place. This speaker situates herself in a process of identification, a search for the unknown name. The focus upon process is common to all the four poets under consideration here, as is a tendency to sublimate the question of belonging that obsesses them throughout their writing lives. It points toward a necessary reappraisal of the concept of identity itself, which may not have anything to do with stasis or roots, but has a great deal to do with movement, fluidity, and attunement to an ever-elusive vanishing point which is never fully comprehended.

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Conclusion: Knowing one’s self Adam Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Julia Hartwig trace four different poetic arcs across a similar thematic terrain; underneath this terrain lie the important concepts of belonging and identity. All these poets reject a simple, unquestioned belonging, and strain against the limits of a singular, bounded socio-cultural identity. This book has shown how their poems work through this effort. How do these four poetic journeys influence, perhaps change, our understanding of these abstract concepts? Abstract conceptualizations of identity can, indeed, be useful for knitting together a diverse group of oeuvres, but only if we work from the ground up. The readings we have undertaken show how these four poets flee the biographical, cultural, and social pressures that restrict their agency. The particular type of agency that they are most concerned to protect is a selfdefinitional agency, the ability to direct the process by which one acquires identity. They all wish to define themselves, to hold themselves aloof from anything that smacks of determinism or essentialism. The project of forming a poetic personality becomes an act of balancing the claims of one’s given spatio-temporal coordinates against one’s own desires. Its motivating question is whether one can or should convey the free movement of one’s imagination. The needs of a society are one thing; the desires of the creative imagination are another. These poets all strongly believe in the integrity of the imagination. It is not merely a minor aspect of the self or a socially constructed entity. They believe idealistically that the imagination is a potent force capable of forging its own alliances. We have seen how the importance of postcoloniality waxes and wanes for these poets, how Zagajewski begins as a politically engaged poet and then resists history, and large-scale History, with surprising tenacity in his poems, so that we cannot quite call him a postcolonial poet without risking over-simplification and, possibly, his own suspicion of such a phrase. It is more accurate (given the poems we have closely considered) to posit that these poets are united by a sense that strong cultural and historical forces are pulling them towards a type of belonging and identity that they must resist. History bullies these poets. It is not on their side. Instead of feeling that their identities are organically formed by a process whereby the individual takes a place in a historical process and “fits” into a larger sociocultural trajectory, they equate such organicism with the subsumption of

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individual will and character. They all feel that they must resist a force that destructively opposes them. I write “must” instead of “choose to” because their poetic imagery often creates a sense of exigency fuelling their personal rebellions against overbearing histories. “History” itself is a catch-all word that each of these poets uses with some frequency, yet what it stands for is an unpalatable amalgamation of biographical narratives—i.e., personal life stories—with public narratives—i.e., the stories of groups of people (groups into which the individual may not fit). History may even be allied with specific places, such as Mahon’s Belfast: the “desperate city” itself compels his participation in its story. One of Hartwig’s more surreal poems, discussed in Chapter 7, imagines a gravely ill figure whose body is covered with scenes from his own life as by a rash or by plague blisters. He begs the reader not to force him to interpret these pictures. Interpretation, here, is itself an intensification of pain. In order to heal his illness, however, a “reading” of the body will be necessary. The body must thereby be viewed as an object upon which narrative is inscribed as well as an actor in this narrative; the process of inscription, though, is the spread of disease. This is an example of the sort of exigency that all four poets make real in their poems. The historical actuality that they confront is uncomfortable: it pulls together feelings of physical and psychological pain, disorientation, revulsion, and refusal. To Hartwig, as we have seen, awareness is of no help: an awareness of solitude, fear, incapacity, and obligation in no way leads to a sense of acceptance. Belonging is not organic. Zagajewski creates his sense of it by mythologizing a city he has never inhabited; Mahon forges his by imagining a place out of time, or re-imagining quiet corners and decrepit garages until they fulfill a grounding function. Heaney strenuously attempts to learn how to belong, by means of a different sort of mythologization, one dependent upon historicizing and “consecrating” a threatening landscape until he becomes its “bridegroom.” Unlike the other poets, Heaney rarely confronts true foreignness when he travels, and also rarely feels a sense of belonging by means of such an encounter—foreignness, to Heaney, does not signify an ability to choose, as in Zagajewski’s work, or a wild chance to explore an idiosyncratic type of belonging, as it does to Hartwig in the United States. We can conclude that belonging is here an act, not a static condition; this act may need to be learned and consciously undertaken, as knowledge of how to do it is not innate or automatic; this act might put one in opposition to one’s home community (as with Mahon’s Belfast, which he does not live “bomb for bomb”); frustratingly, this act might not “work” to establish a satisfying sense of belonging but may need to be re-attempted several times in one writing life. Identity is both a more basic and more elusive concept than either history or belonging. Whereas we can understand how one rebels against people

