Young Poets, Please Read Everything

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Adam Zagajewski

Young Poets, Please Read Everything

        I sense at least one danger here. By discussing ways of reading, or simply sketching a portrait of a "good reader," I may inadvertently give the impression that I am myself a perfect reader. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm a chaotic reader, and the holes in my education are more breathtaking than the Swiss Alps. My remarks should thus be seen as belonging to the realm of dreams, a kind of a personal utopia, rather than as describing one of my very small platoon of virtues.
    Reading chaotically! Some time ago I unpacked the suitcase from my summer vacation. Let's take a look at the books I took with me to Switzerland, near Lake Geneva. I probably should have brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Byron, Madame de Stael, Juliusz Slowacki, Adam Mickiewicz, Gibbon, and Nabokov, since all of these are linked with this renowned lake in one way or another. But none of them actually made the trip with me. I see on my study's floor instead Jacob Burckhardt's The Greeks and Greek Civilization (yes, in English translation, I picked it up in a Houston half-price bookstore); a selection of Emerson's essays, Baudelaire's poetry in French, Stefan George's poems in Polish translation, Hans Jonas's classic book on Gnosticism (in German), some of Zbigniew Herbert's poems, and the volume of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's voluminous Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke) containing his remarkable essays. Some of these books belong to various Parisian libraries. This suggests that I’m a rather neurotic reader who often shuns an owner's responsibilities in favor of library books, as if reading books that don't belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries-the only venue in which the socialist project has succeeded).
    But why do I read? Do I really need to answer this question? It seems to me that poets read for all kinds of reasons, some of which are quite straightforward and don't differ from the motives of any other mortal. But our reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened. This is what we call tradition-or history.
    We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanist drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry. Because we ourselves experience those strange moments when we are driven by a force that demands strict obedience and sometimes, though not always, leaves behind black spots on paper the way fire leaves ashes (noircir le papier, as the French call the noble act of writing). And once you've undergone a moment of ecstatic writing, you start acting like a drug addict who always raw more. You'd do anything for more of it; and reading doesn't seem like an excessive sacrifice.
    The books I read-if any such confession is required or desired-fall into these two categories, books of memory and of ecstasy. You can't read an ecstatic book late at night: insomnia ensues. You read history before falling asleep, and save Rimbaud for noon. The relationship between memory and ecstasy is rich, paradoxical, and engaging. Sometimes ecstasy grows from memory, and then spreads like a forest fire-an old sonnet seized by a greedy eye may ignite the spark of a new poem. But memory and ecstasy do not always overlap. Sometimes a sea of indifference divides them.
    There are scholars whose memory is astonishingly vast and yet they produce very little. Sometimes in the library you catch sight of an old man wearing a bow tie, bent beneath the weight of years, and you think: That person knows everything. And some of these elderly readers in thick glasses do indeed know a great deal (though perhaps not that little old man you glimpsed the other day). But this is leagues apart from creativity. At the other end of the spectrum we have the teenagers getting high on hip-hop, but we don't expect to reap a rich artistic harvest from this particular passion.
    Apparently memory and ecstasy need each other desperately. Ecstasy requires a little knowledge and memory loses nothing when colored by strong emotions. The problem of reading is so vital for us-us meaning poets, but also just people who like to think, to meditate-because our education has been so imperfect. The liberal schools you attended (or the communist schools where I studied) cared very little for the classics, and were even less interested in the giants of modernity. Our schools are proud of producing streamlined members of that Great Animal, the new society of proud consumers. It's true that we weren't tortured like adolescents in nineteenth-century England (or France or Germany, or even Poland for that matter): we didn't have to memorize the whole of Virgil and Ovid. We must be self-taught; the difference in this regard between someone like Joseph Brodsky, who left school at the age of fifteen and proceeded to read everything he could get his hands on, and someone who's successfully run the full gamut of a modern American education, including a Ph.D., while rarely setting foot outside the Ivy League's safe precincts, doesn't require much comment. We do our reading mainly off-campus and in our post-campus lives. The American poets I know are very well read and yet I see clearly that they have acquired their knowledge in the interval between graduating and entering the zone of middle age. Most American graduate students know rather little less than their European counterparts, but many of them will make up for this in the years to come.
    I also have the impression that many younger American poets read rather narrowly today; they chiefly read poetry and not much else except perhaps a little criticism. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with reading poetry from Homer to Zbigniew Herbert and Anne Carson, and yet it seems to me that this mode of reading is too specialized. It's like having a student of biology tell you: I read only biology. Or a young astronomer who reads only astronomy. Or an athlete reading only the sports section of The New York Times. There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry-and yet a shadow of premature professionalization hovers over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.
    Reading "only" poetry suggests that there's something rigid and isolated about the nature of contemporary poetic practice, that poetry has become separated from philosophy's central questions, from the historian's anxieties, the painter's quandaries, the qualms of an honest politician, e.g., from the deep, common source of culture. The way a young poet organizes his reading is actually quite crucial for the place of poetry among other arts. It may determine-and not only for a single individual-whether poetry is a central discipline (even if read solely by the happy few), responding to the key impulses of a given historic moment, or a more or less interesting form of drudgery that for some reason continues to draw a few unhappy fans.
    Or perhaps it's the other way around. Our patterns of reading reflect our deeper, perhaps not entirely conscious, conclusions on the central-or peripheral-place of poetry. Are we satisfied with the specialist's timid approach, with the cautious, sectarian relationship to literature typical of those writers who agree to confine themselves to little tales of broken hearts? Or will we aspire rather to the generous stance of the poet who struggles to think, to sing, to take risks, to embrace generously and boldly the thinning humanity of our time (without forgetting the broken hearts)? So, young poets, please read everything, read Plato and Ortega y Gasset, Horace and Holderlin, Ronsard and Pascal, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Oscar Milosz and Czeslaw Milosz, Keats and Wittgenstein, Emerson and Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and Umberto Saba, Thucydides and Colette, Apollinaire and Virginia Woolf, Anna Akhmatova and Dante, Pasternak and Machado, Montaigne and St. Augustine, Proust and Hofmannsthal, Sappho and Szymborska, Thomas Mann and Aeschylus, read biographies and treatises, essays and political analyses. Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

Adam Zagajewski: A Defense of Ardor