Abstract: A problem is a stumbling block, something thrown in the way. Problem comes from the Greek-pro (before, in front of) + ballein (to throw)meaning anything thrown before you, directly ahead of you. You either face your problem, a potentially null encounter, or go back the way you came. There is no way around the problem. Parable is a form of problem. Like problem, parable also comes from Greek. The difference is between the para (to the side) and the pro. The parable is something thrown to the side, a by-word, the stumbling block alongside you. And like a parabola, the parable is a curve whose ever-widening, infinite symmetries most often escape notice and so close in on you. The parable, like the parabola, is both open and closed. It's a matter of looking in the right direction. John Taggart's latest book, When the Saints, the second part of which first appeared in this magazine and the whole of which was published by Talisman House last fall, is not a parable. As Taggart writes in the opening lines: The subject was roses the problem is memory that was the subject roses piled to burn intensity of a fire in summer intensity in intensity ashes in a ring pale rose hue of the rose ashes that was the subject the problem is memory the problem a problema the problem a problema a problem to find a problem to find the unknown Memory is a stumbling block. The choice of roses as a subject is not incidental. Of all the things to write about, roses are most difficult, most like a stumbling block. What can you do about roses? Taggart uses the stumbling block as material on which to inscribe the poem. The problem is how to remember without being overtaken and closed in on by memory. memory is musical memory is musical in suggestion suggestion of a progression of a progression to a destination the destination of music is harmony everything joined to fit to fit together closely fitted close harmony which closes on a close which closes in on itself there are other harmonies there are other harmonies which do not close which close to open which close in open harmonies Invoking figures as various as Simonides, Simon Weil, and Charles Mingus, When the Saints is an extremely ambitious poem that manages to maintain its focus through seventy-two pages. It is an elegy for Taggart's friend, the sculptor Bradford Graves, a photo of whose stone xylophone graces the cover. It is a meditation on Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It is a collection of quotations, including some from Coltrane's poem on the inside cover of A Love Supreme, taken, cut up and rearranged. When the Saints is not, however, a collage. Like the New Orleans funeral dirge from which Taggart has taken half his title, When the Saints is a procession of the saints of Taggart's imagination. The primary figures in the procession are Coltrane, Rilke, and Sainte Colombe, the late-seventeeth-century and early-eighteenthcentury century French composer whose main contribution was the addition of a seventh string to the viola da gamba, thus giving the instrument a more mournful tone. Taggart is deeply influenced by each-the long riff of Coltrane, the elegiac and spiritual concerns of Rilke, and the almost dronelike vibration of Sainte Colombe's seventh string-but the connection is more than his admiration. …

Abstract: That afternoon we met as we did every week, at the Irish Pub on the corner of Wrzeszcz's two main streets: a doctor of psychiatry, two philosophers, a schoolteacher, a painter, and me-the secretary of a nonexistent brotherhood; that afternoon we desired, as we did every week, to free ourselves from the weight of existence, from the gray, boring, recurrent existence of mundane things; however, that afternoon was not your typical February afternoon with its dirty slush of well-trodden snow outside the windows, the slight slump in the Warsaw stock exchange, or our wise politicians reading the law on lustration for the thirty-fifth or-just as well-the fifty-third time, no, that afternoon with our view onto ulica Grunwaldzka, which once was called Adolf Hitler-Strasse, and before that Hindenburg Allee, and not much later ulica Rokossowski, and in the very beginning "Main Street," that afternoon, which we spent as we did every week at the pub, was transformed suddenly into a funereal banquet, a funeral mass, an All Soul's Day, a kaddish, a requiem service, a Kashubian "empty night"in a word, into a prayer for the dead, or to be more precise, for the soul of the departed, which had already left his body, for that afternoon all the television stations, at least in Central Europe, were loudly announcing the news, the story of that shortest of flights: Bohumil Hrabal, while feeding pigeons during his convalescence in the Prague hospital in Bulovka, fell out of a fifth-floor window and died