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and places, it makes little sense to say that someone rebels against identity. The strings are false. Such a conclusion does, however, obtrude itself upon us as we attempt to bring together these poets’ struggles with and against identity, even if we acknowledge that the term is itself contested. There is a gap between poetic practice and contemporary cultural theory in the way identity is conceived, one that is illuminated by focusing upon the social construction of identity and the individual’s subsumption into (or independence from) socio-political forces. A brief consideration of this gap will allow us to appreciate the contributions of these poets in the field of identity studies, just as discussion of what is at stake in “identity” may help to clarify how we can keep their various rebellions and evasions in mind without creating false oppositions or flattening comparisons. The development of these poets shows how strongly identity, for them, is related to escape. Instead of creating an identity by dwelling continuously in one place and within the contours of one recognizable poetic personality, these poets create an identity out of difference and mutability. Zagajewski draws an enormous amount of poetic energy from his rebellion against the overbearing specter of history; Heaney chooses to enter this history in order to rebel against the subservient position in which it has put him, and his effort to possess and master actually ends up as an escape from the limitations of this ideational field. Hartwig strenuously attempts to escape narrative identity, and even personality, throughout her writing life. She escapes into abstraction. Creation of a personality involves the cohesion of recognizable traits, yet Hartwig and also Zagajewski repeatedly emphasize the self’s lack of cohesion. Conversely, Derek Mahon is a poet who believes that personality can itself be a form of escape. His identity is formed ironically, through a stylized rebellion that complicates the seemingly simple task of creating identity (or the once-fashionable phrase “finding one’s voice”). How much agency is available to this sort of rebellious speaker, and must identity involve a diminishment of agency as one reconciles desire with reality, as choice becomes overborne by necessity? Is there a way of conceiving identity that allows for greater choice? Is there space to reconfigure how identity is defined? These questions have been debated by cultural theorists, philosophers, and literary critics over the past few decades. The way in which Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig rebel against socio-cultural necessity and strive toward identitarian choice can usefully inform an overview of the theoretical struggle over identity, as we measure the demands of these poets against the vocabulary we use to conceptualize them. The Introduction has put forward the key concepts of postcoloniality and identity that may furnish a useful theoretical background for understanding these poets’ backgrounds and the work they do. What comes clear from a close reading of their poems, though, is that neither a politicized conception of identity—i.e., identity

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politics—nor a traditional, static conception of identity—as essence—will do. How can Zagajewski’s wanderer, or drop-of-water self, be discussed in terms of essence or essential belonging? It makes no sense to do so. There has, however, been considerable work done to destabilize these conceptions even if they may remain normative in the actual societies that these poets, and we, inhabit. The most concerted challenge to an essential(ist) view of identity has come from the cultural philosopher Stuart Hall and his student Paul Gilroy. Their work—informed by the postcolonial theory that was, at the time, still a growing field—provides a forceful new definition of identity: speaking in 1992, Hall states, ‘[the term identity] comes out of an essentialist, teleological discourse; when I use the term, identity, I mean identity, now, in a much more positional way, without any fixed origin. But nevertheless, what can you say? So I say “identity” with a quotation mark, I put it “under erasure.”’1 In this refreshingly colloquial way, Hall demonstrates the difficulty of redefining a term that is used for purposes one does not like. He clearly wants “now” to be a moment of change, and puts distance between himself and the term’s essentialist overtones by telling his interviewer to imagine quotation marks around a concept that one cannot do without, yet that which must be redefined. Hall does not actually put the concept under erasure but pioneers a new vision for it: in his view, whereas an Enlightenment view of identity focused on an individual’s core, and a sociological conception of identity focused on one’s social background (viewing identity as something formed in the interaction of self and society), the postmodern subject, to Hall, has no fixed, essential, or permanent identity. Identity becomes a moveable feast, “transformed continuously in relation to the ways in which we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us. . . . The subject assumes different identities at different times, identities which are not unified around a coherent ‘self.’ Within us are contradictory identities, pulling us in different directions, so that our identifications are being continuously shifted about.”2 The self, then, becomes the subject unifying all of these different identities. As they shift about, the self functions not as a core exerting a centrifugal pull but a word which extends its reach, however weakly, around these different identities. It becomes a denotative key, like Zagajewski and Hartwig’s speakers, that allows us to speak of a singular subject with multiple identities. Hall’s view allows for the “cultural systems which surround us” to figure into identity as a mass of separate identifications, movements which may have no endpoint or coherence. This view holds great potential for the study of literature, particularly poetry, where each poem offers an opportunity to metaphorize identity 1

Stuart Hall in interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen, 8 September 1992, in Morley and Chen 392–410. 2 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity 595–634.

