Artistic statement

by Adam Lizakowski

The Polish Arts and Poetry Association in Chicago is organization of newcomers with different cultural backgrounds who write about America as their new land and America as a dream five hundred years old. Their poetry consists of the words of common people who work for their daily bread, words used in everyday conversations. The inspiration for their poetry comes from newspapers and magazines, describing people’s lives. Their words are not from dictionaries or words of educated people because their poetry is about problems of people who are looking for jobs and better lives for their families in the Promised Land.

The theme of their poetry does not see and observe life through the lens of an intellectual point of view but from their own experience.  Its tone is rather realistic, and the subjects of the stories are people’s lives. They do not invent them; they are stories, which are handed over from one person to another one. In their poetry, there are biographies of many immigrants from the past and hopes of better future.  Their work is not trying to evoke sadness or depression in their reader but reflects who they are and why they are here.

They want to invent a new language and new poetry in the new land.  They know that the most important thing in poetry for the poet is his or her language -- how a poet thinks and how the language of poetry is related to everyday language.  Their awareness of everyday life and struggles with assimilation are the inspiration of their work.  Emerson in his essay states: “The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin” (The Poet by R.W. Emerson).  Emerson gives an idea of how poets should write poetry if he lives in his own country and writes in his own language.  The American poet from XIX century who was planted  roots for American poetry didn’t foresee that one day there would be poets who write about America as their own land in language they just learned.

The immigrant poets try to combine their old vision of the past with a new, rapturous one by transforming their own lives. They do not abandon the present (as when surrendering to memories of Poland and other places), but rather engage and celebrate it. They accumulate knowledge every second of their being here from their surroundings in a way which recalls, not surprisingly, Homer’s Iliad or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass-though, but unlike these poets, they write of a “foreign land” in a “foreign language.”  They join their fellow immigrants in singing the chorus of Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago,” but for them the words are not a cliché of the popular culture (as they might be for the average American), but something extraordinary and fantastic.

Chicago, September 30, 2006