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Morton Marcus: He said, "My generation was lost, cities too and nations, but all this a little later. Meanwhile in the window, a swallow performs it's right of the second. That boy, does he already suspect the beauty is always elsewhere and

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always delusive? Now he sees his homeland at the time of the second mowing. Roads winding uphill and down. Pine groves. Lakes. An overcast sky with one slanting ray. And everywhere men with scythes in shirts of unbleached linen, and the dark

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blue trousers that were common in the province. He sees what I see even now. Oh but he was clever, attentive, as if things were instantly changed by memory. Riding in a cart, he looked back to retain as much as possible, which means he knew

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what was needed for some ultimate moment when he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last." That is part of a longer poem by Czeslaw Milosz [“From the Rising of the Sun”] , which a lot of Americans pronounce Czeslaw

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Milosz, the great Lithuanian-Polish poet, Nobel Prize winner of 1980, who passed away this past August 14th, and whose work we will be discussing tonight on the Poetry Show. I'm your host, Mort Marcus. And for "From the Bookshelf," the

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program that begins at nine o'clock I will be reading my memoirs of Czeslaw to give you some sense of the man as I knew him. The poem I just read is very interesting because it in many ways hits to the heart of a lot of what we're going to be

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talking tonight. And let me just give you a little biography on Czeslaw Milosz. He was born in 1911, in a small province in Lithuania near the large old town of Wilno, which is now in the Republic of Lithuania called Vilnius, and was then in 1911

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part of the Russian Empire and was called Vilna. He went to school in Krakow, I'm sorry in Vilna. And he was a very promising young poet who was also called a Catastrophist in the 1930s in that he saw the disaster of what was going to

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befall Europe in the 1940s. He was at that time a Marxist. By temperament, he wanted to see, as so many people wanted to see, the 20th century become a time when the worker or the poor would be of equal status and not downtrodden. And about this

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time, the rise of fascism, of course, began World War II, he found himself in Poland in World War II, in Warsaw, in fact, and as you know, from motion pictures and I hope from history, or if not from history, then motion pictures such as,

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"The Pianist," Warsaw in 1943 was not only the site of the Jewish ghetto, which was emptied out and destroyed, but afterwards the rising of the Polish people in the streets, a three-month uprising, which the Nazis responded to by killing

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230,000 of the inhabitants of Warsaw and literally raising the city street by street until there was nothing left but rubble. Milosz was in that city at that time, he was working in a

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clandestine press for the Resistance. And after the war was over, you know he had to flee the city during the destruction. After the war, he became part of the new Polish government, which was slowly taken over by the communists. He

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became a minor diplomatic official. He first went to Washington, DC in 1948, 1949. He then was reassigned to Paris, and in Paris in 1951, he defected. Now a staunch anti-communist realizing that totalitarian governments of any

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kind, whether they be fascist or whether they be communist, are deadly and lethal to human life and human aspirations. He lived in Paris for the next nine years, throughout the decade, but immediately wrote a book called, "The Captive Mind." And

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"The Captive Mind" was an examination of how insidious communism would move into a nation or what it would do to it. It became an international bestseller, his reputation was based on it. He followed with several other books, one of

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which was a novel, which also talked about life under communism. And in 1960, he was brought over to the United States by the University of California at Berkeley, and became a professor of Slavic Literature in the Slavic

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Languages department. One little anecdote that you might be interested in, he was to teach Polish literature, but found when he got over here that there was no Polish literature textbook. So over the summer, he wrote the complete history of

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Polish literature, and used that in his classes, and it is one of the great scholarly works of the 20th century. He was an amazing intellectual. But then he got used to life in America and he had to confront what America was as opposed to the education he

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had had as a boy. And he lived literally in obscurity, published only by an immigrant Polish press in Paris. And at the same time, Kenneth Rexroth, the great literary figure from San Francisco, was instrumental in bringing out a very thin book

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in 1973, which was called, "The Selected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz," but nobody knew who he was over here. And it wasn't until suddenly in 1980 that the Nobel Prize committee awarded him the Nobel Prize that he suddenly became extremely

