Adam Zagajewski (1945 – 2021), Polish poet, translator and essayist.
YOUNG POETS, PLEASE READ EVERYTHING
By Adam Zagajevski
I sense at least one danger here. By discussing ways of reading, or simply by sketching a portrait of a “good reader,” I might give the impression, unconsciously, that I myself am a perfect reader. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a chaotic reader, and the holes in my education breathe deeper than the Swiss Alps. My remark might therefore be seen as belonging to the realm of dreams, a kind of personal utopia, rather than as a description of my own truly small platoon of virtues.
To read chaotically!
I unpacked my summer vacation suitcase a while ago. Let's take a look at the books I took with me to Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. I probably should have taken Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Byron, Madame de Staël, Juliusz Slowacki, Adam Mickiewicz, Gibbon, and Nabokov, since they are all connected with this famous lake in one way or another. But none of them really stuck with me. Instead, I see on the floor of my studio Jacob Burckhard's The Greeks and Greek Civilization (yes, in the English translation, I found it in a used bookshop in Houston); a selection of Emerson's essays, Baudelaire's poems in French, Stefan George's poems in Polish, Hans Jonas's classic book on Gnosticism (in German), some poems by Zbigniew Herbert, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's voluminous Complete Works (Gesammelte Werke) containing his unforgettable essays. Some of these books belong to various Parisian libraries. This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries - the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
But why do I read? Do I really need to answer this question? It seems to me that poets read for all sorts of reasons, some of which are directly related to the work and no different from the motives of any other mortal. But our readings take place mainly under two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read more memories (for knowledge, edification), because we are curious about what our many predecessors produced before our minds were opened. This is what we call tradition – or history.
We also read for ecstasy. Why? Simply. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-organized information, but also a kind of energy that is close to shamanic dancing and intoxication. This is especially true of (some of) poetry. Because we ourselves experience those strange moments when we are guided by a force that demands strict obedience and sometimes, but not always, leaves behind black stains on paper as fire leaves ashes (blacken the paper, as the French call the noble act of writing). And once you've had a moment of ecstatic writing, you start acting like a drug addict who craves more and more. You'd do anything for a little more of it; and reading doesn't seem like an excessive sacrifice.
The books I read—if such a narrative is sought and desired—fall into these two categories, books of memory and books of ecstasy. You can’t read an ecstatic book late at night: insomnia ensues. You can read stories before you fall asleep and save Rimbaud for noon. The relationship between memory and ecstasy is rich, paradoxical, and engaging. Sometimes ecstasy grows out of memory and then explodes like a forest fire—an old sonnet caught by a greedy eye can ignite the spark of a new poem. But memory and ecstasy don’t always coincide. Sometimes they are separated by a sea of indifference.
There are scholars whose memories are surprisingly vast and yet they produce very little. Sometimes in the library you might catch sight of an old man in a bow tie, bent over with age, and you think: This person knows everything. And some of those old readers with thick glasses do know a lot about things (although maybe not that little old man you saw yesterday). But that is a long way from creativity. At the other end of the spectrum we have teenagers who are obsessed with hip-hop, but we don't expect to reap artistic harvests from such a passion.
Perhaps memory and ecstasy need each other desperately. Ecstasy requires a little familiarity, and memory loses nothing when it is colored by strong emotions. The problem of reading is so vital to us – we poets, I mean, but also simply people who like to think, to meditate – because our education has been so deficient. The liberal schools you attend (or the communist schools I studied in) do not bother much with the classics and are very little interested in the giants of modernity. Our schools pride themselves on producing efficient members of that Great Beast, the new society of proud consumers. It is true that we are not tortured like the adolescents of the nineteenth century in England (or France, Germany, or perhaps even Poland): we were not forced to memorize all of Virgil or Ovid. We must be self-educated; The difference between someone like Joseph Brodsky, who dropped out of school at fifteen and continued to read everything he could get his hands on, and someone who has successfully gone through the entire modern American education system, including a Ph.D., without ever stepping foot outside the Ivy League fence, needs no comment. We do our reading mostly off campus and in our post-campus lives. The American poets I know are very readable, yet I can clearly see that they gained their knowledge in the interval between graduation and entering middle age. Most American graduate students know much less, much less than their European counterparts, but many of them will make up for it in the years to come.
I also feel that many young American poets read only certain things these days; mostly poetry and not much else, except perhaps a little criticism. To be honest, there's nothing wrong with reading poetry from Homer to Zbigniew Herbert to Anne Carson, but it still seems to me that this way of reading is too specialized. It's like a biology student telling you: I only read biology. Or a young astronomer who only reads astronomy. Or an athlete who only reads the sports section of The New York Times. There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry - but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.
To read “only” poetry implies that there is something reluctant and detached about the nature of contemporary poetic practice, that poetry is separated from the fundamental questions of philosophy, from the anxieties of the historian, the doubts of the painter, the scruples of the honest politician, for example, from the deep common wellspring of culture. The way a young poet organizes his reading is in fact essential to the place of poetry among the other arts. It can determine – and not just for a single individual – whether poetry is a central discipline (even if read by a happy few), responding to the key impulses of a given historical moment, or a more or less interesting form of drudgery that for some reason continues to attract a few unhappy devotees.
Or is it more likely that it is quite the opposite? Our reading patterns reflect our deepest, perhaps not entirely conscious, conclusions about the central – or peripheral – place of poetry. Are we content with the timid specialist approach, the cautious sectarian relationship to literature, typical of those writers who agree to limit themselves to small, heartbreaking narratives? Or will we rather aspire to the generous stanza of the poet whose heart yearns to think, to sing, to take risks, to generously and courageously embrace the fragile humanity of our time (without forgetting the broken names)? So, young poets, please read everything, read Plato and Ortega y Gasset, Horace and Hölderlin, Ronsard and Pascal, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Oscar Milosz and Czeslaw Milosz, Keats and Wittgenstein, Emerson and Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Umberto Saban, Thucydides and Colette, Apollinaire and Virginia Woolf, Anna Akhmatova and Dante, Pasternak and Machado, Montaigne and Saint Augustine, Proust and Hofmannsthal, Safon and Szymborska, Thomas Mann and Aeschylus, read biographies and treatises, essays and political analyses. Read for yourself, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your beloved brain. But also read against yourself, read to question yourself and out of impotence, read out of desperation and out of erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Ciorani, even Carl Schmitt, read the newspapers, read those who despise, exclude, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do so. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what it is to evolve in poetry, and also read those whose gloom or malice or stupidity or grandeur you cannot understand, because only in this way will you grow, surpass yourself, and become who you are.
/Adam Zagajewski, 'A Defense of Ardor', Ferras, Strauss and Giroaux, 2005
Express Newspaper,
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