The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
Wislawa Szymborska died on Feb. 1 this year. Born in Poland 1923, Szymborska lived through the political tumults of the 20th century, but her poetry stubbornly presented the individual conscience in the face of history. A shy and retiring woman, Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin celebrates the work of the late Wislawa Szymborska, and explores the brilliance of Polish poetry throughout the last half-century.
“Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.”
(Via The Book Bench)
...more
Five years ago on a tiny island in the Aegean, I cried for Kurt Vonnegut as I sat in the tub, holding in one hand the long, low-pressure shower hose and in the other, a coffee mug full of red wine.