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well-known and was an international celebrity. Then translations of his work into English just began to roll out like newspapers. Terrific translations, I should say. All of his translators are just excellent. He finally wound up

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with Robert Haas, the great American poet who lived in Berkeley and they would meet every Friday and they would discuss things and they would translate and they are really marvelous translations, no foreign poet has been done

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better. This does not mean that even though he was not known in America before 1980, that he was not known in Europe. He had become literally a hero to the Polish people, even though he was obviously persona non grata and would have been arrested had

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he gone into the country, and even in Gdansk after Solidarity. They have in the monument of Solidarity they have- one of the panels is a poem, actually a stanza of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz. He is considered to this very day a hero of the Polish

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people. So, it is his poetry that we will be looking at tonight, a man who literally had his world destroyed, his friends, his loves destroyed. Ironically, he met his wife in Poland during

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the Nazi occupation. And that and his two small sons are the only things he really was able to get out of Poland with. So, we will look at his poetry tonight and what I've been doing for the past week since I've heard of his death is go over

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his poetry. I had not read his last three or four books and It has been very interesting for me to go over his poems and to realize how repetitious they were, how he went over the same area again and again and again. And a lot of the poems which I

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would like to read, I'm not going to read because one, they are very long. And two, they make references to things that are specifically Polish and would take me a lot of time to fill you in on. But I certainly do want to start with some very

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early poems, and I will go chronologically, and this is, from what I read, he's remembering himself as a young boy in that introductory poem, and wondering at this picture of this young boy who was once him, and he will do this over and

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over again, and from the beginning, and even before his poetry drastically changes, certain themes are set. And what I would like to read you is the first major poem that he wrote, and that he still liked in old age very much, and it's called a

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poem called, "The World," and it's in twelve sections and I will just read, maybe just six of them. The poems are supposed to sound like a primer, like a Dick and Jane book, like you're talking to a child. What's interesting is he is talking

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about his youth, a subject he will go back to again and again and again. Memory is one of his main subjects and it is more than nostalgia. As we will see, it is also about trying to capture and keep what is real, a word he will use over and over

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again, and to find that you cannot really capture anything that's real, even the poet doesn't capture anything that's real. So if you can capture nothing that is real, does that mean that there is no reality and that human life is just a

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series of events which perish the minute they happen? Well, he has an answer for that, but it doesn't come up immediately. Here are some poems from "The World." In this picture then of this area of Lithuania which is, oh, twenty, forty kilometers

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away from what we now call Vilnius. THE ROAD Here where you see a green valley and the road half-covered with grass, through an oak wood beginning to bloom, children are

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returning home from school. In a pencil case that opens sideways crayons rattle among crumbs of bread, and a copper penny saved by every child to greet the first spring cuckoo.

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Sister's beret and brother's cap bob in the bushy underbrush, a screeching jay hops in the branches and long clouds float over the trees. A red roof is already visible at the bend. In front of the house

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father, leaning on his hoe, bows down, touches the folded leaves, and from his flower bed inspects a whole region. THE PORCH The porch whose doors face the west has a large windows. The

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sun warms it well. From here you can see north, south, east, and west, forests and rivers, fields and tree-lined lanes. When the oaks array themselves in green, and the linden's shade reaches the flower bed, a world disappears behind the blue bark,

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engraved by leaves into motley patches. Here at a tiny table, brother and sister kneel during scenes of battle and pursuit and with the pink tongues, trying to help great warships, one of which is sinking.

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"The Stairs," this is a lovely look at perspective here as it would have seemed to a small child. There is obviously a boar's head on the wall as we would have deer heads on walls because there's a lot of hunting went on in this area of

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Lithuania. And the shadows cast by the boar's head, and then as you'll see the mother's shadow do a wonderful thing. THE STAIRS Yellow, creaking, and smelling of wax. The curved steps are

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narrow. Near the wall you can place your shoe crosswise, but near the banister, they hardly hold your foot. The boar's head is alive, enormous in shadow. At first, just the tusks, then as it grows, the snout roams the

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ceiling, sniffing the stairway vault while the light dissolves into vibrating dust. Mother carries down a flickering light. She walks slowly, tall, a robe tied at the waist. Her shadow climbs up to the shadow

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of the boar. And so, she struggles, alone, with that cruel beast. And then there are a whole lot of poems about father and I'm going to read three poems together. One is called:

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BY THE PEONIES The peonies bloom, white and pink, and inside each, as in a fragrant bowl, a swarm of tiny beetles have their conversation, for the flower is given to them as their home.