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differently. The four poets in this study make the redefinition of identity a central thematic of their oeuvres, sometimes because of external factors (as when controlled, familiar scenes unexpectedly reveal their otherness in Heaney’s work), but most often by the force of will. Their poetry shows the extent to which different identities can or cannot be assumed at different times, as they all are forced to realize the constraints of their imaginative systems. Adam Zagajewski’s “The Self” presents one metaphorical extreme, in which the self is seen as a drop of water that clings to whichever surface it touches. It is an important state to explore—even though Zagajewski ultimately departs from this metaphor in later poems—because it brings together the freedom of perpetual change with the need to conform to certain containing structures. Identity is not transformed in a cultural vacuum but responds to “the ways we are represented or addressed”: this is a hard truth to accept for a group of poets who strenuously push for self-definition and celebrate—even idealize—the state of travel or wandering. Julia Hartwig represents a radical desire to un-place the self, not just from its physical home but from the containing structure of a life-narrative; Seamus Heaney represents a strong desire to re-place the self by creating a masterful narrative of identification. Derek Mahon inhabits the tension between displacing the self from an undesired narrative and finding a way to exert agency over an already-inscribed cultural space. The conflict between identity as essence and identity as process is at the heart of these poetic conflicts. These two views of identity come together around the concept of agency. The poet seeks to invest the creative act with maximal agency: these four poets all want to create a type of belonging that is empowering. They do not naively believe in creative omnipotence. The great question is now how much agency a “new” view of identity allows the subject. Judith Butler’s work helps us to limn the contours of this issue, as she combines the notion of a shifting identity with her stern (post-Foucauldian) view of a regulatory power that produces the subjects it controls, maintaining that our ability to conceive of an identity and to speak, write, or act it out already depends on what we can conceive within the regulatory system. Butler writes, “[i]dentifications are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted, and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability. They are that which is constantly marshaled, consolidated, retrenched, contested, and, on occasion, compelled to give way.”3 This language of warfare is striking. Identity is something that is fought over. The self fights for its own identification. Butler’s view accounts both for the constraints on identification and for the power to make identifications. There is certainly a sense of contestation in the poetic work considered in this study, and a sense that utter freedom is a chimera, that we are compelled to conform the logic governing “iterability” (especially at issue for Hartwig’s rebellious early speaker) and to confront 3

Judith Butler cited in Hall and du Gay 15–16.

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the constraints of language—constraints that keep identification from being utterly free and self-willed. At times, one’s own prior identifications are also contested, as in Heaney’s works; at times, a difficult process of identification is chosen over one that seems to be more freely given, as in Mahon’s works. Butler’s critical attention to the constant battle between regulation and selfconstitution is germinal for the debate over identity and agency. We play a part, take part in a certain culture, because that is what our society expects of us; we construct an identity because it allows us to take part in society, and vice versa, we are allowed “in.” Belonging is related to this Butlerian scenario, and if we act as if we belong, then it is hard to ascertain whether the act is real or not. These poets, however, tend not to do this. They put their “identity trouble” front and center. Heaney may be the only exception, and is only partially exceptional: he makes certain gestures that perform belonging, such as his ritual pacing of the land or his ritualistic archeologizing of his home place, gestures that establish what looks like a very strong assertion of spatial identity, of belonging upon one patch of earth. His continued fascination with the duality of surface and depth, however, alerts us to an instability at the core of this successful performance. Just as a “conjunctural” or “processual” theory of identity (to use Hall’s terms) usefully allows us to speak of continuous identification rather than settled identity, and allows us to theorize belonging as a shifting set of identifications rather than settled and essential rootedness, so also Butler’s theory of regulated performative identity allows us to nuance our understanding of the way identification “shows itself,” the way it is performed to the public—in this case, the poem’s implied audience. It also invites us to consider our own part in construing these authors’ identities. We, too, are bound by a vocabulary of “roots and graftings,” of formlessness and form, that their work has forced us to question and nuance. We have also had to question the credibility or thoroughness of their more fleeting identifications or modes of asserting belonging, as we realize that certain personae or postures (the archeological dig; the wanderer who doesn’t wander; the disaffected émigré) are more durable than others. Perhaps that makes them more “true,” less of a performance; or perhaps we must simply conclude that certain performances, when repeated enough, become the truest record we can gather of an author’s identity. In spite of the antagonistic pressures Butler considers (as identities are “constantly marshaled, consolidated, retrenched, contested”), Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig all believe in, and express, a certain amount of free choice and pleasure when it comes to exploring identity. Without this belief in choice, their work could not proceed; we must be careful how much we stress the boundedness of possible identifications. The leitmotifs of transformation, change, and travel of these poets often elicit expressions of joy, even ecstasy, in their work. One of the dangers in stressing regulation of identity over free choice is that this pessimistic scenario does not always