instantly; so Pani Agnieszka had to bring us our rounds more frequently than usual, and we began our prayers for the dead, calling up from our memories the stationmaster, Frances's famous BMW bike, the cats in Kersk, Uncle Pepin, Maniusia who shat herself, beautiful Marie and the even more beautiful Gypsy Girl, the waste paper depot, the bar "Svet," the waiter who served the English king, the brewery at Nymburek, Soviet tanks on Vaclavski Namesti, and the liquidation of the writers' profession; and there before us were all the weddings in Libna and all the letters to Kwiecienka and once again they cheered us up, as if we were "Under the Golden Tiger" or "At the Vojvods"' or "At the Singer's," or in some tavern in Mkov, and not in this cloudy, provincial, northern city, which had just celebrated its thousandth anniversary in an atmosphere more like that of a hospice than a holiday -what a writer! what a talent! -we tried outshouting one another in vain; someone mentioned the looking-glass set up on the highway, someone else mentioned the collage, the kaleidoscope, the mosaic, and Prague surrealism, which Andre Breton himself must eternally doff his hat to, and right then we decided to write-on the back of the menu- a letter to the Swedish Academy, saying that while we love the poetry of Jaroslav Seifert even more than the Czechs themselves do, we really do not understand why Seifert got the Nobel Prize, and not Bohumil Hrabal, since in our opinion, there are at least a few poets as good as Seifert in the world, and even in the Czech Republic itself, while prose writers like Bohumil Hrabal,besides Bohumil Hrabal himself, you won't find hide nor hair of; and so we wrote our protest, Pani Agnieszka provided us with an envelope and even stamps and the blue `PAR AVION' sticker, and when the pub had closed and we were heading down Grunwaldzka, we tossed our message into the mailbox, but to this day no reply has come, and sometimes, remembering those funeral festivities, we wonder if we wouldn't have had better luck writing to Berdycz6w.' Unfortunately, on that particular afternoon we didn't have with us that most beautiful of books-I Remember Only the Sunny Days: Bohumil Hrabal in Photographs-because it hadn't yet been published, but if it had been with us at those festivities, we certainly would have looked it through from back to front: first the picture of Hrabal on the hospital bed in Bulovka, then the photo of the writer before his family grave near Kersk, next the postcards from Mitterand, Clinton, Havel, and Menzel, and the portrait painted on his eightieth birthday in front of 24 Na Grobli Street, then Hrabal with the cats in Kersk, Hrabal in the bar "Svet" in 1976, later with his wife at the end of the sixties, next with Vladimir Boudnik, then with his dear Uncle Pepin and his father, after that in the waste paper depot, and with the Gypsy women from Libna, too (this is the fifties), then finally receiving the diploma for his doctorate in law (Prague, 1946), until as we near the end, and find ourselves lingering somewhat over a photo of the writer from his days working for the railroad (looking entirely the part of the Hollywood heartbreaker), we arrive at the source: that is, his childhood in Nymburek and 2idenice, amazed at the three-year-old Bohumil standing under the handle to the French doors, or a little bit older, with Frances, on the back seat of the BMW. …

Abstract: The 1 990s were witness to significant changes on the literary map of Poland: new regions and new trends emerged as the old ones evolved. Undoubtedly, a central place in this changing topography was occupied by works that represented both a continuation of and a challenge to the tradition of the so-called literature of "mythic homelands"--a literature of "small," "personal" or "minor" homelands. These terms refer to a literary current which had for decades shaped the ways that the Polish landscape (whether physical or psychological) was presented in narrative form. Crucially, that tradition has ensured the primacy of the imagery of those territories lost to Poland (primarily the kresy , or eastern regions of prewar Poland) over those regained (the western territories of postwar Poland); and by extension, it has led to the dominance of the provinces of the past over those of the present. It is a tradition so strong and rich in postwar Polish prose that imitation or continuation in some form was inevitable; and yet at the same time, in its traditional manifestation it was a literary current too incompatible with the experiences of post-1989 Poland to be continued without undergoing serious transformation. It was therefore quite natural that a dynamic process of "creative betrayals" and literary polemics has characterized Polish prose of the last decade.As a result, not only has Poland's