Saved from Oblivion

If only more of us, and not merely the poets, could speak with the orphic clarity of Czeslaw Milosz, a representative 20th-century man who sometimes shares a voice with Swendenborg or, closer to our own tradition, Blake or Whitman. Milosz had every excuse to turn lazy and bitter, and surrender to the fashionable nihilism of the age. Instead, he outlived the Third Reich, became an American of sorts, outlived the Soviet Union, survived as a poetic master into the new millennium, and never seemed to lose hope. If I remember correctly, even Susan Sontag in the opening section of her final novel, In America, made a veiled allusion to Milosz (who died in 2004) as the greatest living poet.

Now we have a fitting reminder of Milosz the man and poet in the form of Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations, the latest installment in the Literary Conversations Series published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book includes 18 interviews Milosz gave after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Among them is a brief e-mail conversation the poet had in 2000 with James Marcus, of House of Mirth, when he worked for Amazon.com. Here’s how the exchange concludes:

“Amazon.com: Finally: In another poem from the same year [1985], `In a Jar,’ you allude to the preservative powers of poetry, which can confer immortality on the humble newt: `I address you, I give you existence --/Even a name and a title in the princedom of grammar --/to protect you by inflection from nothingness.’ You have granted a great many such titles. Might that even be the primary goal of your poetry?”

“Milosz: Yes, I believe that one of the functions of poetry is to save as many beings as possible from oblivion. I prefer the word oblivion to the word nothingness.”

On one level I marvel at a man, born three years before the start of World War I, sitting in Krakow after decades of exile in the West, exchanging e-mails with an American writer in Seattle. On another level, I marvel at a poet who admits to “saving beings” with mere words – a divine quality, surely – and yet somehow remaining humble.

The prize of the collection is a 24-page conversation between Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, two years after the latter won his own Nobel Prize and almost seven years before his death. The friendship and mutual esteem is obvious, like a couple of veterans swapping war stories, which in a sense they were. The talk is digressive, informal and joshing, and conducted in English – a language in which it has never before been published (it has seen print in Polish and Italian). Brodsky asks, “Do you have any strong loves in poetry in English? Something that, well, just…”

“CM: You see, in English, in English, I must say that it’s Whitman. For me Whitman is a poet like those painters of old who can take one part of the big canvas –’’

“JB: Ya. And live in it.”

“CM: --take, cut, and you see, modify that, and you see a world in that little margin.”

“JB: Ya, exactly.”

“CM: And that’s, for me Whitman. Extremely…this gives me a kick. And it corresponds precisely to that gluttonous attitude, omnivorousness, toward reality.”

“JB: Perhaps you also find Whitman congenial precisely because of that statement in the `Ars Poetica’: `gravitation to the spacious form.’”

“CM: Precisely. Precisely.”

Ah, to have been a fly…. Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations is a rich cassoulet of thoughts, emotions, history, memories, jokes and charm – in short, excellent talk.