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mesh with the literary work one reads. Must we conclude that such poets think perversely, fooling themselves with belief in an illusory freedom (such as Zagajewski’s pure choice in “I Walked through the Medieval Town” or Mahon’s utopian cleansing and reimagining in “A Garage in Co. Cork”)? Cultural theory inhabits its own province, certainly, but it holds a special relationship to literature (“high theory” often begins as “literary theory”). Literature is one of the main cultural forms to which it refers, and it can indeed help to raise or extend issues that literary texts bring before us. At times, however, a space opens between theory and literature, so that theories of identity may proceed along different lines than do poems questioning identity. To refer back to Butler’s provocative language, there is certainly a bellicose element in these poets’ resistance to structures of domination and repression, but there also exists a sense of (perverse? illogical?) empowerment in their conscious construction and reconstruction of selfhood, and a clear feeling of the joy attendant upon envisioning the possibility of belonging. Hall’s view of identity as a moveable feast is part of his own belief that the regulatory powers-that-be do not overly circumscribe one’s choices: we are confronted with a bewildering multiplicity of identities, Hall writes, any one of which we could temporarily identify with. Such a statement presents the illusion of great empowerment. The danger of Hall’s view is that it may lead one to conclude that identities can indeed be remade freely at any moment. Of course, every identity is not free, and not available. Hall knows this well—he is interested in postcoloniality, in class, and in race. He is more aware than most of the ways our identitarian choices are circumscribed by history, society, and the accidents of our birth, to paraphrase Yeats. Yet one’s ability to misread such a statement points to a necessary division between two types of identification: those performed imaginatively and those performed in social space. Hall joins with Arjun Appadurai in focusing on the imagination as a social practice, thus bringing together both types, although they do not always conjoin so readily. Instead of addressing this potential divide, Hall worries about the appearance of “a superficial new world of consumer choice and off-the-peg identity options.”4 We may ask what is worrisome about such a system. It seems as though Hall is attracted to the freedom of indeterminacy but turned off by the superficiality of identities that are hastily assumed, as if they were commodities in an aggressively capitalist world, and “consumer choice” seems to signal frivolity, not deep freedom. Yet Hall’s phrasing effectively illustrates the intellectual elisions that may accompany full acceptance of “consumer choice and off-the-peg identity options,” a possibility that the four poets in this study do not even visualize. The drumbeats of history that follow Zagajewski’s speaker force the poet to reckon—albeit fearfully, reluctantly, or disgustedly—with the necessary limits of ostensibly open self-identification. These poets realize the 4

Hall quoted extensively in New Keywords 174–75.

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extent to which one cannot choose identities at will, yet do not fully subscribe to a Butlerian view either, tenaciously holding onto an idealistic view of choice even as they grapple with external forces and necessities that limit their freedom and power. Is this ambivalence regarding identitarian choice, perhaps, even deeper than it seems, dividing the desire for wandering and change from the desire for depth of character premised upon (a modicum of) stability, and historical responsibility? Does depth indeed carry an assumption of stasis, of remaining within the limits of one identification? If we possess one identity only, does that make it deeper than any one of the multiple identities that we may assume in the “new world” Hall describes? These questions are hard to generalize and therefore answer, leading into a subconscious level of emotional need that may, perhaps, resist theorization. There is an emotional undercurrent to such generalizing statements as “If we feel we have a unified identity from birth to death, it is only because we construct a comforting story . . . about ourselves. . . . The fully unified, complete, secure and coherent identity is a fantasy.”5 This may be true, but humans need fantasies. The specter of a unified identity will not disappear if it is a deep need for much of the population. Hall distances himself from this specter by injecting a tough, demystifying tone to his words (“it is only because . . .”), yet the emotion behind them shows that he is not neutral toward this “comforting story,” which is presented more attractively than the “off-the-peg” consumption of multiple identities. How could one not secretly desire something “unified, complete, secure and coherent”? The desire for narrative unity is not only a desire for a unified identity but, concomitantly, a desire for authorial agency. A conjunctural view of identity emphasizes the stimuli that cause one to change, although there may be considerable conflict between changes demanded by one’s environment and one’s desired identification. This has proven all too true for the poets in this study, all of whom must undergo a process of reckoning with external and internal imperatives, and who must confront the sources of their desires, which may themselves be externally conditioned, like Mahon and Hartwig’s escapism. The comforting story of a unified self answers many questions that may arise from a conjunctural view, such as, “how do I know who I will be next?,” or, “how am I to reconcile my identity at one point of time with others? Am I a hypocrite?” The crowning question may be, “am I the same person as I was yesterday?” By creating a sustained narrative, one moves towards a reconciliation: previous identifications are merged in a story of the self, a story in which the singular self undergoes change. This may be the bedrock of novels, but it is a subject of uncertainty in discussions of poems, in which personae are frequently assumed and the lyric speaker may or may not be the same recognizable personality poem after poem. The 5

Hall in Modernity 598.

