'He Treated Us Like Adults'

I grew up thinking writers – poets, certainly – were not quite real. None lived in my neighborhood. I never saw writers on television. My parents never talked about them, as they might actors and politicians, who also were unreal. Without thinking too deeply about it, I put writers in the same metaphysical category as Spinoza’s God and non-differential equations. 

I met my first flesh-and-blood writer, Max Ellison (1914-85), when he came to my high school in suburban Cleveland and conformed to my Whitmanesque image of what a poet should look and act like. He had just published his first collection, The Underbark (1969). I bought a hardcover copy ($2.50) and he signed it for me. That too was a first, though the book is long gone. Ellison would later be named the poet laureate of Michigan. I was a Roethke enthusiast and had recently read Allan Seager’s The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (1968). Folksy and bearded, Ellison assured me that Roethke, another Michigan native, was overrated. I asked him about Buber and Tillich, writers important to Roethke late in his life, but Ellison knew nothing about them. Disappointment mingled with the thrill of meeting my first real poet.

 

In the title essay in Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination (trans. Lillian Vallee, 1995), Adam Zagajewski writes:

 

“[I]t was Zbigniew Herbert who came to our school. Professor M. introduced him in his typical sweet-sour fashion. He said that there were two Herberts—one who lived in Poznan and the other who had come to our school—although one can’t be altogether sure, because in modern poetry everything was possible. But Herbert did not need Professor M.’s help at all. He read fragments of Barbarian in the Garden and a few poems. He treated us like adults, which was flattering.”

 

Zagajewski says Herbert was the “first real poet I had listened to.” He read his poem “Biology Teacher,” which includes these lines: “in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies.” The poem is taken from Alissa Valles’ translation of Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco, 2007).