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crookedtreehouse's review
5.0
“Where are you from?” ”Where are you from?””Hvor kommer du fra?” The most common question, by Copenhagen standards “Where did you come from?” “How long have you lived here?” “Hvor kommer du fra?”
I was in Grolier’s, investigating the Polish Poets section when Recommender Extraordinaire, Elizabeth Doran, suggested Grzegorz Wroblewski. “He’s like the Polish James Ta—“
And before she could get out the finale “te” in “Tate”, my frequent drinking partner and poetry related accomplice, Dean, had snatched the book out of my hand. Stop drinking and you will instantly shed false friends. Your heart will gain strength and you will get that long awaited erection!
We went back to my house, me with some other book which I probably enjoyed, and Dean with Wroblewski’s Kopenhaga (where all the italicized text is from...in this review....I do not mean to imply that all the italicized text in the world hail from Copenhagen or Wroblewski’s fingers). We drank quite a bit of whiskey ‘Stop drinking!’ is what you will tell him at the end of your life as the pearly gates open... and started reading some of Wroblewski’s work aloud.
It wasn’t just the whiskey. The mostly justified prose poems in this book were perfectly timed with our afternoon. “Has something serious happened” my Copenhagen friends ask. “No, nothing serious.,” I answer, opening a new bottle of pink Lambrusco. “Nothing serious has happened yet, so far things are going fine.”
Kopenhaga starts out as a straightforward memoir in Polaroids. Brief glimpses at the life of a Polish man living in Denmark. Conversations with his wife, an accounting of the type of Non-Danish people living in Copenhagen, a woman at a bus stop. The longest poem is a page and a half. All straight forward, mostly prose. But amongst the memoir, small cracks of non-melancholy unhappiness, seeds of discomfort that can’t help but grow into the spikey weeds of a happily and dissatisfying mundane life.
First thoughts, morning thoughts: “I’m alive. This means I have to eat something.” Later: “Has anyone ever managed otherwise?” Again: “I really have to eat something. Someone? Something? After all I’m alive. This means I have to eat something. Something. Someone.”
***
Today instead of letters – ads for meat. Apparently I did not deserve letters.
I have had all of those mornings. Replace ads for meat with “stacks of circulars for computers I want but can’t afford” and you’ve just described every time I’ve opened my mailbox for the last several years.
A long and eventful life? The doctors make no bones about it...Your blood cholesterol: 350. You must go on a diet immediately. Reduce your intake of alcohol and start playing sports again. Unless nothing matters to you anymore.
I started to question whether Wroblewski had gathered my imaginary primary care provider (that’s early 21st century American for “doctor”) and my subconscious into his manuscript to mock my current life.
No, these were just paragraphs torn from the journal of a Polish man living in Copenhagen which could easily be paragraphs torn from the journal of an American man living in America. Both were living in a foreign country they’d grown accustomed to, even though they frequently felt out of place there.
Maybe he was mocking me.
“If any of us are ghosts,” said Mary, “it will soon come to light.” Meanwhile, everyone pretended to be alive.
When I was living in Burlington, Vermont (surely an even more foreign country than Boston, Massachusetts) a poet went on a diatribe about not wanting to live in the “meanwhile”. He preferred the “nicewhile”. While I’ve never enjoyed the nicewhile, I have definitely appropriated his idea. I frequently talk about living in the tepidwhile, the frustratedwhile, the shitwhile, the contentedwhile, the yeswhile. I was residing in the whiskeywhile when Dean, having wrested control of the book from me again, let out a sharp cry that somehow managed to convey shock, adoration, enlightenment, disappointment, crushing self-realization, and the desire to share a common experience. He read aloud: You will survive in the minds of distant relatives and cousins, in their memories of you...(Motherfuckers! What if they deliberately choose to forget you!) And then, when they also depart, you will be no more.
Well, shit.
And then, immediately following that: December 1998. The whole world rejoices! (The whole world...but me). These two poems, Dean announced, were his favorites.
A few pages later, arrived at my favorite brief poem in the book.
At the end of the day I’m seized by the fear of suddenly falling asleep, at the end of the night by the fear of suddenly waking up.
“Sure, Wroblewski,” I thought, “just sum up my existence in one sentence. That’s fine. As long as you don’t then talk about how many of my friends and contemporaries (as in the pedestrian ‘people my own age’ not as in the egotistical ‘people I share genius with’) have died in the last year.”
Today’s phone call about the funeral: “They’re starting to pick off our shelf.”
I stared at the book for a moment, then passed it back to Dean. The whiskey said “Fuck Wroblewski.”
Life is not happy these days, but the key is knowing how to position yourself: always be at the right bench at the right time! Especially in summer
Ok.
Stay out of politics for God’s sake, for politics is only good for shortsighted people in unironed silk shirts.
Fine. Fine. Advice is nice when it’s brief and obvious. Especially when it’s so obvious that you’ve spent most of your life ignoring it. I realized that reading these poems out loud to Dean (and having him read other poems from the book out loud to me) was a welcome change from what had become my usual topic of conversation: complaining about shitheels what done me wrong, making jokes out of the bones jutting out of my skin, turning my frown upside down while also angling my brows like an aroused butterfly. “Franklin!” I thought (Franklin being the imaginary person whose name I took in vain, so as not to pester the constantly beleaguered Jesus). “It’s so much easier to talk about poets these days when I’ve never had to encounter them as human beings. Never had to read about the offensive thing they hopefully said accidentally. Never had to worry about the possibility of them having said the offensive thing on purpose. never had to imagine if they would stand behind their statement. Never had to put myself in their underwear with the Target logo on the crotch.”
I thought about expressing the sentiment to Dean, but he was (and continues to be) a poet I had to encounter as a human being, so I took the book back.
