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Piotr Sommer’s poetic excavations of the quotidian will, I hope, be a cause for real excitement among American readers unfamiliar with his work. The poems themselves are quite approachable and need little by way of explanation. But allow me to share a few thoughts about the work and the poet that may be helpful.

Sommer’s everyday world is Poland, chiefly Warsaw and its suburbs, from the mid- to late twentieth century and into the first few years of our new century. It is a world saturated in history, almost all of it brutal and tragic, or, at the very least, difficult. But this is not Sommer’s principal subject. Sommer the poet only happens to be Polish; the Polish situation — historical, political — though it colors the work and not infrequently intrudes upon it, is not what this poetry is really about. This is not a poetry that aspires to articulate the historical conscience of a people, nor would it presume to, which for some American readers might make it seem curiously un-Polish. The American reader will know soon enough he is in Poland and not Arcady or Cincinnati. Many of the poems are site-specific and filled with Polish names of people and places and things. Also, the feel of the poetry will, I think, identify it as Eastern European. It is not allegorical, symbolist, or parabolic, per se, but the work bears the inflections of those kinds of poetic treatment of subject matter to which the reader of translations from the Eastern European will be familiar.

Sommer’s main subject is the “quandary-ness” of “ordinary life”: an old dog, the color and texture of a lemon, an elevator in a dilapidated apartment building, the crash of toiletries on a bathroom floor. The art of the poetry — and its art is considerable, singular and memorable — is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object, and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity. It is a poetry that engages large subjects through its attentiveness to seemingly small or minor events.

Sommer is not only a poet of importance but a significant translator of American and British poetry into Polish. He has produced Polish editions of Frank O’Hara and Charles Reznikoff, and Sommer’s own poetry has been strongly influenced by the work of both Americans with its mix of off-handedness, the depoeticized treatment of subject matter, the focus on the domestic, the strangeness and significance of the minor and ephemeral, the manner in which the voice is handled. All of these characteristics he would have found in the work of the so-called New York Poets and Objectivists that he has translated. Still, I don’t think the reader will be directly reminded of O’Hara, Reznikoff, or any other American poet in particular, including Robert Lowell, whom Sommer has also translated. Sommer’s influences, which are broad, appear to have been thoroughly digested. If his poetry has any identifiable antecedents, I would suggest that they are French, as befits the son of a partly French mother. Follain and Ponge come to mind.

As a translator of poetry from English who has also spent a great deal of time in America and Britain imaginatively and in fact, many of Sommer’s poems have a rather liminal feel about them, of poetic incident and impulse caught up in the act of being translated into language, a language, but one that refracts and interacts with a secondary or alternative language. Meaning is unstable. There is a quality of otherness in the poetry, or the suggestion of otherness. Boundaries are continually being crossed. There are sallies and retreats. What at first reading may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is very much the poet as double agent, working both sides of the border and traveling incognito.

The translator of poetry knows better than anyone else the difficulties and loss incurred by the passage of a poem from one language to another. In Polish, Sommer is an intensely musical poet. I know because I’ve heard him read aloud. His poems move in a complex array of measures. They make gorgeous noises with their textures of consonants and vowels. Sommer’s poetry also makes very particular use of colloquial diction and constructions to achieve its effects in Polish. Many, perhaps most, of these effects do not make the passage into English, and much of the music of the originals has been sacrificed. But if we do not get the full glory of Sommer’s poetry in English translation, we still get a great deal, which is testimony both to the poetry and the quality of the translations.

The chief notion I would suggest to the new reader of this poetry is how Sommer, often several times within a given poem, establishes tonalities and then modulates them into alternative tonalities in such a way that the quiddity of the piece becomes unpredictable and subject to transformation at any point, say from irony to pity and back again. Any given poem has multiple planes and surfaces, many of these not immediately evident until turned sideways, ever so slightly, by an unexpected word or syntactical effect that provokes entirely new possibilities and resonances of meaning.

Sommer’s poetry is distinguished, on the one hand, by an uncommon breadth of sympathies and its humanness, as full of heart as it is of intellect. It is also a poetry of trap doors, false bottoms, and numerous levers, some real, some faux, that the poet invites readers to pull at their own discretion. With regard to this last, allow me to caution the reader: should you pull the wrong (or right) lever, you may find any number of your habits of mind set on their head, likewise your expectations of how language and meaning interrelate. So be alert. Exercise caution. Go slowly. And enjoy the ride.

August Kleinzahler

San Francisco August 2004