Le Spleen de Paris<\/em>? Even seasoned poetry readers tend to shrug off prose poems. <\/p>\nExample: an associate of mine, a poet, flipped through Wr\u00f3blewski\u2019s book and commented that, while it seems quite interesting, it isn\u2019t poetry. I could practically see the dismissal manifest physically. Never mind the content\u2014the form doesn\u2019t work for him. This is lamentable and further evidence that poets and their readers may be poetry\u2019s worst enemy.<\/p>\n
It may be worth considering the purpose of prose poems, specifically in the case of Wr\u00f3blewski. The theme of Kopenhaga<\/em>, if one can be found, is the familiar one of writer-in-exile and the pieces that comprise the book\u2014usually only running a paragraph or two, sometimes only a sentence\u2014are episodic in nature, often funny, deceptively disconnected, and frequently profound. While constructing these poems, Wr\u00f3blewski did not concern himself with meter so much as impact. Brief meditations on the everyday life of a poet in exile can go in numerous directions. Such freedom requires breaking out of traditional form. <\/p>\nDespite the random feel of these musings, the book is a complete and intentionally constructed work (even though the reader learns from translator Piotr Gwiazda\u2019s introduction that the English edition is a collection of different texts). The fragments (I think this is a better description) discuss the trepidations of exile, but also incorporate pop culture, URL<\/span>s, personal recollections, advice to beginning writers (\u201cIf an editor doesn\u2019t respond at all . . . you need to calmly drain two bottles of cheap wine and discuss the matter with local pigeons\u201d) and sardonic jokes. The result is a perfect example of the poet as witness. Better: poet as anthropologist, observing and reporting on the absurdity of orienting to shifting cultures. Wr\u00f3blewski quantifies his existence by writing:<\/p>\n\nA letter from the insurance company PFA<\/span>. My life is currently worth 7,993 Danish crowns. (The amount my family will get if I unexpectedly relocate to the next world.) Cosmic Loneliness. Thank you, Krystopher, I will keep you in my thoughts when I\u2019m underground. A unique combination of protein and paranoia: 1,330 bottles of beer (or four tickets to Poland.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat might otherwise be a brief interlude in a different book stands out on its own as a contained thought, yet serves a larger goal. In this sense, Kopenhaga<\/em> is a piecemeal accumulation that deserves to be read in its entirety. Picking isolated movements feels criminal and detracts from the cumulative effect. In this sense, the poems adhere to a theme and build upon each other not unlike a novel. Any one page from Kopenhaga<\/em> can stand on its own, but taken as a whole it makes a larger, albeit bizarre, sense. <\/p>\nAnd for all his concern with his homeland and his adopted country, in the end Wr\u00f3blewski\u2019s realization is that they are irrelevant:<\/p>\n
bq, What terrifies me in Denmark (the land of Bohr and Kierkegaard, a caring tolerate state, with a high standard of living, etc)? What terrifies me is homo sapiens<\/em>. Also in Wilan\u00f3w and other wholly innocent corners of the Earth. What terrifies me is homo sapiens<\/em>.<\/p>\nIn this brevity, Wr\u00f3blewski communicates the enormity of not only the exile\u2019s tragedy but of all of humanity\u2019s. The joke, it seems, is on us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“What if even in the afterlife you have to know foreign languages? Since I have already suffered so much trying to speak Danish, make sure to assign me to the Polish zone . . .” So reads a typical aphoristic \u201cpoem\u201d in Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wr\u00f3blewski. I use quotation marks in an attempt to indicate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[52736,52746,52756,39616,1646,22356,1626],"class_list":["post-296386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-grzegorz-wroblewski","tag-kopenhaga","tag-piotr-gwiazda","tag-polish-poetry","tag-review","tag-vincent-francone","tag-zephyr-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317756,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296386\/revisions\/317756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}