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Mother stands by the peony bed, reaches for one bloom, opens its petals, and looks for a long time into peony lands, where one short instant equals a whole year. Then she lets the flower go. And what she thinks she repeats

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aloud to the children and herself. The wind sways the green leaves gently and speckles of light flick across their faces. And this next one from the long poem, "The World," is called:

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FAITH Faith is in you whenever you look at a dewdrop or a floating leaf, and you know that they are because they have to be. Even if you close your eyes and dream up things, the world will remain as

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it has always been, and the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river. You have faith also when you hurt your foot against the sharp rock and you know that rocks are here to hurt your feet. See the

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long shadow that is cast by the tree? We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth. What has no shadow has no strength to live. HOPE

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Hope is with you when you believe the earth is not a dream but living flesh, that sight, touch and hearing do not lie, that all things you have ever seen here are like a garden looked at from a gate.

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You cannot enter but you're sure it's there. Could we but look more clearly and wisely we might discover somewhere in the garden a strange new flower and an unnamed star. Some people say we should not trust our eyes, that there is

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nothing, just a seeming, these are the ones who have no hope. They think that the moment we turn away, the world behind our backs ceases to exist as if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

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And the last short poem I will read from this long poem, written in 1933, is: LOVE Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at

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distant things, for you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills– a bird and a tree say to him: Friend. Then he wants to use himself and things so that they stand in a

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glow of ripeness. It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves: Who serves best doesn't always understand. And then we come to poems which really give us a different sense of life. And I would like to read some of those and these are

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from poems actually written in- during World War II when he was in Warsaw. And this is called, "The Song of a Citizen." And it starts a series of ruminations on his part that will not end. In one form or another as we go on, he will declare that he is

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guilty. And the question is, what is he guilty of? Is he guilty of surviving where all his friends have died? That's one question, or is he really just guilty about not fulfilling what he thinks was his calling? I think there's a little of

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both. Here he is: THE SONG OF A CITIZEN A stone from the depths that has witnessed the seas drying up, and a million white fish leaping in agony, I, poor man, see a

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multitude of white-bellied nations without freedom. I see the crab feeding on their flesh. I have seen the fall of states and the perdition of tribes, the flight of kings and emperors, the power of tyrants. I can say

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now, in this hour that I am, while everything expires, that it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion, as the Scripture says. A poor man, sitting on a cold chair, pressing my eyelids, I

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sigh and think of a starry sky, of non-Euclidean space, of amoebas, and the pseudopodia, of tall mounds of termites. When walking, I am asleep, when sleeping I dream reality, pursued and covered with sweat. I run. On city squares lifted up

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by the glaring dawn, beneath marble remnants of blasted-down gates, I deal in vodka and gold. And yet so often I was near, I reached into the heart of metal, the soul of earth, of fire, of water, and the unknown unveiled

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its face as the night reveals itself, serene, mirrored by tide. Lustrous copper-leaved gardens greeted me that disappear as soon as you touch them. And so near, just outside the window– the greenhouse of the

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worlds where a tiny beetle and a spider are equal to planets, where a wandering atom flares up like Saturn and, close by, harvesters drink from a cold jug in scorching summer. This I wanted and nothing more. In my later years, like old

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Goethe to stand before the face of the earth and recognize it and reconcile it with my work built up, a forest citadel on a river of shifting lights and brief shadows. This I wanted and nothing more. So who is guilty? Who deprived

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me of my youth and my ripe years, who seasoned my best years with horror? Who ever is to blame? Who, oh God? And I think and think only about the starry sky and the tall mounds of termites.

