In these epistolary poems written by exiled poet Adam
Lizakowski, time spent in San Francisco and Chicago coalesces with memories of
his home, Pieszyce in southwestern Poland.
Each letter begins with a
question or prompt from a mysterious interlocutor whose identity is never
revealed—an old friend in Pieszyce? A
family member left behind? Or perhaps
these letters are occasioned by and written to some version of a past,
pre-exilic self, a ghost subject or phantom limb of sorts that still speaks to
the poet, impossibly, from another space and time. Over the cruse of these 100+ letter poems, scenes of
San Francisco’s fabled literary scene and Chicago’s working class mythos are
brought to life through the poet’s telling and put into relief by images of the
cherry trees of Poland’s countryside. Of the Polish poets have resided and wrote in
America—Czesław Miłosz and Adam
Zagajewski the most notable among them—Adam Lizakowski is perhaps the most American. Like Whitman, his line extends to the ends of
the page’s geography. Like Ginsberg, the
poet sees the line as a vessel for his speech, which vacillates between the
quotidian and the profound. Like
Williams Carlos Williams, the poet finds his subject matter not in ideas but in
things—American things: squirrels; Bob Dylan; “checkerboard streets”; the IRS; eucalyptus
trees; Chicago streets named after Poles, French voyageurs, and American
presidents alike; orange groves in Sacramento Valley. All of these unlike things find in common their
unlikeness, and this proves to the poet the he is as much a thread in the
tapestry as all of the “American” things he encounters. In Letter 84, he likens Lawrence Ferlighetti
to “Dr. Noah / [who] brought lunatics upon his Ark.” Recalling Andre Bréton’s characterization of
America as a “boatload of madmen,” the poet recalls the San Francisco
Renaissance as a motley origin myth: “the clouds descended from [Ferlinghetti]
/ bearded and balding on Columbus Ave / Allen Ginsberg / Gregory Corso / Jack
Kerouac / Kenneth Patchen / were like a good recipe for vegetable soup /
cauliflower / carrots / onion / peas / potatoes” which was “cooked in a pot of
poetry / in North Beach.” Lizakowski’s
collection asserts that America is a myth comprised of many origins.
Brian Momar
