Eternity but it ends soon

The late late style with Adam Zagajewski

I heard Adam Zagajewski’s poetry before I ever read it, in English and in the half-wistful half-wry sing-song of a Polish accent, the speaker being Adam Zagajewski himself. Amid the personalities onstage and the other 17-year-olds (almost entirely girls) from points far and wide wandering around the 2002 Dodge Poetry Festival, the only impression this genial and quietly amused man from Poland made on me was his voice. It was my first encounter with those raised penultimate syllables of Polish: “my name is Adam ZagaYEVski.” During some other reading (I can’t remember who), I noticed him just a few yards from me, sitting on a lawn chair with his hands folded. He seemed more interested in the early autumn sunlight than the reading. 

At the time (again, I was 17) I was more fascinated by the brashness of Robert Bly and Amiri Baraka, who got into a stupid but entertaining argument during a panel discussion (the great debate was whether poetry is about Enriching the Self or Changing the World). I’d gone into the festival skeptical of Bly, but I was easily won over by the way he played up the bard role, singing Blake’s “Hear the voice of the ancient bard” and reciting his translation of Antonio Machado’s “The wind one brilliant day…” (also, during another panel discussion, telling a guy in the crowd he wanted to strangle him). As for Baraka, I was there when the man first performed “Somebody Blew Up America”; I remember the crowd nodding fiercely until he got to the part about Jews staying home from work on September 11, 2001. His benediction to the audience on the last day has always stayed with me: something like “You might like Langston Hughes; you might like John Keats; and maybe, just maybe, you can be hip enough to like them both.”