literary map evolved; but the special nature and the very content of the "mythic homeland" in Polish literature has changed as well. What ingredients, then, constitute the heritage of this literature of the "mythic homeland"-a heritage painstakingly constructed throughout the entire postwar period, by both emigre writers and those working in Poland? Certainly four basic characteristics of this literature can be named. First, in the works of emigre writers, the lands of prewar Poland's eastern kresy appear as a region in which, although everyone was different, none were foreign . The Hucul country of the Carpathian Mountains immortalized by Stanislaw Vincenz; Jerzy Stempowski's Dniester Valley; Jozef Wittlin's Polish-Ukrainian Lwow; the Polish-Austrian Galicia of Zygmunt Haupt and Andrzej Kusniewicz; Andrzej Chciuk's Drohobycz, now in Ukraine; the Berezya River region of present-day Belarus, described by Florian Czarnyszewicz; the Litwa of Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Konwicki; and, finally, the Polish-German borderlands: the image of all these homelands which emerges in the literature is one of regions inhabited by multi-ethnic and multi-fa ith communities, full of varied customs and traditions. Yet at the same time, it is an image of peaceable communities, whose inhabitants live side-by-side without conflict. Despite their differences, no single one of these groups occupied a dominant position, or attempted to posit itself as the norm, which would in turn have made it possible-as happens in mono-ethnic nations-to define (and reject) "outsiders." These writers' works present a picture of communities that were tolerant, even as they believed in upholding tradition; and that were surrounded by the pristine beauty of unspoiled nature. All of this evokes a kind of idealized Wild West, in which not only Indians and Whites live together peaceably (that is, resolving their conflicts without the use of force), but even Whites and Blacks, Secessionists and Unionists, Protestants and Catholics. The second characteristic derives from the first: within such pluralistic communities, identity was always open-ended-for it was shaped by the natural internalization of that most prized treasure of tradition: an attitude of tolerance. A society-wide respect for the Other, meant that everyone was different; but at the same time everyone was an insider. For these idyllic homelands were peopled by individuals for whom the concept of identity was tied to a region, and not to country, nation, or religion. Thus--evoking the image of a mythologized Wild West again--these were not so much natives of hazy or indefinite identity, as followers of the belief that over and above all differences there exists a more important, regional--or communal--unity. …

Abstract: Evanston, Illinois 18 July 2000 W. MARTIN: There are rumors that you are also a poet. Is this true? And do you consider translation to be a creative practice? CLARE CAVANAGH: Yes, and I'm not a poet. I'm a former poet. I feel like translating is the right place for me, rather than my own poetry. I think it is a creative enterprise in a different way than being a poet is. The way I think of it is more like being an actor or a musician, where somebody else composed the lines for you, the music for you. You feel like you've got the one interpretation, but of course, if it's a work of art at all worth looking at it's worth looking at more than once, in the same way a great work of music can have five different interpretations that can be quite at odds with each other. But I still pretend that I'm doing the definitive one, you know. But that's what I think it's like. WM: You've written one book on Eastern European poetry and you're currently working on another about poetry and politics. Could you talk a little about that? CC: Sure. My first book was on Osip Mandelstam,' it was exclusively on Russian poetry, which is technically my field, but I've gone off on a deviation that's taken over my life. The second book' reflects more of where I actually am in terms of my day-to-day work. It's sort-of half-Russian, half-Polish, and half-Anglo-American- it's got too many halves. It's a series of case studies on the relationship between the Romantic tradition of the poetic bard and twentieth century Eastern European politics, specifically with the totalitarian, or the Soviet, landscape, and what that does to the tradition of the poetic bard. So the first half deals with Russia from around 1905, what some historians consider the beginning of the Russian revolution, the failed uprising of 1905, and I start with Blok and Yeats, who are working on how the poet-prophet places himself in relation to national upheaval in interestingly comparable ways, even though politically they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then