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effects of a sustained narrative are double: one achieves a sense of authority and one receives a sense of belonging in one’s own story. This is greatly empowering. If one views identity as a continuous narrative of identification sustained over time, then does the term refer only to the narrative—the trajectory of one life is its “identity”—or does it imply a continued understanding of the narrative—so that “knowing oneself” is tantamount to having an identity? Julia Hartwig writes, in a late poem, “a thought dashed . . . sharply through me that everything happening to me / is incomprehensible to my mind.”6 What follows is a disoriented yet emotionally searing summation of the poet’s lack of self-comprehension and (as discussed in Chapter 8), the loss of poetic “ecstasy.” Has she failed to construct an identity, and can such a poem serve as an exemplary case, wherein an author cannot attain a sense of authorship over her own life-narrative? Hartwig is an interesting case because her late-life poems (written when the poet is in her seventies and eighties) react to a lifelong poetic flight from identity. She shows that it is possible to avoid identity. One cannot do away with it altogether, though, because of the inevitable external pressure to create narratives of identification—just as we must grapple with factors regulating and limiting identity, so must we respond to the imperative to express identity, to create and communicate identifications. Zagajewski’s traveler must take a seat in the train station, even if he wishes to situate himself in a perpetual in-betweenness (“alone but not lonely,” “a wanderer who doesn’t wander”). His metaphor does not exactly communicate the imperative to choose (why not refuse to sit and allow such metaphorical discomfort to communicate sustained identitarian refusal?) but it motivates the poem, and more broadly, compels Zagajewski and Hartwig to confront the narratives they have tried to escape. Charles Taylor influentially discusses the link between identity and authenticity, and between identity and recognition: the idea of individualized identity goes together with an ideal of being true to oneself, of authenticity, thus bestowing a moral dimension to the construction of identity—we need to be “true to ourselves,” a need that haunts Mahon as he comes to grips with his early decision not to learn “what is meant by home.” Since human life is fundamentally dialogic, one forms an ideal of authenticity through exchanges, sometimes struggles, with others, who are called upon to recognize one’s identity (pertinently for this particular study, Taylor adds that the driving force behind nationalist movements is a need for recognition that is basic to identity).7 These exchanges are accompanied by the feeling that one (or one’s group) has a right to be recognized by others. These “others,” of course, can differ, as Hartwig’s traveler may feel 6

“Gdy opatrzy się zieleń,” Nie ma odpowiedzi 76–77. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 225–256. 7

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that her movement through a foreign space allows for a different process of identification than in the home space. Taylor’s theses, like Butler’s, provides a provocative counterpoint to the dominant theme of avoidance, rebellion, and escapism running throughout this comparative study. Just as Mahon wishes to avoid subsumption in a group identity and rootedness in one perpetual place, so his aggressive self-stylization demands recognition, and this need should constructively complicate our understanding of his choice to hold himself apart. Hartwig’s poems also frequently contain a theatrical tone, an awareness of audience. This awareness is, finally, an extreme complication of these poets’ choice to flee identitarian constraints and exigencies. It is, perhaps, the same complication as that in Zagajewski’s phrase “alone but not lonely,” in which being apart is not the same as feeling a lack of human contact. There is no easy solution to the conflict between different views of identity and the various pressures that have been put upon its manifestations. The concept forces one to grapple with the difference between theory and lived reality, between the imagination and the socio-cultural sphere, and between what one desires and what one is compelled to accept. It is utopian to think that identity is always an open, transformative, empowering concept. The work of Adam Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Julia Hartwig illustrates the different ways identity can be conceived. None of them rests in a single definition, but through their poetry, they show how belonging can be imagined and re-imagined while taking nothing for granted, not the coherence of the self, not its “place” in society or in language, and certainly not the problematic and changeable concept called identity.

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INDEX

About All of This 230 The Andean Flute 97 Autumn Poland 41 Zagajewski, Adam 41–2 An Autumn Wind 131–3 The Banished Gods 110 Barańczak, Stanisław 22, 30, 191–2 Baranowska, Małgorzata 195 Beautiful Sisters agency and assertions 199 psychological processes 198 the self 200 Before Salvador Dali memory 199 mimesis and illusion 198 real feelings, recognition of 198 Surrealism 196 truth 197 belonging The Andean Flute 97 Butlerian scenario 239–40 The Dawn Chorus 97–8 Day Trip to Donegal 92 First Love 90–1 Glengormley 86–7 Hartwig, Julia emptiness 220 the self and agency 229–30 There Is Such a Town 220–1 Heaney, Seamus anxiety and not-belonging 135 Bogland 139–40 community 146 Death of a Naturalist 136–8 Digging 136 Exposure 157–9

