On Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World“

Philip Terman

Today is the first of April –not only April Fool’s Day, but the first day of what has been called “Poetry Month.” Inspired by Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), the month was dedicated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. The idea was to ‘increase awareness and appreciation” for poetry.  Aside from the legitimate reservations by poets and poetry enthusiasts that there be designated ‘one month’ for poetry, again, like those who descry devoting one month for African Americans and one month for Women and one month for…fill in the blank…Shouldn’t we, after all celebrate poetry every day? 

Indeed, along with our poetry grandfather, Walt Whitman, shouldn’t we celebrate every moment?: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I suppose that if expanding poetry’s reach is the goal, then perhaps folks reading some poems one month out of the year—the hope being, of course,  that some will become ‘hooked’ and expand the expansion, furthering the dream that it is better than their not reading poetry at all and—hope of hopes!– a precious few will come to realize, with William Carlos Williams, that we “die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there”—is better than them not reading any poems at all.  Perhaps instituting a “poetry month” is a last gasp attempt to save it from oblivion or, from another angle, to not “give up on poetry.”

And if there has to be a month, then I agree that April is the right choice; the beginning of spring, after all, and, though one could of course point to every month as being the occasion for great poetry, April certainly has made its contributions, including, among others, Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom” and, of course, the opening of Eliot’s majestic Wasteland: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” 

In fact, I’m looking out the window at a similar scene that Eliot describes: it’s sunny, but snowing.  Spring can’t make up its mind—“a heap of broken images,” and I think of the recent celebrations of Passover’s slavery-into-freedom and Easter’s death-into-new life during a time conflicted with pandemic-ending hopes and children fleeing borders into uncertainty….the continual complexities and contradictions, how we wound and heal, and wound and heal again, the continual back-and-forth of hope and despair, of brokenness and repair, forgetting and remembering to, in the words of Elie Weisel, “think higher, feel deeper.”  Poetry is a place to turn toward that mantra, and perhaps April is as a good month as any to remind us.

And what would poetry be worth if it didn’t have personal associations?  For me, April is bursting with them.  For one thing, my mother—from whom I received poetry’s torch– was born, like Shakespeare, on April 23. And for another: I met one of the world’s finest poets who passed away two weeks ago, Adam Zagajewski.   Zagajewski was  twice-exiled poet, once as a child and once as an adult.

Born in 1945 in Lvov, Poland, he was expelled by the Soviets with his family into Silesia, and then again, as a leader of a literary movement, the Generation of “68,  his works were banned by the Communists authorities and he fled to France. He said, “I lost two homelands, but I sought a third: a space for the imagination.”  Certainly, Zagajewski understood brokenness and thought higher and deeper.  How we wound and heal.  The September 11 attacks and his poem that was shared around the world: “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” 

The poem was written a year and a half before the attacks; the New Yorker published it on the last page of its special issue devoted to the catastrophe. According to Newsweek, “the poem nevertheless quickly became the most memorable verse statement on the tragedy, and arguably the best-known poem of the last 10 years.”  Wounding and healing continue, often at the same time.  Clearly Zagajewski did not write the poem as a direct response to the attacks; rather, the attacks, one might say, occurred as a result of what the poem—and so many poems like it—already forecasts and attempts to salve. 

Here’s what Zagajewski said about the making of the poem,  which recalls a trip Zagajewski took with his father through Ukrainian villages in Poland forcibly abandoned in the population transfers.  By “population transfers” we also think about Jews and other minorities transferred to concentration camps; Syrians escaping the bombings in tiny boats; South American families fleeing their homes for freedom at our border:

There were these empty villages with some apple trees going wild. 
And I saw the villages became prey to nettles; nettles were everywhere. 
There were these broken houses. It became in my memory this mutilated world, these villages, and at the same time they were beautiful. It was in the summer, beautiful weather. It's something that I reacted to, this contest between beauty and disaster.

“This contest between beauty and disaster”—and so the world goes round. Praising a “mutilated world”?  How can we think of such a thing? Praising the Holocaust?  The September 11 attacks? I think, in a way, the most important phrase in the title is “Try to….”  Because only focusing on the ‘disaster’ is another ‘disaster.’  To “try to” strongly implies that we need to apply all our consciousness, our conscientiousness, our very humanity, into what makes life—yes, beautiful:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rose wine.

Beauty and disaster, it seems, cannot be separated; to consider one without the other is a false reality.  Zagajewski, in fact, implores us to “praise” even after  giving us the worst “The nettles that methodically overgrow/the abandoned homesteads of exiles” and yet: “You must try to praise the mutilated world” because: 

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it
while salty oblivion awaited others.
you’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

By now I’m wondering if Zagajewski isn’t being ironic all along.  I read and nod my head: “yes, even so, even with the disaster, there’s beauty, and I must try to praise it.”  But ‘refugees going nowhere”?  “Executioners sing[ing] joyfully”?  No, I am no longer in a praising mood.  I lament the mutilations.  But, still, this poet, this twice-exiled poet, in his very next line, insists, persists, though now the “try to” becomes a more declarative “should”:

“You should praise the mutilated world.”

Why so, Adam (by this point in the poem, we’re on first-name basis)? On what basis, after watching the refugees lost, abandoned, after  hearing the executioners’ song,–what is there to praise?  And, Adam, like all the great poets, reminds me: Think higher.  Feel deeper.  You are human. You have been in love:

Remember the moments when we were together (We,” Adam? So now you’re   heading straight for the heart…}
in a white room and the curtain fluttered. (Yes, it was something like that…)
Return in thought to that concert where music flared (Ok--)
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn (Yes, it was in the city, as I recall…)
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.  (I did, Adam. We did, her and I. Something like that.}

Beauty, Adam.  But I haven’t forgotten the disaster.  And now, in the last lines, there’s no ‘try to’ or ‘should”: There’s only the commandment.  Oh, you poets—you think you’re gods!  

Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Yes, Adam.  It comes and goes. And comes back again.  Exile into freedom.  Death into resurrection.  April.  The cruelest month, the month of Shakespeare, of my mother’s torch, the month I met you: you signed my copy of your new and selected poems, on April 17, 2003, World Without End.  Two weeks ago, you passed away.  Today, now, in the snow-filled light that strayed and vanished, I read your dedicated words in your living hand, which returns.