WHAT IS THE POET?
Sven Birkerts
What is the poet? Who is the poet? The wonderful old Heideggerian questions. And to answer philosophically would take us right to the heart of things. But I don’t know how much philosophy is in me today. I threw out the question just as a way of writing about going to see Adam Zagajewski at B.U. the other night. Looking all around me, I walked right by the man going into the seminar room. He was standing there at the door, but I was so fixated on my visual memory of his impossibly black and bristling eyebrows that I discounted any other resemblance. The man by the door was what Adam Zagajewski would look like if his eyebrows were white. I took a few strides before allowing that eyebrows, composed of hair, could turn. By then it was too late, I was in the room, seated. I went right to the front. I like to see my readers, like to study their little gestures and tics up close, as if they might help me answer my questions. Not that appearances give up the deepest secrets. But neither are they negligible. The poet’s face—how could it not be the most interesting thing in the world? Eyes, mouth. Eyes and mouth together. The repertoire of expressions, which with Zagajewski seemed especially rich. In him—this was clear right away—the current of irony runs steady. Almost everything he said when he was not reading his poems, when he was introducing, or, later, taking questions from the audience, needed to be read against that horizon, its meaning altered. Not necessarily inverted—irony is not so simple—but revealed as complex, shaded. So many gradations of expression possible here, and I’m sure the Poles are expert. So much so, that I wonder that they don’t go half mad among us literalist Americans. Maybe this is why members of various ethnicities cluster together—not so much out of fear or chauvinism, but to be able to speak in their full register, in their real voices. But now I’m making it sound like Zagajewski is all dark humor and understatement. Above it and below it, on either side, and maybe soaking through it, too, is everything else. The lyrical. Love, loss and memory. The world taken up and touched, detail by detail. This is stronger than the irony. You only have to look at his face, his mouth, which is not an ironist’s whetted blade, but a sad exposed mouth, upper lip pushed forward so that at times it seems to be pouting, or getting ready to whistle. I studied that face as I listened, and along with the face the hands, the fingers, which seemed uneasy in the world, not jaded from work and the handling of things. The poet so clearly lives inside. He has the look of a man who is always listening, even as he talks to you, as if he’s also trying to hear a conversation in the other room. It was a beautiful reading. I kept thinking that I was glad that I came. For the poems, sure, but I can get to the poems better by myself. No, I was glad to be near that power, its very special consistency. As he read, I thought, not for the first time, that real poets are very few. They are like Baudelaire’s big seabirds, his pelicans that from time to time land on decks of ships, where sailors make great sport with them, sticking pipes in their beaks. But to continue the thought, the impulse, modifying the image, I also pictured this one, with his white eyebrows, somehow pushing his head up through a thick, woolly cloud cover and just looking around.