{"id":130313,"date":"2018-10-24T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130313"},"modified":"2018-10-24T15:02:43","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T19:02:43","slug":"fighting-with-czeslaw-milosz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/24\/fighting-with-czeslaw-milosz\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting with Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz.<\/p><\/div>\n

It is a blessing for a poet to have a Great Poet to fight with, forever.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean a Great Poet one merely despises. That\u2019s nothing. It has to be someone you partly love, partly revere, but who lets you down over and over and over and makes you want to scream.<\/p>\n

The Great Poet has to be one from whom you are continuously learning, even if most of the time what you\u2019re getting is a kind of cautionary tale. He or she has to be someone you can never get rid of. You keep going back.<\/p>\n

Does everybody remember Ezra Pound\u2019s little epigram about his deal with Walt Whitman? Here, I can do it from memory:<\/p>\n

A Pact<\/b><\/p>\n

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman.
\nI have detested you long enough.
\nI come to you like a grown child
\nWho has had a pigheaded father.
\nI am old enough now to make friends.
\nIt was you that broke the new wood;
\nNow is a time for carving.
\nWe have one sap and one root:
\nLet there be commerce between us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Get it? Pound couldn\u2019t shake Whitman. Whitman got on his nerves, and that was never gonna change. But yer daddy is yer daddy. Maybe he and you can team up, after all, as long as everybody understands the new terms \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pound made up a spoof line somewhere, making fun of Whitman\u2019s style. It was something like \u201cBehold, I eat watermelons.\u201d That cracks me up. Those four words tell you quite a lot about what Pound was resistant to. And if you just think about it for a second, you can see why unintentional buffoonery would be a \u201clive issue\u201d for Ezra Pound.<\/p>\n

With me, it\u2019s Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. When I thumb through the seven-hundred-plus pages of his Collected<\/i>, I am appalled, time and again, at the man\u2019s influence over me, especially the me from my twenties. I keep thinking, Oh, so that\u2019s<\/i> where I got that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what always happens. The young poet covets the admiration the Great Poet receives from professors, and so the young poet sets out to imitate. Unfortunately (and this drove Alexander Pope absolutely insane), conceited fools always imitate without judgment<\/i>. They helplessly, brainlessly mimic the faults<\/i> of their models just exactly as much as if not more than they imitate the good stuff. And this is exactly what happened with me.<\/p>\n

I have a line like Pound\u2019s spoof on Whitman, about Mi\u0142osz. Mine\u2019s not funny, though. In fact, I\u2019ve often wondered whether it\u2019s not a spoof at all but is simply present in some unsearched corner of that Collected<\/i>. The line goes: \u201cThe women are come from the river, with their baskets.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with that? Nothing, I guess. To me<\/i>, it\u2019s affected. It\u2019s that European \u201cbiblical\u201d tone, in which women are always The Women. Likewise with the baskets, likewise with the river. All rivers in Mi\u0142osz are The River, even if he gives a particular name. All cities are The City. You\u2019re supposed to picture a walled Babylonian town from 4000 B.C.<\/small> The men are merchants, warriors, or philosophers. The women go to the river with their baskets. Everyone is in a robe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, what\u2019s wrong with that<\/i>? What are you gonna do, chuck Rilke, Montale, Amichai, and almost all Spanish poets?\u201d I\u2019m not chucking anybody. All those guys are Greats; they deserve their reputations. But when you write (or, worse, cause my twenty-seven-year-old self to write) in a deeply ancient pastoral register in order to secure a tone of high moral seriousness, it\u2019s not<\/i> gonna be all gains for you. You lose something, too. Me and La Rochefoucauld will be out back, having a cigarette.<\/p>\n

Put down that gun. Mi\u0142osz wrote at least five of my all-time favorite poems. I know you like \u2019em, too. \u201cElegy for N.N.,\u201d \u201cGreek Portrait.\u201d I even like that boring, messed-up, eleven-legged jungle of zibzib that doesn\u2019t make any sense, called \u201cWith Trumpets and Zithers.\u201d\u00a0But how are you going to defend things like this:<\/p>\n

Autumn
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

Cathedral of my enchantments, autumn wind, I grew old giving thanks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a whole poem. As is this:<\/p>\n

\n

On the Death of a Poet<\/b><\/p>\n

The gates of grammar closed behind him.
\nSearch for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And now, lastly, this:<\/p>\n

\n

If There Is No God<\/b>
\nIf there is no God,
\nNot everything is permitted to man.
\nHe is still his brother\u2019s keeper
\nAnd he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
\nBy saying there is no God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That last one puts me in mind of a certain bit out of Mencken. He defines a judge as a \u201claw student who marks his own examination papers.\u201d Now, to me, that nails the very thing that should not be imitated in Mi\u0142osz. One finds him again and again grading his own papers and giving himself, with certain tactful qualifications, a well-deserved A.<\/p>\n

