Polish poet & Nobel Prize Winner, Wislawa Szymborska passed away on February 1st. I had been thinking about her poetry more as of late because of a creative writing class I was asked to guest lecture.
I had been trying to think of a challenging writing activity for the students–one that might expand their perspective. I immediately turned to Szymborska’s poetry, which as a younger woman, I had found not only challenging but rewarding and fertile with new ways to conceive of poetry, language, and everyday objects.
I vividly remember reading my first Szymborska poem, “Some Like Poetry” –for a high school English class, photocopied in a poetry packet alongside Seamus Heaney, Li Young-Lee, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and various other famous poets and chock full of regional New York writers–on the front porch of my grandmother’s house.
I feel fortunate to have encountered her poetry early in my life and I continually recommend her to others. The poem I introduced to the creative writing class was “On Death, Without Exaggeration.” A poem that endows an abstract concept, like Death, with a personality that is at once knowable or understandable. Death is depicted as a blundering serial killer who is often, an inept failure who “halfheartedly” works. I read the poem aloud to them and then challenged the students to give something abstract a personality or characteristics so that the reader might gain a different idea about that particular concept/abstraction. I was quite pleased with the results of the activity (plenty of them wrote about hate, love, and truth but a number of them choose difficult abstractions like peace & solitude). I hope I encouraged more readers of her poetry and would urge you, if you have not already encountered her work to seek it out.
I, for one, look forward to her last book of poems–to be published later this year (according to the BBC’s obituary & interview with Mr. Rusinek).
