Piotr Florczyk
Interviewed by Jonathan Wolf
You’ve said that your earliest poems (“doodles of thought and emotion”) arrived shortly after you moved from Kraków to California. What can you say about the urge to write? Was there any initial, galvanizing experience that set you chattering? And at what point—and how—did writing become more than a mere enjoyment?
When I moved to Southern California in 1994, it was for sports, as a high caliber swimmer sent to train with the best by the Polish Swimming Federation, not for school let alone poetry. I arrived in September and by December I was so homesick that I wanted to go back to Poland. Writing became an outlet—for making sense of my feelings and thoughts, of course, but also my identity, which began to undergo what ultimately amounted to seismic changes. I didn’t get serious about writing, even though I’ve always been a reader, until midway through college, which, by the way, I attended on a swimming scholarship. It’s hard to write when everyone thinks of you as a jock, but the need to do it came from within. Then, after college, while still involved with competitive swimming, I entertained entering a PhD program in History but changed my mind at the proverbial the last minute, having made the decision to commit myself to literature. I still doodle a lot, but my background as an athlete plays a huge role in my writing life. How so? I try to be consistent, have a plan, goals, etc. In other words, I’d like to think of myself as a poet/writer who gets things done.
I particularly love “People’s Overture.” It’s funny, tragic, aspirational—for me, it ably covers all the ground a good “political poem” should hope to. Can you tell us where this one came from?
I am a promiscuous reader of all kinds of poetry and writing in general. There is no other way to be, I think. Some days I long for brief lyric poems, while other times I am drawn to expansive treatises. What really gets me going is a poem or a piece of writing that I can’t figure out, but that’s not how most people work or read. In fact, we are living in the age of sincerity and immediacy. How else to explain the popularity of the so-called Instapoets? Sadly, this desire for straight-up narratives about this or that has led to the discounting of works that are formally ambitious. Fair enough, I say, but then I remember that literature is also about how things are being said. I like it when a poem, that is, the poem’s form and its language, make me work for it.
In terms of “People’s Overture”—and I can’t thank you enough for your kind words about it—people either love it or hate it. Its genesis is rather pedestrian: it came from my listening to and reading up on various national anthems, and in that sense, it is best thought of as a composite poem. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but one can learn quite a bit from listening to the national anthems of countries from around the world; the lyrics tell us how the nation sees itself and how it wishes to present itself to the world. The poem plays with the idea of nationhood and, by extension, it questions national frameworks, ideals, and stereotypes.
Absolutely. And that’s interesting. I’d recognized the poem as a kind of mazurka (spry and folky, written in threes) but hadn’t made the connection to anthems. Rereading it now, the poem seems almost haunted by a phantom brass section! I always find it interesting when a poem (or any other bit of writing) melds research and experience—as do your last book of English poems, From the Annals of Kraków (2020, Lynx House Press), and your recent book of essays, Swimming Pool (2024, Bloomsbury). Do you think of research as a part of your creative work?
I love what you say about “People’s Overture” being haunted by a “phantom brass section”! Your comment reinforces my belief that poems can be deep and fun at the same time, which was my goal in writing this piece. Like many writers, I came to poetry with the idea of writing Poetry—you know, serious stuff about serious things—but then I realized that poems channeling ambiguity, or humor, can be just as powerful (not to mention that they are, arguably, more difficult to write).
For me, it almost always comes down to how something is written rather than what it is about. With the two books you’ve mentioned, and especially From the Annals of Kraków, which is a volume of poems based on testimonies of Holocaust survivors, the question of how is of paramount importance. Here, the research part is present, directly or indirectly, in almost every poem. The question of why also hangs over the entire project since I am not Jewish. Did I fail to stay in my lane? Absolutely, and I’m proud of it. To limit ourselves as poets to writing exclusively from the personal/lived experience, to not venture out into the past or the world as we don’t know it but long to learn from and about, seems self-defeating, to say the least. So, yes, I think of research as an integral part of my creative practice, including the kind of research that is not project-oriented but simply comes from the reading that I do. All writers should read more than they write—don’t you think?—just as we’re told to first listen, then talk.
Do these ideas—the importance of listening, research, and reading as methods of working outside of personal experience—influence your work as a translator? There seems to be endless disagreement as to the “proper” attitudes and responsibilities translators should have to their material.
Translators and poets/writers are similar in many ways, including in that—contrary to popular opinion, which paints them nearly exclusively as benevolent engines of cultural dialogue—the former pursue glory and fame just like the latter do. Likewise, the main responsibility of translators should be to do their job well. Period.
Of course, there is a lot to be said about the sociology of translation, especially the why of this book or that author being selected for translation, which, by the way, automatically results in others voices from the same literary tradition losing their shot at being translated due to the literary marketplace’s—I’m talking about the US here—inability to handle foreign authors in large quantities. It’s a peculiar situation, and something that all translators should be cognizant of, especially those who translate from the so-called minor languages.
For me, translating has always been about writing. Sure, there was some ambition to expand the canon of Polish poetry in English translation, but ultimately, I got into translation because it’s the best way to learn how to write. This explains, at least in part, why 99% of the authors I’ve translated are my exact or near contemporaries, and then also why their work differs from my own (or did, when I was translating it).
Zagajewski imagined writers as managing a swarm of contradictions (between irony and ecstasy, beauty and honesty, the inexpressibility of the “inner world” and its need to be expressed through some subject). What contradictions do you think are most pertinent to poets writing today, and how do they work their way through your writing?
I wouldn’t want to speak for others, but in my case, the contradictions I most wrestle with stem from my experience as a migrant. See, I used to dislike visiting Poland—my parents and sisters didn’t come with me to the US, so I had reasons to go back—but now I do, quite often, in fact, which is why I prefer the term migrant to immigrant. Like any migrant/immigrant, I struggle with issues of identity, no matter how sure I am about who I am (on most daysJ). I also, after initially writing only in Polish and then exclusively in English, write in both of my languages, and my bi- or multilingualism creates its own set of dilemmas. Inevitably, this extends into issues of belonging, both as a person but also as a writing artist. You know, there was a time when I wanted to be called an American poet, but then I realized that that would never happen, that the American literary establishment, no matter how good my work may be, would never think of me as one of their own, that I would forever be thought of as someone from elsewhere. It wasn’t an easy thing to come to terms with, but what has made it worse is the fact that the literary community in Poland also sees me as an outsider. There is a lot to be said about the benefits of existing in the margins of whatever community, but it can be a very painful and disorienting place to be.
Lastly, can you tell us what you’re working on now and/or give a word of advice to the eager and wary new poets of the world?
Well, the new poets of the world should—to paraphrase a classic, who believed that great poets do not borrow but rather steal from their idols—never stop exploring. Which is to say: write what you do not know. Or, write to discover something new about yourself and the world. Also, whatever you write about, remember that craft matters. Everything’s already been written—to use another stock phrase—but not by you. You, the new poet, can contribute to the conversation that has been going on for thousands of years, but you have to find a way to do it in ways that makes whatever you say interesting, especially to those who have no personal stake in or connection to your subject or theme. Everything I’m working on now—new poems, essays, a fictionalized memoir—is about helping me learn how to do that over and over again.