`The Best Fertilizer for Poetry'

Last month I mailed my brother an uncorrected proof of The Complete Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert, a book I reviewed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ken called Wednesday to say he had created a series of 10 assemblages titled “Ten Things Made After Reading Herbert” -- collages on wood incorporating texts, including all of one poem, “Nothing Special,” and four lines from another, “Mama.”

My brother is broadly read but not literary. By trade he is a picture framer. He knows wood and art history, particularly Albrecht Durer. He is self-taught, like me, and non-academic. He is suspicious of herd-thinking and fashion mistaken for truth. I asked why he liked Herbert’s austere poetry:

“The clarity of it. Something just meshes with my gears. And I understand the sheer shit of the first part of his life. I like the humor, too. It’s not boastful humor.”

Here’s “Nothing Special,” as translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles:

“nothing special
boards paint
nails paste
paper string

“mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants

“forest of arden
from umbrella
ionian sea
from parkers quink

“just as long as
his look is wise
just as long as
his hand is sure –

“and presto the – world –

“hooks of flowers
on needles of grass
clouds of wire
drawn out by wind”

Herbert, too, works “not from atoms/but from remnants,” and so does my brother, and so do I, I suppose. In Herbert, the remnants are never selected arbitrarily. Take “forest of arden.” Yes, Shakespeare, but Herbert is more cunning than that, and his airy-looking texts are always dense with associations. He published an earlier poem titled “Forest of Arden,” and here’s the note that accompanies it in the Collected Poems:

“In Polish the title refers both to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the Ardennes forest in Belgium and northern France. During World War II, much of the Polish resistance to the Nazi and Soviet occupations took the form of partisan groups based in the wide expanses of forest in what is now the territory of Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, where the Herbert family lived until 1944.”

Herbert is an erudite poet who deploys his erudition modestly. I suspect this is a matter of temperament and contingency. Joseph Brodsky subverted the culturally condescending label “Eastern Europe” by calling it “Western Asia.” Herbert was a Europe-facing Pole, an inheritor of Western Civilization and its glories, at the same time he was disinherited from the very heritage that sustained him. His indelibly divided nature, his outsider credentials, may account for some of the attraction Herbert holds for my brother and me. His friend, the Polish novelist Leopold Tyrmand, described in a diary passage from 1954 (two years before Herbert published his first book of poetry) how Herbert worked as an accountant-timekeeper for a cooperative that manufactured bags, toys and boxes:

“The serenity with which Herbert endures that drudgery – him, a man with degrees in three fields – is straight from Early Christian hagiography. That serenity is a carefully crafted mask -- it conceals the despair of a man who fears that he gambled away his life in History’s absurd game of poker, where the stakes were honor and ideological attachments.”

And later in the diary, after Herbert has gone to work in the Central Peat Industry Bureau:

“Herbert read his new poems this evening. Looks as though working in peat is having a fertilizing influence on him. There is nothing to do there, you can’t read newspapers during the office hours, so Zbyszek sits at his desk and writes poems and fables. Everybody thinks he’s an exemplary and zealous worker, while Zbyszek struggles with his obsession – that of a wasted life, which, as we know, is the best fertilizer for poetry.”

I’m not equating my experience or my brother’s with Herbert’s. Neither of us endured a world war or the misery of Stalinism. We are well-fed, pampered Americans. But both of us, I suspect, empathize with the poet-in-disguise at his desk. The mask of a drone is useful. The finery and poses of a bohemian are not. You can accomplish much sitting at a desk, head down, absorbed in some important-looking matter. We come from that forgotten reservoir of discipline and resentment, the working class. Our father was an ironworker. I was the first in our family to attend college. No one expected us to be bookish, artistic or articulate. The absence of all expectations, a doltish complacency, too, is an excellent disguise. Of late, my brother has enjoyed “In Praise of Limestone,” by W.H. Auden, and has created another assemblage based on these lines by Osip Mandelstam: “I do not sing of stone/now, I sing of wood.”

Herbert reminds us in “The Power of Taste”:

“So in fact aesthetics can be an aid in life
One shouldn’t neglect the study of beauty.”