9781441116420.indb 255

Gifts of Rain 141–2 language 136 Lloyd’s critique 153–4 The Loose Box 156–7 North 144–7 otherness 149 personal 164 Personal Helicon 136 The Place of Writing 141 Romantic quality 159–60 Station Island 138 The Tollund Man 135, 150–1 The Toome Road 154–6 word-hoard power 147–8 Zagajewski’s mythologization of Lvov 146 history 235–6 Jail Journal 90 The Last of the Fire Kings 96–7 The Mayo Tao 94–5 Ovid in Tomis 100–1 place names, dinnseanchas tradition of 82–3 The Sea in Winter 89 The Snow Party 95 Spring in Belfast 83 Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass 92–4 Zagajewski, Adam language 136 poetry 64–5 the whole 65–6 Beside the River, otherness 205 Beyond Howth Head 106–7 Bishop, Elizabeth 189, 206–8 Bogland 139–40 selfhood 181 Butler, Judith, identity 214, 239–40

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INDEX

Calling Forth 226–7 Cavanagh, Clare 10, 12, 34, 37 Chambers, Iain 200 Clearances 167–9 The Close of Summer 69–70 Comaroff, John, hybrid culture 153 A Confession 216–8 Country Road 129 Craigvara House 103 darkness 104 human society 118 intimacy 105 knowledge 124 Crotty, Patrick 154 Czechowicz, Józef 224 The Dawn Chorus 97–8, 108 Day Trip to Donegal 92 Deane, Seamus 9, 10, 14, 96 Death of a Naturalist Haughton, Hugh 137 land and psyche 136 sexuality and bodily decomposition 137–8 A Defense of Ardor 64–5 Derrida, Jacques, identity 18 District and Circle 180–1 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 121, 123, 128 abandonment 116 historical griefs 125 Drzewucki, Janusz 54, 201 Duality aesthetic harmony 203 articulating subject 202–3 problem of agency 201–2 space 207 duality, concept 187–8 Electric Light 179–81 Eliot, T. S. 126–8, 133, 159–60 emigration 16 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito 217 An Evening Postcard Addressed to the Intellect 63–4 Everywhere 214–5 Exposure 157–9

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figuring otherness city of ideas, Krakow 59 form 57–8 high style 58, 60 The Last Stop 79 Night is a Cistern 78 poetry 59–61 the self 75 simile conceptual and tonal disjunctions 69 definition 62 Demetrius’ On Style 62–3 Sails 67–8 Ziemia ognista 63 Stolarska Street 78, 80 To See 73 travel and home 71–3 Walk through This City 78 Without Form 58 Fire 32–4 First Love 90–1 foreignness 236 formless self 58 From Memory 48 From the Republic of Conscience 164–5 A Garage in Co. Cork 121, 123, 241 abandonment 116 grand synthesis 130 voyeurism, witness, and participation 119 Generation ’68 30–1, 187–8 Key 40–1 Polish romanticism 31 Zagajewski, Adam 30–1 Ghosts 212–3 Gifts of Rain identity and belonging 142 loop of silence 143 Toome and Broagh 141–2 Glengormley 86–7 The Gothic 50, 73 Grennan, Eamon 98, 105, 129 Hall, Stuart cultural theorizing 205 identity 19, 27, 238, 240–2

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INDEX

Harbour Lights 128 Hartwig, Julia About All of This 230 A Confession 216 ahistoricism 218–9 American poems 207–9 assertion 193–4 Beautiful Sisters agency and assertions 199 psychological processes 198 the self 200 Before Salvador Dali memory 199 mimesis and illusion 198 real feelings, recognition of 198 Surrealism 196 truth 197 Beside the River 205 biography 26 Calling Forth 226–7 clarity 198 Classicism and Surrealism 196 dream, Baranczak’s view 190–1 Duality aesthetic harmony 203 articulating subject 202–3 problem of agency 201–2 space 207 duality, concept 82, 187–8 Everywhere 214–5 extreme expression 215 Ghosts 212–3 identity 243 indulgence and avoidance 194 It Will Return 230–1 knowledge 233 Lublin Elegy 189 autobiographical significance 221–2 Middle West–Evening 210 mimetic style 207 Museum 213 oneiric qualities 190–1 place and person 208 process of identification 234 the self, life narrative 233–4 self-presentation 208–9 Still and Again 213–4

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257

style and stylization 195 Szymborska’s poems 229 There Is Such a Town 219 To See 73, 219 unknown and known 206 Waiting By the River 207–8 Waiting for a Signal 216, 227 What is Inside 204 Haughton, Hugh 23, 86, 96, 104, 121, 127, 137 Heaney, Seamus biography 24–5 Exposure 228 foreignness 236 From the Republic of Conscience 164–5 A Herbal 183–5 identity 20–1 The Nod 182 personification of the land 41 Place and Displacement lectures 122 Squarings 171–3 Station Island postcoloniality 163 selfhood 162 Terminus 169–72 Tollund 177–9 The Tollund Man in Springtime 181–2 A Herbal 183–5 Herbert, Zbigniew 33, 165, 179, 189, 217 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito 217 home home with stability 29 To Go to Lvov 49 Without Form 48–9 home with stability 29 Hufstader, Jonathan 177 I Everywhere 214 North 146 structure 200 The Idea of Order at Key West 108 identity definition 17–18 Derrida’s view 18