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In the next one, he does something very interesting he talks about revenge on whoever has deprived him, but here is his revenge ["The Poor Poet"]: The first movement is singing: a free voice, filling mountains

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and valleys, the first movement is joy, but it is taken away. And now that the years have transformed my blood, and thousands of planetary systems have been born and died in my flesh. I sit, a sly and angry poet with malevolently squinted

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eyes and weighing a pen in my hand, I plot revenge. I poise the pen and it puts forth twigs and leaves, it is covered with blossoms and the scent of that tree is impudent, for there, on the real earth, such trees do not grow and like an insult to

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suffering humanity is the scent of that tree. Some take refuge in despair, which is sweet, like strong tobacco, like a glass of vodka drunk in the hour of annihilation. Others have the hope of fools, rosy as erotic dreams. Still others find peace

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in the idolatry of country, which can last for a long time, a little longer than the nineteenth century lasts. But to me a cynical hope is given. For since I opened my eyes I have seen only the glow of fires, massacres, only injustice,

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humiliation, and the laughable shame of braggarts. To me is given the hope of revenge on others and on myself, for I was he who knew and took from it no profit for myself. And one of his most quoted poems, he was raised around the

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Roman Catholic and would go back to the church, though in a very circuitous, roundabout way. And here, he looks at the ghetto. This poem was written in Warsaw in 1943. He looks at the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews were first herded, and then of course,

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taken to Auschwitz and other camps and exterminated. And here is what he says about himself and the ghetto ["A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto'']: Bees build around red liver, ants build around black bone. It

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has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks. It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals. Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow

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walls engulfs animal and human hair. Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs, ants build around white bone. Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax, fiber, fabric, cellulose, snakeskin, wire. The roof and

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the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations. Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down, with one leafless tree. Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,

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with a small red lamp fastened to his forehead. He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on. He distinguishes human ashes by the luminous vapor, the ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. Bees built around a

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red trace. Ants build around the place left by my body. I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole. He has swollen eyelids like a Patriarch, who has sat much in the light of candles reading the great book of the species.

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What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus. My broken body will deliver me to his sight and he will count me among the helpers of death: the uncircumcised.

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It is a very unexpected poem for a Pole because Poles were notoriously anti-semitic. And certainly when I would talk to Czeslaw about this and asked him, because my grandmother came from Vilna, or his Wilno, when I would ask him about this, he

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said that he would just take no notice of Jews, they were there, but you just didn't even notice them. They were just sort of like an invisible race. But still, he could see in Warsaw in the midst of the horror that was going on and would soon engulf

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the very Poles of the city that this was a monstrous situation. There is one more poem that I want to refer to and that is a poem called, "The Dedication," in which he offers his book at the end of the war, to the graves of his comrades and

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companions and old friends who he was educated with and he ends the poem in a shocking manner. He says, "I lay my-" asking that they do not come back as ghosts, or expecting they will come back as ghosts. He says, "I lay my book of poems on your grave, so

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you will come back no more." And when you really look at the poem, you see he is very angry at his friends who followed this logic: the Nazis are fascists, and they are destroying us, the only thing that we can do is become communists to destroy

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them. And he thought that thinking was so erroneous, and so destructive, that he could never forgive his friends in sort of an angry horror at them, as they just gave up their lives by the thousands. And he just sort of says he wants to have

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nothing to do with them. It is an attitude that when I read my memoirs of him you will see come out very, very strongly. He is not a poet of emotion. He is a contemplative poet and always said to me that that's what he wanted to be known as. He did

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not want to be known as a Holocaust poet, he did not want to become known as a Cold War poet, he wanted to become known as a philosophic, or as he put it, a contemplative poet. Here is several poems about what then later on will become his

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major themes. Now, already what I read you, when he remembers himself as a little boy, and even in the world, he's talking about himself when he was a child. So, let me see- if I can do this. Let me read you these poems. I'll read you one of them

