Deceptive simplicity. If there is a space where this often misused term can feel right at home and be proud, it is poetry. Personally, I am drawn to verse that’s easy to follow and allows multiple interpretations. I don’t want to be crowded by polysyllabic words, often used gratuitously. Give me a poet who speaks from the heart and says the profoundest of things in the simplest of ways, and I am happy. To quote Leonardo da Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It takes a great deal to write simple and write well. And when you encounter a poet who does this, you’re enchanted.
For me, that’s Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. She wrote about history and humanity and she did so by contrasting serious themes with familiar settings. In The grim Identification , the poet talks of a plane crash, the identification of a body and its effect on the woman narrator in the poem. The woman denies that the scrap of shirt or the watch found mean anything. Even the wedding ring with both their names is not acceptable to her. The poem slowly becomes garbled as the narrator falls to pieces. “It’s good you came. Sit here beside me. He really was supposed to get back Thursday. But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year. I’ll put the kettle on for tea. I’ll wash my hair, then what/try to wake up from all this. It’s good you came, since it was cold there/and him just in some rubber sleeping bag/him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea/since our names are completely ordinary—”
There is heartbreak and defiance in the poem. You might even find yourself rooting for the woman – of course there are so many more Thursdays in a year. Simple details bring about strong emotion.
The domesticity spills over into other situations too. In The End and the Beginning , Wisława Szymborska talks of the clean-up effort after a war. Someone has to clean up, she remarks. This is a remarkable piece of writing and one that I return to time and time again. How I wish I could quote it in full here. Here are a few lines. “Someone has to push the rubble/to the side of the road/ so the corpse-filled wagons/can pass. (...) Photogenic it’s not/and takes years. All the cameras have left/for another war. (...)Someone, broom in hand/ still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens/ and nods with unsevered head. (...)From out of the bushes/ sometimes someone still unearths/ rusted-out arguments/and carries them to the garbage pile.” Unsevered head. A small shocking, sickening detail placed just so. The word changes the mundanity of the scene completely.
I also found myself nodding at a spirited defence. In Lot’s Wife , Wisława Szymborska speaks from a different point of view. Lot’s wife looked back so that she, “wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape/of my husband Lot's neck. From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead/he wouldn't so much as hesitate. From the disobedience of the meek.(...) I looked back in desolation. In shame because we had stolen away. Wanting to cry out, to go home.”
In Dreams , Wisława Szymborska makes a clear demarcation. It is between dreams and freedom of thought and the concrete (no pun intended) of construction and geology, the business of cinema and architecture and the precision of art. She is almost dismissive and her word play only makes the poem even more enjoyable. “So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books/the scholars of oneiric signs and omens/the doctors with couches for analyses—/if anything fits/it’s accidental/and for one reason only/that in our dreaming/in their shadowings and gleamings/in their multiplings, inconceivablings/in their haphazardings and widescatterings/at times even a clear-cut meaning/may slip through.” The last line is amusing and incisive, wouldn’t you say?
Amusing and incisive can also be used to describe another poem, On Death, Without Exaggeration . I hope you read the poem. Actually, I hope you read more of her work. You’ll never again think that the ordinary is ordinary.
(Nobel prize winner Wisława Szymborska was born on 2nd July, 1923.)