I have a chapter on Whitman and Mayakovsky. There was a huge cult of Whitman in Eastern Europe, and Mayakovsky clearly saw himself in competition with Whitman and was trying to create himself as a kind of bard. And then a chapter called "The Death of the Book a la russe" that's challenging post-Structuralist and post-Derridean ideas about writing based on an Eastern European model in which writing itself became an endangered model, or an impossible model, for the poet. The Derridean idea of orality is based on a Western, bourgeois model in which you have means of printing on hand all the time and nobody is shutting down the presses on a regular basis, let alone shooting you for running the press, or putting you in jail. In Stalinist Russia the cult of the oral poem, the spoken poem, became this dominant model, where people like Mandelstam and Akhmatova were composing poems that either were not written down at all or written down and destroyed. Mandelstam was sent to a camp for a poem he never wrote down; he wrote it down for the first time under interrogation. He recited it to a group of friends, and it got to Stalin that way. So he was demonstrating the power of the oral voice in a country in which speech was regulated beyond all comprehension. And then Akhmatova wrote her "Requiem" as part of her genre of "Poems for the Ashtray" -poems that she would write, memorize, have a group of friends commit to memory, and then bum. So, what I'm trying to do is challenge a lot of Western notions of poetry, language, politics, and so forth, because none of them fit the Eastern European model. I have another chapter on Pound, Mandelstam, and Khlebnikov, on ideas of the poet as legislator and the poet as "master-builder." And then I switch over to Poland after the importation of Soviet rule, late forties, early fifties. I have a chapter on the cult of Mayakovsky in Poland-which poets took up willingly, they didn't have crammed down their throats, right after World War II. …

Abstract: BIM AND BOM Bim and Born were a pair of clowns. They always performed together, and enjoyed enormous popularity. No one could remember Bim without Born, or Born without Bim-only that Bim-and-Bom and Bom-and-Bim made them laugh. It was unclear whether Bim played a particular role in the partnership, or whether Born had any special significance; perhaps it was only the "and" between them that mattered. Besides this "and" that held them together, there was one other constant, unvarying element of their partnership - which though inessential, proved grave in consequence: namely, the order in which their names appeared on the poster. Bim was always first, and Born second, always "Bim and Born," never "Born and Bim." No one knew why this was the case; even they themselves were not sure. And no one would have given it much thought-they themselves the least of all, since they had always worked in perfect agreement and harmony-if not for a curious event, not unlike the one that took place in Paradise. While on tour around the country, Bim and Born arrived in a little town, signed in at a hotel, and, having nothing else to do before the evening performance, decided to make their way to a barber. They took their places in the queue, and since this was-as we have already mentioned-before their performance, they were still unknown and thus waited incognito. When the last of the customers before them had had his hair cut, the barber untied the apron from under his neck, dusted it off, and asked: "Who's next?" Without hesitation, Bim and Bom stood up and together sat down in the barber's chair, each occupying exactly half the seat. "This must be some sort of a joke!" exclaimed the barber, not even slightly amused. "What I'm asking is, which one of you gentlemen was first!" Bim and Bom looked at each other, but because they were sitting so close, one next to the other, or the other next to the one, they had to look each other straight in the eye. "I haven't the time for stupid jokes"' said the barber, becoming more and more impatient. "Please leave my shop." Bim and Born stood up simultaneously and headed for the exit. They were so preoccupied with the question of precedence -a question that until then they had never asked themselves-that they paid no heed to their surroundings. Although they were still walking together, the question took shape in each of their minds separately, and now each of them independently sought an answer. They crossed the doorstep and once more found themselves in the street. Over the barber's door could be seen a sign: "Haircuts & Shaves-Z. Snake." The ampersand was strangely enlarged. Their career did not survive much longer. They say Bom attempted to strangle Bim, and Bim to poison Bom. In any case, their joint performances were no longer of the same quality, and their