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anyway. This is called," No More," and it's an interesting. I will talk about these, some of these poems are hard to fathom at first. And this is a poem in which he tries to recreate the situation in Renaissance Venice. And it is to go back through

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language and recreate the world as it was, the world of history and he is very concerned with history. He says, if we don't appreciate history, we can have no moral intelligence or no moral way of looking at the world. And he was sort of

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appalled that in America, we do not care about history, especially since I would describe him, and have to him, as the victim of history. It's called NO MORE

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I should relate some time how I changed my views on poetry, and how it came to be that I consider myself today, one of the many merchants and artisans of Old Japan, who arranged verses about cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, and the full

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moon. If only I could describe the courtesans of Venice, as in a loggia they teased a peacock with a twig, and out of brocade, the pearls of their belt, set free heavy breasts and the reddish weal where the buttoned dress marked the belly, as

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vividly seen by the skipper of galleons who landed that morning with a cargo of gold; as if I could find for their miserable bones in a graveyard whose gates are licked by greasy water a word more enduring than their last-used comb that in the rot

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under tombstones, alone, awaits the light. If I could, then I wouldn't doubt. Out of reluctant matter what can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best. And so, cherry blossoms must suffice for us and chrysanthemums and the full moon.

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So he wants to be, or imagine himself a merchant and artisan of Old Japan because only by trying to capture history, only by trying to put into words what he has seen, can he save the world which goes, which leaves, whether it be during the Nazi

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destruction of Warsaw or whether it be in Venice of five hundred years ago. That is a theme that will come up again and again. And then he will begin to question that, because one part of his poetry that's so interesting is he questions

00:32:32.000 - 00:32:51.650

himself again and again and again. He also has what he calls, or what I call transcendent moments, and they're usually short poems. What he says is, there is a time when you may be doing nothing. And suddenly you become so much

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a part of the world, the moment seems to be transcendent, and what it lets you know, what it implies is that events, experiences don't just disappear. They seem so charged that they are- that the implication is that there must

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be a godhead behind it, there must be, if I will, a parallel world between this one that keeps disappearing and that parallel world goes on on a different spiritual level. And that's what he's looking for. And of course, what he's talking

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about is the the Catholic world of the life after death, of the world of grace, and more and more he turns to Catholicism. Here's HAPPINESS, written in Washington, DC when he was in the Diplomatic Corps in 1948.

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How warm the light from the glowing bay, the masts-like spruce, repose of the ropes in the morning mist, or a stream trickles into the sea by a small bridge. A flute. Farther, under the arch of ancient ruins, you see a few tiny walking figures.

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One wears a red kerchief. There are trees, ramparts, and mountains at an early hour. And these moments of his reminded me very much of Wordsworth's describing London on a Sunday, when the city

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actually looks like a part of nature, it seems to have taken on a transcendent sense of itself. And I see that time is getting on. Though I'm not going to be able to read even a quarter of the poems that I want to, I can

00:34:45.300 - 00:35:04.170

see that- so let me just finish the section by reading from, "Throughout Our Lands" and then we will take a brief break for announcements. If you've just tuned in, I am reading the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz who has died on August 14th, the great

00:35:04.170 - 00:35:22.110

Nobel Prize winner who lived most of his adult life here in the United States, in Berkeley, and I will just read his remembrance of Paulina from, "Throughout Our Lands" one of my favorite poems by him, a very long complex poem about his

00:35:22.110 - 00:35:40.820

coming to America and here it is. This is Part 11: PAULINA, as he remembers back to Lithuania. Paulina, her room behind the servants' quarters, with one window on the orchard, where I gather the best apples near the

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pigsty, squishing my big toe, the warm muck of the dunghill. And the other window on the well, I love to drop the bucket down and scare its inhabitants, the green frogs. Paulina, a geranium, the chill of a dirt floor, a hard bed with three

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pillows, an iron crucifix and images with the saints decorated with palms and paper roses. Paulina died long ago, but is. And I am somehow convinced, not just in my consciousness. Above a rough Lithuanian peasant-face hovers a spindle of hummingbirds

