Poet asked us to praise the ‘mutilated world’
Houston gave him needed solitude but also a place of shared purpose
I loved Adam Zagajewski’s poems before I ever met or came to love him. I recall the shock and transport, the mounting excitement I felt in reading his early selected poems, “Tremor,” the first book of his translated from Polish into English, published in 1985, and I resolved immediately to try to hire him in the Creative
Writing Program at the University of Houston, where I had recently begun teaching.
I had no idea whether or not he spoke English or had ever taught before — it didn’t matter to me, so enamored was I of his poetry — and my passion prevailed. I argued that we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to hire an heir to Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, a European poet of the greatest magnitude. At the time, Adam was living in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and needed a job — the French did not understand the sophisticated flaneur moving in their midst — and so in 1988 he stepped off a plane in Houston with a red scarf, a migraine headache and a German-English dictionary. He was very polite, but he seemed tired and disoriented. For a moment, I wondered what I had done.
Houston was an incongruous place for him to land for many reasons. The city is obsessed
with the future to the point of pushing aside history. And though Houston had long seen itself as a global city, in 1988 that was more aspiration than reality. His arrival gave the European intellectual tradition more of a foothold on the swampy Gulf Coast, but Houston and its people changed him as well.
“The first time I went, I had only the weakest impressions of the place, I pictured a brown desert, a wasteland,” Adam wrote of that time in “Slight Exaggeration,” his 2011 book of essays. “I saw the gigantic trees, evergreen oaks overgrown with Spanish moss, like ancient bison … (T)hey never lost all their leaves even for an instant, they renewed them systematically, new leaves grew beneath the previous year’s leaves and after a moment mercilessly pushed the old ones out — the battle of the generations crystallized in pure, clinical, horrifying form — so that the trees were never naked.”
Adam was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945 just weeks after the Nazis surrendered to Allied forces. He was a leading member of the “Generation of ’68” or “New Wave” writers resisting communism in Poland and the government there banned his work. By the time he came to Houston, Adam’s work had evolved. He never forgot the importance of addressing communal concerns, but he also valued his privacy, the morality of only speaking for oneself. Or as he put it: “I have discovered there is also a ‘metaphysical’ part of myself that is rather anarchic — not interested in politics or in history but in poetry and music.” He had impeccable manners and carried himself with dignity; he had become a sort of spiritual aristocrat, a pure artist like Thomas Mann or Rainer Maria Rilke.
By his second day in Houston, we settled into a French café in Rice Village and started talking about poetry, a conversation that never stopped. I also took him to get a rental car and soon he was zipping round on what he called the Texas boulevards. In those days, we lived on either side of the Menil Collection, and Adam said that he could often see me coming to get him across the meadow. He seemed endlessly amused by my American openness, which wore him down, and eventually cracked his carefully constructed facade. In fact, our entire Creative Writing Program wore him down with our friendliness and our rigor — and he responded deeply to our core group: the sly irony of Donald Barthelme, the full-throated embrace of Cynthia Macdonald, the capacious intellect of Richard Howard. Our graduate students also rapidly embraced the unlikely intellectual in their midst.
Adam challenged those students. He chided them gently, “So you all have been writing a lot of small poems about small things. I would like for you to try something larger.” He assigned one class to write elegies to the 20th century. He made space for students to probe big questions with utter seriousness and depth. The course titles speak for themselves: The Imagination and Its Enemies. End of the Century, End of the World. Memory and Oblivion. Poetry and Doubt.
I have heard more than one of his students do spot-on imitations of his accent and manner. I liked to try to make him laugh and see his caterpillar eyebrows arching upwards. Adam was kind-hearted and pensive, a reticent, somewhat introverted person, quiet by nature, modest, solitary, inclined to melancholy, though he also had a gift for friendship, a quick wit, a droll sense of humor, and a special talent for joy. He had clear, piercing eyes.