And like all depressed Christians, he regards the fact that he beholds the world in \u201cwonder\u201d as very meritorious indeed \u2026<\/p>\n

You can tell I hate him, right? But I hate him like his student or his offspring. I learn stuff every time I approach him, no exceptions. And it\u2019s partly he who taught me not to envy him in the first place \u2026<\/p>\n

Do you remember this bit, on the last page of Unattainable Earth <\/i>(1986)? It\u2019s like it\u2019s the colophon for that book:<\/p>\n

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s it, no title, no nuthin\u2019. Underneath, it says, weirdly: \u201cBerkeley\u2014Paris\u2014Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981\u20131983<\/i>.\u201d As if it took him three years and three cities to write that little note. But then, if you page backward through the poems, you\u2019ll see that the citation surely refers to the whole book, not just that one page. Still, the humorous misunderstanding is not altogether unwelcome.<\/p>\n

Mi\u0142osz is bigger than I\u2019ll ever be, but, partly taught by him, I don\u2019t care about that anymore. The main thing, now, is to figure out what I\u2019m going to do about those four words, \u201cnot to enchant anybody.\u201d (Is that where I should be headed, as a poet? Is that why he is big and I am little? Or is it why I find him so boring and prosaic 95 percent of the time?)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I wish to register a very simple gift that Mi\u0142osz offers anyone who even riffles through his Collected<\/i> without reading it. It\u2019s this form<\/i>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pages 2 and 3 (out of 4) of the poem \u201cCapri,\u201d as it appears in \u201cNew and Collected Poems, 1931\u20132001,\u201d first Ecco paperback edition, 2003<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the very beginning, when Jane Miller told me to read Mi\u0142osz when I was in M.F.A.-land, I have thought that strophic prose has a future in American poetry. It\u2019s a very manageable rhythm, and you get an attractive page out of it, and, best of all, you don\u2019t have to fuss with hundreds of unconvincing line breaks where no line breaks are necessary.<\/p>\n

I wish I could say the form brings out the best in Mi\u0142osz, but that\u2019s not exactly the case. He seems to have taken it up in the late sixties, right around the time he stopped being able to come up with good titles for books. (From the Rising of the Sun<\/i>; Provinces<\/i>; Facing the River<\/i>, and so on.) There are roughly thirty specimens of strophic prose in the Collected<\/i>, along with perhaps a dozen more items that might as well be strophic prose. Of all these, not one is what I would call a Major Mi\u0142osz Hit, unless you think \u201cIn Szetejnie\u201d is a hit. One of these pieces even begins, alarmingly, with the note, \u201cPerhaps this is not a poem but at least I say what I feel<\/i>.\u201d The stonyhearted part of me replies: Yeah, you could have written that sentence on a lot<\/i> of these, babe.<\/p>\n

But see, this goes back to my larger point. Mi\u0142osz leaves one scheming and brooding. Not a bad place to be. It\u2019s a little like what Auden says about Hardy\u2019s poetry. I forget where this is, but it\u2019s something about how lucky<\/i> Auden and his generation were, having Hardy as a model, \u2019cuz Hardy was great but there was patently room for improvement. That is a sunny way of looking at it, and one that I hope to adopt someday, when I am better able to pretend I don\u2019t hate stuck-up poets who fascinate me.<\/p>\n

Listen, this is not about fathers and sons, or masculine lala. It\u2019s about greatness and wanting to be a moral authority. I know very well there is an army of emerging poets for whom Jorie Graham serves the exact same function I\u2019m talking about here. And I really mean it when I say it\u2019s a blessing to have somebody like that to fight with. Keeps you hungry. Keeps you questioning yourself.
\nLet Mi\u0142osz himself have the last word. This is one of his best poems, to my mind, but I\u2019m going to ask him to switch roles in it. In the original, Mi\u0142osz plays the part of the man with the boot. This afternoon, I want him to play the part of the marble stairs at the end:<\/p>\n

Should, Should Not<\/b><\/p>\n

A man should not love the moon.
\nAn axe should not lose weight in his hand.
\nHis garden should smell of rotting apples
\nAnd grow a fair amount of nettles.
\nA man when he talks should not use words that are dear to him,
\nOr split open a seed to find out what is inside it.
\nHe should not drop a crumb of bread, or spit in the fire
\n(So at least I was taught in Lithuania).
\nWhen he steps on marble stairs,
\nHe may, that boor, try to chip them with his boot
\nAs a reminder that the stairs will not last forever.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read our Art of Poetry interview with <\/em>Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz in our Winter 1994 issue.<\/em><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is\u00a0<\/em>Try Never<\/a>. He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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