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and her flat calloused feet are sprinkled by sapphire water in which dolphins, with their backs arching, frolic. We'll take a brief break now and maybe one minute of some more Polish music and then we'll come back, make some announcements

00:36:45.680 - 00:37:29.920

and continue with the show. Of Czeslaw Milosz, and I haven't even cracked this thing. Let me just tell you that I'm reading from the "New and Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz" which came out in 2001. And they're

00:37:29.920 - 00:37:53.110

poems 1931 to 2001. There was another Collected Poems out in 1986. I'm not reading the longer or more difficult poems, and now I realize even why; there's just no time or room for it. But I now have to choose from all those poems I was going to, so

00:37:53.110 - 00:38:16.780

I'm going to start hesitating more and more. I do want to read one poem, however, that is really in many ways one of my favorites, and I even will refer to this in my memoirs of Czeslaw. And it's a poem in which he confronts America as an

00:38:16.810 - 00:38:32.770

artist. He will confront American culture in many ways, but in this poem he confronts America as an artist. And since he has come to Northern California, the poet he has to confront, the vision he has to confront, is Robinson Jeffers.

00:38:33.280 - 00:38:57.160

And I should tell you that, and I think I've already mentioned that my grandmother, her family came from Wilna, and that is his Wilno. And I have felt for a long time that there is a tremendous difference between the way the Anglo-American looks

00:38:57.190 - 00:39:19.480

at the world and the way the Slavic or East European looks at the world, not East European, but definitely Slavic. And it is perfectly expressed in this poem, the difference that it is in Robinson Jeffers and in, what Milosz says, the Slavic

00:39:19.480 - 00:39:34.990

temperament, brings to poetry. So here he confronts the great Robinson Jeffers, who of course, as most of you know, lived in Carmel for all of his adult life. And he's addressing him.

00:39:36.940 - 00:39:54.280

If you have not read the Slavic poets, so much the better. There's nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For Slavic poets, the sun was a farmer's ruddy face, the moon

00:39:54.280 - 00:40:12.190

peeped through a cloud and the Milky Way gladdened them like a birch-lined road. They longed for the Kingdom, which is always near, always right at hand. Then, under apple trees, angels in homespun linen will come parting the boughs and at the

00:40:12.190 - 00:40:30.400

white kolkhoz tablecloth cordiality and affection will feast (falling to the ground times). And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where burying a warrior they broke his bones so he could not haunt the

00:40:30.400 - 00:40:48.010

living. From the sea night, which your forefathers pulled over themselves without a word. Above your head no face, neither the sun's nor the moon's, only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable violence of new beginnings, of new destruction.

00:40:49.800 - 00:41:06.810

All your life listening to the ocean. Black dinosaurs wade where a purple zone of phosphorescent weeds rises and falls on the waves as in a dream. And Agamemnon sails the boiling deep to the steps of the palace to have his blood gush

00:41:06.810 - 00:41:25.780

onto marble. Till mankind passes and the pure and stony earth is pounded by the ocean. Thin-lipped, blue-eyed, without grace or hope, before God the Terrible, body of the world. Prayers are not heard. Basalt

00:41:25.780 - 00:41:46.830

and granite. Above them, a bird of prey. The only beauty. What have I to do with you? From footpaths in the orchards, from an untold choir and shimmers of a monstrance, from flower beds of rue, hills by the rivers, books in which a zealous

00:41:46.830 - 00:42:08.690

Lithuanian announced brotherhood. That's where I come from. Oh, consolations of mortals, futile creed. And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches more than does the nakedness of elements. No one with impunity

00:42:08.690 - 00:42:27.350

gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void, you offered sacrifices to demons: there was Wotan and tall Thor, the screech of Erinyes in the air, the terror of dogs, when Hekate with her retinue of the dead draws near.

00:42:29.270 - 00:42:50.150

Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses, as was done in my district. To birches and firs give feminine names. To implore protection against the mute and treacherous might than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.

