Monologue of a Dog by Wisława Szymborska

There's fate and fate. Mine changed abruptly.
One spring came
and he wasn't there.
All hell broke loose at home.
Suitcases, chests, trunks, crammed into cars.
The wheels squealed tearing downhill
and fell silent round the bend.

After reading How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), I was curious about the poetry of author Wisława Szymborska, who, in a surprisingly turn, won the Nobel in 1996 after writing popular but largely regionally-known poetry for nearly 6 decades. 

It's interesting to read a collection like this after reading something like How to Start Writing, with its acerbic tone and ironical wit. I wondered if Szymborska's own poetry would live up to her own advice. I can imagine the recipients of some of her bon mots secretly hoping it wouldn't; alas for them, the poems in this slim volume are, to use a literally term, straight bangers.

The title poem, which I've excerpted above, opens the collection and is the clear standout. Over the course of the poem, it moves from pastoral animal poetry into something much bigger and broader: revolution, the cruelties of history, the tragedies of the simple lives caught up in time's tumultuous passage. And it does all this without ever leaving the head of the titular canine. If you read nothing else of this review, do yourself a favor and click the link above.

The other poems often follow a similar structure. From a simple and small scale starting point they often blossom out thematically to encompass far more than their ostensible subjects. A baby pulling a tableclose becomes a meditation on physics and entropy; a series of short aphorisms about statistics turns toward existential loneliness; a survey of epochal time gives way to the infinity of an instant. 

But lest this all sound weighty and tedious--and any poetry lover can conjure a hundred great poets are often just this--Szymborska's style is never less than approachable. As she recommended in her column, she never chooses to obscure when speaking straight will do. Mystery and ambiguity are in these pieces, around the edges, but she isn't interested in obscurity. It struck me while reading how often poetry is spoken of as something that can make the familiar unfamiliar, and how rarely that occurs; but here, in free verse lines anyone can read, Szymborska does just that.

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) by Wislawa Szymborska

"My parting with summer springs forth like a white breast from a tunic bound with gems..." Many questions leap to mind: why a breast, why white, why springing, why from a tunic. The remaining poem leaves the questions unanswered. Instead Adam turns up, tempted by a snake--a bold innovation, but unlikely to catch on. Humanity has long since happily blamed it all on Eve."

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) is a strange little book. Barely 100 pages long, it's a collection of responses to submissions made to the Polish magazine Literary Life, in the column Literary Mailbox. The responses are presented sans context, as the material or questions they're responding to aren't provided or summarized.

One interesting side effect is that this is the rare book where reading the introduction and afterward, a short interview with Szymborska, are more or less required, as they provide the historical and literary context in which the replies were written. Started in 1968 by Szymborska and her friend, author Wlodzimierz Maciag, Literary Mailbox doled out advice to writers who'd sent in various works--poems, stories, even novels--mostly in the form of cutting abut humorous bon mots or, occasionally, a paragraph or two of feedback:

The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these anxieties beset every budding bard. They're curable, if caught in time. Your poems thus far resemble strained translations from direct speech into needless complication--we're tempted to ask for the originals on which this fruitless labor was based. For the moment, though, please believe us, a single metaphor organically linked to the poem's original concept is worth more than 1,500 embellishments added ex post. Please send us something new in a few months. 

Reading through them in bulk can be a bit of a dispiriting exercise, as most of the material collected here is fairly negative; but on the other hand, it's often very funny, and the advice given is good, if perhaps not particularly hard to come by: temper your highbrow language, make your work concrete, keep track of your metaphors and don't write poems about spring ("spring no longer exists in poetry"). Szymborska has the least patience, however, for the lazy or arrogant: her coldest replies are toward those who don't to rewrite, who write only about dour things, who demand publication. Perhaps the cruelest cut here is one of the shortest: "Does the enclosed work betray talent? It does."

But the cumulative effect, especially in conjunction with the closing interview, is that of someone who takes poetry, and writing in general, seriously while still recognizing that there is something a touch silly about treating every letter scrawled onto paper as holy writ. But I hope she never finds this review.