Polishing the argument

A Nation piece about two new volumes of Polish poetry—Ewa Lipska's The New Century and Janusz Szuber's They Carry a Promise—starts with a self-described bit of heresy:

Polish poets publish too much. Such a generalization flirts with heresy in a country with so many lionized bards, and where for much of the twentieth century state censors steered extraordinary poets into long careers of writing "for the drawer." There are certainly exceptions to this overexposure, including Adam Zagajewski, Wislawa Szymborska and the late Czeslaw Milosz. But some of their colleagues haven't been so prudent. In Poland it is not uncommon for a poet to "debut" (their term, thankfully, not ours) by the age of 25 and to crank out a book every eighteen months thereafter. One consequence of this prolificacy is the staggering volume of garbage that floods bookstores, including many D-list poems by A-list poets. Another is that if a poet aspires to be noticed—and poets, like children, want desperately to be noticed—he or she often becomes a rejectionist within a generation, publicly denouncing predecessors, rivals and younger upstarts.

Yow. Happily, writes critic Benjamin Paloff, the poets he's reviewing escape the trend, striking "an essential, if not always consistent, blow in favor of a broader appreciation of individual poets from Poland and against the romanticized view of Polish poetry as a resolute 'witness to history' that still overshadows the publication of translations of Polish poetry in the United States."

That's the view that inspired David Orr to write, two winters ago, that Robert Pinsky "can’t hear a Polish poet snortle without having fantasies about barricades and firing squads."