A benefactor is not a person who gives money to drunkards, but a person who tries to swindle them out of it. (There are plenty of ways to rationalize your own degradation and downfall.)
The book had become so simultaneously more and less a memoir. It was life told in Fortune Cookie strips. I drank more whiskey. Thought more about the strangers I had let become the most important people in my life.
The guy with the mustache walking away. I guess I could catch up with him and ask whether he keeps a python in his house, or likes to suck nectar from flowers. Of course we have no other ideas. We want to come up with something relatively neutral...Even sausage would seem to him suspect. So we remain, each in his place. Cosmic alienation. He knew very well I was thinking about him. He spat - a bulldozer-telepath...
I realized that each of us (Dean and I, not Grzegorz) were only reading aloud the introspective, personal poems. There were also references to The World Outside Of I. Poems of Kosovo, and The Heaven’s Gate cult (Franklin! Dean had no memory of Heaven’s Gate. Were we not sharing the poems about cultural references because we didn’t really share cultural references?), Y2K, the treatment of the elderly in Denmark. We spoke none of them aloud. Only the intrapersonal. Perhaps because that was the only language we spoke in common.
The best strategy is to feign muteness. Or – as Steve did – to retreat to your roots, your native language. Steve is from London. After twenty years in Copenhagen, after twenty years of patiently answering the question “Hvor kommer du fra?” Steve finally broke down. These days he speaks only London slang. And no one understands him anymore. No one even tries to understand him. At least Steve is a free man. I envy him.
And then, as though he had sensed my inner-monologue, or, perhaps, because we were reading the book chronologically, (and with the exception of the above paragraph, I’ve been presenting you with the book from page one to page last) Dean read aloud a poem about Jennicam.org which tells of a non-porn site If instead of “jennicam” you write “jenny-cam” (or “net” instead of “org) you’ll end up with porn! where you can watch a woman live her entire life in front a webcam. For a free “visit” to Jenni, you get a new picture every twenty minutes. For $15 a year, every two minutes.
This was clearly meta commentary. Post modernism. Self-aware metaphor for self. See how we talk about ourselves and we talk about other people. “Oh, Franklin’s Father.” I think. “Is it possible to read anything anymore without trying to parse it intellectually? Curse the stupid, well-intentioned, adequately educated professors who imposed their methods of critique and buzzwords upon my reading comprehension. Can’t I just read something for enjoyment?” And then I looked at my giant stack of graphic novels about superheroes and found some brief inner-peace.
Dean and I finished reading the book. He took it home. I went online and ordered my own copy. We talked about it from time to time, mostly when other people were around.
In the alonewhile, I sat down on my bed, and reread the book. I was not melancholic or depressed. It was alonewhile, not necessarily selfindulgentwhile or ennuiwhile. This time I was whiskeyless. Or, rather, my liver was in the bedroom and the whiskey was safe in the kitchen. My mouth was too exhausted from a night of laughing to run in the direction of alcohol.
The moment you die, you cease to have hangovers, a car that breaks down, an unfaithful wife, an allergy to the moon, bad cholesterol, debts, loud neighbors, memory loss, short legs, a malicious confessor, et cetera, et cetera...So let’s be positive!
There were two pages left in my reread and I opened up my computer to order the other Wroblewski book I could find online. I remembered that Elizabeth was planning on going to Denmark to see a Wroblewski gallery show. I wondered what sort of visual art he created. Paintings? Photographs? His own poems carved in the remnants of his childhood home which he burned to the ground on his fortieth birthday (this is not a thing he did, as far as I know)? I could have easily looked it up online, but decided I wanted to continue my ignorance of his non-poetry life.
Should I ask Elizabeth to pick up any of his books that might not be available in the US? Oh. Right. They would be written in Polish, which is not a language I speak.
I thought of my friend, Peter, who is also Polish and who speaks Polish and thought about asking Elizabeth to buy a book in Polish, and then asking Peter to translate it for me. How more broken would the sounding of words become when a fluent of both languages man is given no time to make translation poetic?
Sadly, Elizabeth didn’t end up going to Poland. I didn’t have anything for Peter to translate. For me to repurpose and tell Dean or anyone else who’d heard our praises of The James Tate of Poland, of the improper translations that existed purely in my memory and in the residue on Peter’s fingers or tongue. (I couldn’t decide whether I’d more appreciate the ephemera of him just reading it aloud, or giving him just enough time to sit down and write it out.)
Soon, my imaginary translation fantasy gave way to the routine dread of actual memories of reality. These then shaded my vision of future interactions with people I tolerated but didn’t enjoy being around. I went to work. I wasn’t entirely unhappy. I left work to eat something I probably ate twice a week because sometimes you just eat something. Something. Someone. that happens to be close to you. I went home and petted cats. Sat in the colossal clutter of books and dirty laundry that I called a bedroom. I saw that my mother had left a voicemail, and debated calling her back. I opened a bag of chips instead.
For dinner, I went to the pizza place with the mediocre food and insufferable staff. I nodded and monosyllabically answered their overly cheerful questions in exchange for leeching the wifi from laundromat next door. I realized I should have forgone the food for actually cleaning the laundry. I still had time to go home and remedy the situation. Instead I said “Yea.” to a question I did not actually hear. I read an e-mail I immediately wished I hadn’t. There was so much humanity coming at me via machine, I couldn’t look away. My phone rang. I did not look to see who was calling. I went home to find that one rebellious cat had taken a shit directly to the left of the litterbox. Another had vomited a pile of her fur and dinner directly in front of my bedroom.
“Times will come you’ve never even dreamed of!” – I was warned in childhood. Unfortunately it was true. They came.