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258

diaspora and hybridity 17 Hall’s view 238, 241–2 Hartwig, Julia 243 history 235–6 ipseity 18 Ireland 20 Judith Butler’s work 239–40 mathematical 19–20 paradox of ethnic politics 18–19 Poland 20–1 Polish and Irish writing 20–1 selfhood 19 Taylor, Charles 243–4 Inhabiting the earth An Autumn Wind 131–3 The Banished Gods 110 Beyond Howth Head allusiveness 107 eremitism 106 Craigvara House 103 darkness 104 human society 118 intimacy 105 knowledge 124 The Dawn Chorus 108 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 121, 123, 128 abandonment 116 historical griefs 125 A Garage in Co. Cork 121, 123, 241 abandonment 116 grand synthesis 130 voyeurism, witness, and participation 119 The Idea of Order at Key West 108 Jail Journal, darkness 104 Ovid in Tomis 126 The Studio 105 Troubles 121 Under the Volcanoes 133 The Woods 103 darkness 104 home 105 human society 118 The Yellow Book 111–3, 118

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INDEX

Insomnia 129 Ireland identity 20 poet’s life 23–6 vs. Poland culture 10 dissimilarity 1 similarity 2–3 postcoloniality emigration 16 language 12 Romanticism vs. British Romanticism 6–7 militant republicanism 5–6 Romantic Ideology 6 Wordsworthian line 7–8 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion 6–7 Irish Romanticism 5–7 vs. Poland 7–9 Maria Janion’s view 9 I Walked Through the Medieval Town 57, 73 Jail Journal 90 Janion, Maria 3–5, 9, 15, 189, 196 The Joy of Writing 229 Józef Czechowicz Poem on the City of Lublin 223–4 Kavanagh, Patrick 129–30, 147, 156–7 Epic 129 identity 156–7 Key Generation ’68 40–1 the self 39–40 Kornhauser, Julian 22, 30 Krynicki, Ryszard 22, 30 The Last of the Fire Kings 96–7 The Last Stop 79 Lloyd, David 12–13, 61, 84, 142, 146, 153–4 Longley, Edna 88, 94, 111, 123, 144 The Loose Box 156–7 Lublin Elegy 189, 221–2

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INDEX

Mahon, Derek The Andean Flute 97 Andrew Waterman’s criticism 89 The Banished Gods 110 Beyond Howth Head 106–7 biography 23–4 Country Road 129 Craigvara House 103 darkness 104 human society 118 intimacy 105 knowledge 124 The Dawn Chorus 97–8, 108 Day Trip to Donegal 92 District and Circle 180–1 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 121, 123, 128 abandonment 116 historical griefs 125 First Love 90–1 A Garage in Co. Cork 121, 123, 241 abandonment 116 grand synthesis 130 voyeurism, witness, and participation 119 Glengormley 86–7 The Gothic 50, 73 Harbour Lights 128 Insomnia 129 intellectual knowledge and sensory apprehension 123 intimacy 105 Jail Journal 90 The Last of the Fire Kings 96–7 Ovid in Tomis 100–1 personal 164 place out of time 213 Rage for Order 108–9, 117–18, 123 return to myth 77 The Sea in Winter 89 The Snow Party 95 Spring in Belfast 87, 89, 91, 97, 111, 122 diction levels 83 Fire 84 The Studio 105 Sunday Morning 117

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259

Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass 92–4, 127 Under the Volcanoes 133 The Woods darkness 103–4 home 105 human society 118 Making Strange 168–9 The Mayo Tao 94–5 Mercer, Kobena 19 Mickiewicz, Adam 2, 4–9, 30, 31, 48 Forefathers’ Eve 31 Middle West–Evening 210 Miłosz, Czesław 10 30–1, 38, 53 moments of belonging Zagajewski, Adam 29 darkness 51 dynamic idealism and eternity 51 home. see home idealized home 43 internal calm 54–5 natural growth and man-made destruction 42 On the Road 54 A Quick Poem 53 Search 52–3 To Go to Lvov 44–7 Watching Shoah from a Hotel Room in America 43–4 Museum 213 Nasiłowska, Anna 203 nationalism 16 New Wave. see Generation ’68 Night is a Cistern 78 The Nod 182 nomadism 11–12 North 144–7 On the Road 54 otherness, Beside the River 205 Over America 37 Ovid in Tomis 100–1 Personal Helicon 136 Poem on the City of Lublin 224