popularity fell. They performed in ever more wretched cabarets and even that ever more rarely, until they stopped performing altogether, and no one has heard from them since. HEALTH SERVICES The appendectomy proved inevitable. I filled out the appropriate forms and my name was placed on the waiting list. Two years passed in a flash, my turn came, and I found myself in a hospital. The surgery was successful. Even the head surgeon congratulated me on my results. "It was a beautiful operation, Ma'am," he said. I pointed out that I was of the masculine gender. He checked something in his file. "You were, before the surgery. By mistake, you were transferred to the experimental ward, and now you are a woman. The sex-change is still a pioneering branch of surgery, but we have achieved excellent results, of which you, Madam... Sir.... are the proof." "But what about my appendix?" "Wouldn't you like to keep it, Ma'am?" "No. And I do not wish to remain a woman, either, please correct this misunderstanding immediately." "You certainly are a difficult patient, Sir. …

Abstract: FRAGMENTS FROM THE GHETTO A WORD I remember when I heard it for the first time. It was at the very beginning of the war, right after the defeat. The word drifted into my ears as people around me deliberated: will they lock us in the ghetto or not? I didn't know what this word meant, yet I realized that it was connected with moving; I sensed that it was something adults were speaking of with fear, but to me it seemed that moving would be an interesting adventure. And in the end I envisioned this mysterious and incomprehensible ghetto as a many-storied carriage riding through the streets of the city, pulled by some umpteen horses. They would put us in such a carriage, where we would live-and on the whole it would turn out to be something quite exciting and entertaining. I imagined that in this carriage there would be all kinds of staircases, so that one could run freely from one floor to the next, and many windows as well, so that nothing would stand in the way of looking out over the unknown world. In my imagination, I conjured up this fantastical carriage on the model of a hearse, the black carriage of death, such as could be seen from time to time in our city. Quickly, though, I would be forced to part with this childlike phantasmagoria. We did, in fact, move, but it did not turn out to be a fascinating adventure. And in the very near future my immediate experiences would instruct me as to the precise meaning of this word. Little time had passed before I no longer entertained any doubts about its implications, even though such a short time before it had sounded so mysterious, so exotic, so intriguing. COLOR Still, even now to this day, I don't understand that space encircled by walls; I'm not able to grasp it, to capture it; I'm not able to discern the principles by which it was organized. That space remains for me a chaos, impossible to comprehend. And this is so not only when I reminisce, when I try to remember how I observed it at the time when I was shut inside it. This is also true today when I look at a map of what was once the old Jewish quarter, a place that would henceforth reveal itself to be the site of collective death. That space remains for me a tangle of streets connected in a way I'm unable to figure out. I'm unable to place where we lived; I'm unable to point to what felt close and what felt far away, although I know now that spatial memories have no objective dimension, for behind the walls-as in any kind of prison or camp, or more generally, in any kind of place that can be described as a penal colony-particular spatial relations come into being. In my memory that tangle of streets was never empty for a moment. Naturally I wasn't present after the curfew, nor during those times when, by the nature of the situation, everything was desolate. I saw those streets during the day-and I was one of the crowd, a dense crowd, a crowd one could barely squeeze through. The ghetto remains in my memory a place without a shape, deprived of any ordering principle, a space encircled by walls from which all sense has been taken, just as the sense of life was taken from those pressed within it. Yet I remember its color, unique and inimitable, the kind of color that might signify every collective misfortune: a grey-brown-black, the only one of its kind, devoid of any kind of brighter color, any kind of distinguishing accent. There remains before my eyes this monochromatism of the ghetto, perhaps best described by the word 'discoloredness.' For everything was just that-discolored-irrespective of what had been its original color and irrespective of the weather. Even the most intensive rays of sunlight would not brighten or even vaguely color this discoloredness. But did the sun ever shine over the ghetto at all? Can the sun appear in a place without a centimeter of green? In my memories the color of the ghetto is the color of the paper that covered the corpses lying on the street before they were taken away. …