Adam quickly influenced more than his students and fellow faculty. He became a prized member of our community — collaborating on classical music events with Sarah Rothenberg at Da Camera, collaborating with Rich Levy and Lillie Robertson for readings sponsored by Inprint. He liked our swagger, our energetic go-to intellectual spirit, and we loved his rectitude and gravitas. It was an unlikely marriage of equals.
Adam settled in surprisingly well, partly because he discovered the Rice University library, where the open stacks and wellstocked, mostly untouched books especially appealed to him. “Long shelves brim with books of largely forgotten authors, who labored their whole lives,” he wrote in “Slight Exaggeration. “In vain, since the dusty tomes of their poetry and prose now shivered hopelessly in the library’s air-conditioned halls? But occasionally someone still got read, still lived. … I found many books that I hadn’t been able to get in Parisian libraries. … (I)n the United States memory is preserved chiefly in libraries and museums, since the cities mostly suffer from amnesia, old buildings are laid waste and gleaming new buildings take their place every couple of decades.” He wrote a poem called “The Polish Biographical Dictionary in a Library in Houston.”
I was nervous that another creative writing program would poach him (many tried over the years) and did not want to tell him that quiet, open stack libraries were a common feature of American universities. When his wife Maja came to visit, the first place that he decided to show her was the Rice library. For the next fifteen years, Adam spent one semester a year in Houston, writing poems, teaching in our program, and traveling around the country to give poetry readings. We had many adventures together — he had a sly way of disagreeing with me on panels, carving up my arguments with Old-World knowhow, the cutting remark (“My dear friend Eddie believes …”) — and we sparked each other’s imaginations. His work had a tremendous impact on me personally, but it also began to impact the overall American scene.
I like to think the influence ran in two directions. After Milosz, the Polish Nobel laureate, moved back to Krakow, he missed the interchange with American poets that had been such an integral part of his life in California, and Adam got the idea of cheering him up by creating a colloquy in his honor. Together, we invented the Krakow Seminar, which was sponsored by the University of Houston, and for a decade we brought ten of our graduate students together with Polish, European and American luminaries (Tomas Venclova, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, W. S. Merwin), to ask central questions about poetry, politics, metaphysics and history. Milosz even convinced Wislawa Szymborska to read with us in a church — the church of Polish poetry. Zagajewski was one of its high priests.
Adam deepened American poetry. His work is accessible and serious, weighted down by tragedy, informed by historical understanding. “Two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony,” he asserted. “The ecstatic element is tied to an unconditional acceptance of the world, including what is cruel and absurd. Irony, in contrast, is the artistic representation of thought, criticism, doubt.” He valued both elements, but his broadest impulse was to “try to praise the mutilated world,” as he urged in a poem by that name, written before the Sept. 11 terror attacks and published by the New Yorker shortly after. It was a poem that summed up a collective feeling. So many people felt that the world had been damaged. It had been shaken by cruelty, unimaginable horror, but we still needed to find a way to live. The poem was heard around the world. After everything that has happened during this year of all years, it has special meaning again.
I will always be grateful to Houston for giving Adam Zagajeweski such a welcoming American home. Adam begins his poem, “Houston, 6 p.m.” with these lines: “Europe already sleeps beneath a coarse plaid of borders / and ancient hatreds: France nestled / up to Germany, Bosnia in Serbia’s arms, / lonely Sicily in azure seas.” We feel in this poem the insistence of the past, the living presence of history, the “ancient hatreds.” Later in the poem, though, Adam seems to have found respite in Houston: “Poetry summons us to life, to courage / in the face of the growing shadow. / Can you gaze calmly at the Earth / like the perfect astronaut?”
Houston gave Adam the solitude he needed to write his poems, but it also gave him a community, a place of shared purpose until he moved and then returned to Krakow in
2002. He was a contained person, but the sorrow of those he touched in Houston cannot be contained. It is a flood that overflows the bayous. We changed him, but he also enriched us beyond measure, and we will not be the same without him.