Adam Zagajewski
“Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945; as an infant he was relocated with his family to western Poland. He lived in Berlin for a couple of years, moved to France in 1982, and taught at universities in the United States, including the University of Houston and the University of Chicago. Zagajewski wrote in Polish, but many of his books of poetry and essays have been translated into English. His prose collections include Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995) and the 2000 memoir Another Beauty. Zagajewski won the Prix de la Liberté as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Berliner Künstlerprogramm.
Zagajewski was considered one of the “Generation of ’68” or “New Wave” writers in Poland; his early work was protest poetry, though he moved away from that emphasis in his later work. The reviewer Joachim T. Baer noted in World Literature Today that Zagajewski’s themes “are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.” The titles of his poetry collections suggest some of these concerns: Tremor (1985), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Asymmetry (2018). Zagajewski won many awards, including the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2010 European Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Zhongkun International Poetry Prize.
Writing of Zagajewski’s 1991 collection, Canvas, poet and reviewer Robert Pinsky commented that the poems are “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”
Zagajewski died on March 21, 2021, in Krakow, Poland. He was 75.”
Source: Biography found on Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adam-zagajewski#poet More info on Adam Zagajewski⇒
CPC Readings
Friday, April 15, 1977
with John Ashbery
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Poetry by Adam Zagajewski
You who see our homes at night
and the frail walls of our conscience,
you who hear our conversations
droning on like sewing machines
—save me, tear me from sleep,
from amnesia.
Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures,
oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding—
our only origin, our only longing?
Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness,
an endless highway,
Sahara yellow?
After all, you know there are days
when even thirst runs dry
and prayer’s lips harden.
Sometimes the sun’s coin dims
and life shrinks so small
that you could tuck it
in the blue gloves of the Gypsy
who predicts the future
for seven generations back
and then in some other little town
in the south a charlatan
decides to destroy you,
me, and himself.
You who see the whites of our eyes,
you who hide like a bullfinch
in the rowans,
like a falcon
in the clouds’ warm stockings
—open the boxes full of song,
open the blood that pulses in aortas
of animals and stones,
light lanterns in black gardens.
Nameless, unseen, silent,
save me from anesthesia,
take me to Tierra del Fuego,
take me where the rivers
flow straight up, horizontal rivers
flowing up and down.
– Adam Zagajewski, “Tierra del Fuego”
“Autumn is always too early.
The peonies are still blooming, bees
are still working out ideal states,
and the cold bayonets of autumn
suddenly glint in the fields and the wind
rages.”
– Adam Zagajewski, “Autumn”