Abstract: The final edition of Armand Schwerner's The Tablets arrives as a valuable, important book, extending and challenging our conceptions of poetry, reading, certainty, completeness, and instructing us in the value of humor and the centrality of various modes of not-doing. The National Poetry Foundation has done a beautiful job of producing this book, giving it a properly large page-size format, pricing the book reasonably, and including an excellent, helpful CD recording of Schwerner's superb reading of a great many of The Tablets. The Tablets exists at a timely and seemingly timeless intersection of the written/visual and oral/performative. It is a profoundly moving and flawed project, at once greatly humorous, learned, and outrageous. When I call Schwerner's great work "flawed," I do so with the awareness that all writing is inevitably flawed. But, as part of my taking this work seriously, I do wish to consider what I see to be some of the limitations of Schwerner's work as well as the great accomplishment of it. The Tablets is, among other things, a key book in the work of a particular generation-a group of writers/thinkers that includes David Antin, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, and Dennis Tedlock. These writers extend the encyclopedic impulse of modernism-the beginning globalism of Pound and Eliot and Olson-to make (in Robert Duncan's words) "a symposium of the whole," and an ethnopoetics pursued with a rigor, intelligence, curiosity, and passion that has changed forever the scope of poetry, particularly in the United States. Set beside the anthologies, translations, and books of poems by these writers, much contemporary poetry, particularly the poetry of official verse culture, is readily seen to be minor, narrowly conceived, and claustrophobic in its scope and ambition. Schwerner began work on The Tablets in 1968, and, as Arthur Sabatini notes, Schwerner's career "is a paradigm of the way, during the past three decades, poets and poetry have become enmeshed in the many forms of discourse and performance that characterize contemporary art" (DLB, 243). In an interview with Ed Foster, Schwerner describes the incident that triggered the conception of The Tablets: ... the thing that spawned the beginning stages of that work occurred when I was a graduate student working in the Columbia Library. At the end of one of the long stacks I stuck out my arm to rest it on one of the shelves for a moment, looked at what I was covering and there was a large format edition of Samuel Noah Kramer's translation and transliteration from the Sumerian. I interpreted my experience as an omen. I have never forgotten the power of that initial charge. Charge in both senses, both electricity and the responsibility for a task I hadn't yet formulated. (T, 43) For me, The Tablets opens up tremendously and extends its scope of consciousness in crucial ways with Tablet XXVII (the final Tablet) and with the concluding section, Tablets Journals /Divagations. Finished in the last year of Schwerner's life, Divagations constitutes one-fifth of the final book. Perhaps it is fitting that a book such as The Tablets, with its key figure of the Scholar/Translator, would conclude with such a superb commentary on a commentary, an extended meditation less ruled by the governing conceptions of the rest of the work itself. For me, this Apocrypha becomes the heart of the text itself, where we learn most passionately and exactly what is at stake in The Tablets. Schwerner was quite aware of the significant departure and "violation" involved in adding the Divagations (which first appeared in the Atlas Press 1989 edition of The Tablets, and now appears in a much more extended version in the new National Poetry Foundation edition): For so many years, I'd been deeply convinced that everything should go into the poem, that there should be no need for external divagations. And then, years after that profoundly held belief, I added "Divagations," a long section of citations and commentary as an appendix to Tablets I-XXVII. …

Abstract: The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, "what is lost when words are wasted?" and "who profits when words are saved?", Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. In Carson's view, Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. "Economy of the Unlost" begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of 5th-century BC Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences - Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair - as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.