What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite writers to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems and other writing. In Delineated: Prose Writers on Poetry, prominent writers of fiction and non-fiction reflect on how poetry illuminates their creative lives, whether as inspiration, a daily practice, or a thread of hope through difficult times.
After the search for the depression gene ended in disappointment, after the failures of lens and bench I went to the world, watching first above tall grasses the white rumps of deer floundering like the sails of small boats in trouble just before they vanished into spruces which ate them like a storm; listening first to the timbre of crows' argument in drizzle, then measuring the angle at which their legs hung limply as they flew to the cities, where I traveled from ward to ward cataloguing the scars of unknown origin, recording the contortions of my own face in the steel curvature of bed rails. What had I hoped to gain? To shake the chaff from this drab bouquet of data, crush the seeds with mortar and pestle, toss them to the breath at the ocean's lip? I was no different from the prisoner passing time, carving the bar of soap in the likeness of his guard. I stood outside the husk of Coventry Cathedral the way I've wished I could outside myself. Within the cavity of lacework and melted lead, a tatter of red glass throbbed like a living organ in charred ribs. The old man was beside me crying. He was eighty-seven, had pumped water from the shelters underground as bombs pounded the city through the night. "In the morning I could have cried," he said. And I considered the difference between the consequences of violence and the violence itself. His name was Morris Mander. It was raining. I had my picture taken with him. There was no roof, and rain was falling gently inside the empty church.
Pham Thai Phuc, our neighbor's foster daughter: thirty years ago, I marveled at the X's down her leg, the healed incision of fifty-caliber bullets. I'd heard her sobbing when I spent the night, in her sobs the sound of geese flying through clouds of driving snow. Arriving or fleeing? What would exile be without memory, if one could forget the place refused, the place departed, and return a stranger? Poker on the floor, whiffleball in the yard, we watched her grow from walker to crutches. She was sent back to her village before the war was over, before the black levy was built against the tide of names hers would not be among, even though she vanished more completely. Why have I searched its chiseled list as I would a giant aquarium, its swarms of orbiting fish, or a window at night, snowflakes like sparks in the floodlight's beam? To say mirror is only half the story. Standing there, it was easy enough to ignore myself, to see instead a ladder from a great height, the descent precarious, impossible to read one panel's human rungs, to say each life without looking down, a foray into the territories of drama. A friend adapting The Women of Troy cast refugees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia, governed twice the people needed for her play—a spare for every actor; if one broke down, another could take the script, continue—human bookmarks in the spine of what has been, what must be told again. Better that evidence than these ticket stubs shoved between the pages of my burning calendar, the perpetually obsolete. Enough of the ancestors' clothes, which grow more two dimensional on their bending hangers. Let the dust settle on their brogues and boots, the snow on brilliant maples. Ahead, voluptuous rubble, collapsing banks of wave and cloud: welter of beautiful failures where the sun has parked a rusting chariot to work inside his torch's aura, lone welder perched in the girders of another cold morning, while I retreat into the convenient shortcomings of my omniscience, like the un- heroic narrator of The Firebird describing the hero's progress, I've no idea how long he rode. You can tell a story in no time, but it is another matter to live one.
"Here are two things I have a difficult time writing about: myself and the sacredness of a great poem. Maybe a great poem can give us shape when our own—that is, whatever holds us together—has slipped away."
"Adam Zagajewski, born in 1945 in Lviv, was one of the most famous contemporary Polish artists. He was a poet, prose writer, essayist and translator, winner of many prestigious literary awards. For years, he has been listed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work has been translated into many languages."
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