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260

poet’s life Ireland 23–6 Poland 22–3 Poland Autumn 41 identity 20–1 vs. Ireland culture 10 dissimilarity 1 similarity 2–3 poet’s life 22–3, 26–7 postcoloniality emigration 16 language 12 nationalism 16 Soviet Russia 15 Romanticism Kościuszko Uprising 4 nomadism 11–12 political and textual approaches 3–4 Slavic literature, Mickiewicz’s lectures 5 Polish Romanticism 3–5 Generation ’68 31 vs. Ireland 7–9 Maria Janion view 9 postcoloniality Ireland emigration 16 language 12 Poland emigration 16 language 12 nationalism 16 Soviet Russia 15 Station Island 163 Preface to a Love Poem. see First Love primordia 19 protean self The Gothic 50 Over America 37 A Quick Poem 53 Rage for Order 108–9, 117–18, 123 Ramazani, Jahan 62, 143–4, 152

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INDEX

Romanticism Classicism 196 Ireland vs. British Romanticism 6–7 militant republicanism 5–6 Romantic Ideology 6 Wordsworthian line 7–8 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion 6–7 Sails 67–9 The Sea in Winter 89 Search 52–3 second thoughts Squarings 171 Terminus 170 the self Beautiful Sisters 200 Classicism and Surrealism 196 dissolution 38 divine mystery 231–2 Exposure 159 form of identity 57 Harbour Lights 128 I Everywhere 214 figuring otherness 75 To Go to Lvov 35, 48 I Walked Through the Medieval Town 57 Key 39–41 From Memory 48 style and stylization 195 system of signs 41 To Go to Lvov 35 Waiting for a Signal 216 A Wanderer 38–9 Zagajewski, Adam 239 selfhood in-betweenness 161 Bogland 181 District and Circle 180–1 Electric Light 179–81 Glanmore Sonnets 162 Hartwig’s view 203 A Herbal 183–5 identity 19 individual perception 37

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INDEX

language 162 Making Strange 168–9 Markings 174 The Nod 182 nowhere 168 primordia, identity 166 From the Republic of Conscience 164–5 second thoughts 170–1 self and place 176 Terminus 169–72 Tollund 177–9 The Tollund Man 178–9 The Tollund Man in Springtime 181–2 Shallcross, Bożena 11, 35, 38, 77 simile The Close of Summer 69–70 conceptual and tonal disjunctions 69 An Evening Postcard Addressed to the Intellect 63–4 To Go to Lvov 62 Smith, Stan 84, 96, 163–4 The Snow Party 95 Spring in Belfast 87, 89, 91, 97, 111, 122 diction levels 83 Fire 84 Squarings 171–3 Stanisław Barańczak 30, 191–2 Station Island postcoloniality 163 selfhood 162 Stevens, Wallace The Idea of Order at Key West 108 Rage for Order 108–9, 117–18, 123 Sunday Morning 117 Still and Again 213–4 Stolarska Street 78, 80 The Studio 105 Sunday Morning 117 Szymborska, Wisława 229 Taylor, Charles 243–4 Terminus 169–72 There Is Such a Town 220–1 The Tollund Man 135, 150–1 selfhood 162, 178–9

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261

The Tollund Man in Springtime 181–2 The Toome Road 154–6 Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass 92–4, 127 blank page vs. perfect prints 101 time and space Schulz, Bruno 45 To Go to Lvov 44–7 To Go to Lvov home 49 moments of belonging 44–7 the self 35 Tollund 177–9 To See 73, 219 Troubles 121 Truth 31–2 Under the Volcanoes 133 Vendler, Helen 144, 157, 171, 173 Waiting By the River 207–8 Waiting for a Signal 216 Walk through This City 78 A Wanderer 38–9 Watching Shoah from a Hotel Room in America 43–4 What is Inside 204 Without Form formlessness 48–9 figuring otherness 58 The Woods darkness 103–4 home 105 human society 118 Wordsworth, William 7–8, 94, 126 Yeats 8–9, 44, 50, 52, 77, 87, 89, 103, 113–4, 122, 124, 126–8, 130, 132–4, 144, 152, 164, 195, 241 cosmopolitan nativism 143 Lapis Lazuli 130 Sailing to Byzantium 44, 124, 152 Zagajewski, Adam Autumn 41–2 biography 22

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262

The Close of Summer 69–70 A Defense of Ardor 64–5 desire 47 An Evening Postcard Addressed to the Intellect 63–4 Fire 32–4 From Memory 48 Generation ’68 30–1 home-boundedness, fear of 216 I Walked Through the Medieval Town 211, 220 knowledge 233 The Last Stop 79 Lyrical Ethics, Clare Cavanagh 34 moments of belonging 29 darkness 51 dynamic idealism and eternity 51 home. see home idealized home 43

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INDEX

internal calm 54–5 natural growth and man-made destruction 42 On the Road 54 A Quick Poem 53 Search 52–3 To Go to Lvov 44–5 Watching Shoah from a Hotel Room in America 43–4 Night is a Cistern 78 Over America 37 Sails 67–9 Stolarska Street 78, 80 Truth 31–2 Walk through This City 78 A Wanderer 38–9 Without Form formlessness 48–9 figuring otherness 58

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