00:42:51.830 - 00:43:11.330

And what he's saying is that, in the end, Jeffers gave up any kind of a human representation of a god. His was- it was an inhuman God in a very, very nihilistic- and also in many ways a denial of history. And all of those things are the

00:43:11.330 - 00:43:42.710

direct opposite of what Milosz talks about, where the world is animated by an anthropomorphism, a human touching. So, let me go on and see what I've got time for as we really begin to get out of things here. The poet is the one who is supposed to, or

00:43:42.710 - 00:43:59.150

has been called- and he really thinks that he can't understand why he has been called to really make things stay in the world, by his putting them into words, and he pictures himself as a secretary in this poem called:

00:43:59.300 - 00:44:19.520

SECRETARY, written in Berkeley in 1975. I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing that is dictated to me and a few others. Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth without much comprehension. Beginning of

00:44:19.520 - 00:44:36.630

phrase in the middle, or ending with a comma, and how it all looks when completed, is not up to us to inquire. We won't read it anyway. And what he means is he does not read his own works, that people

00:44:36.630 - 00:44:54.870

read it, people who come after, and I'm trying to find some of these poems now that I've outlined and which looks like I do not have time to read, in which he talks again and again about his calling. There are also poems in which like the

00:44:54.870 - 00:45:31.260

year in which he talks about coming to California and maybe I have time to read that since I've already found it here. And notice the different images that unite different times and places as though everything is just- Okay, that was another one of

00:45:31.260 - 00:46:03.090

the California poems. Okay, well, I'm just gonna go on from here. And here's an addendum. Here's how far pieces go and the thought goes into what seemed to be simple things. One of the things he takes on- Robinson Jeffers for is the inhumanity,

00:46:03.600 - 00:46:28.590

the sense that there is no human image, that there's no sense or compassion for the human. So, in art he has a totally different attitude towards art. And here is a portrait he sees painted by Marjorie C. Murphy when he is in, well he tells you where he

00:46:28.590 - 00:46:41.330

is, visiting in Iowa and what looking at this very realistic painting and what it does for him. It's called A PORTRAIT WITH A CAT. A little girl looks at a book with a picture of a cat, who

00:46:41.330 - 00:47:02.090

wears a fluffy collar and has a green velvet frock. Her lips, very red, are half opened in a sweet reverie. This takes place in 1910 or 1912, the painting bears no date. It was painted by Marjorie C. Murphy, an American born in 1888, like my mother,

00:47:02.450 - 00:47:27.290

more or less. I contemplate the painting in Grinnell, Iowa at the end of the century. That cat with his collar, where is he? And the girl? Am I going to meet her, one of those mummies with rouge, tapping with their canes? But this face: a tiny pug nose,

00:47:27.620 - 00:47:50.000

round cheeks, moves me so, quite like a face that I, suddenly awake in the middle of the night, saw by my side on a pillow. The cat is not here, he is in the book, the book is in the painting. No girl, and yet she is here, before me and has

00:47:50.000 - 00:48:09.650

never been lost. Our true encounter is in the zones of childhood. Amazement called love, a thought of touching, a cat in velvet. The lines that are important are, "The cat is not here, he's

00:48:09.650 - 00:48:29.480

in a book, the book is in the painting. No girl, and yet she is here before me and has never been lost." And the idea is that in art, people do not perish. The next step he will take in this thought is, he is agains all abstract art. What Jeffer

00:48:29.480 - 00:48:47.330

has done is abstract the world What Milosz wants is nothing bu realistic paintings that wil recall the real world becaus that's how things don't peris ; and again and again in h s poems, he comes back to th s idea that things perish. Th

00:48:47.420 - 00:49:08.930

y may come back and re-exi t because the world is continual y reborn, but there is no memor , there is no particul r resurrection of the particul r moment unless it is captured n art, and that's what he feels e as an artist does and wh

00:49:09.350 - 00:49:39.950

t artists in other media do. So e will go on as we're getting l w here. I cannot urge you enou h to go out and get this. Now, y u know, he says again and agai that he wants to observe an insists on observing everythin that's going on around him. Bu

00:49:41.000 - 00:49:55.550

here's a poem which tells yo how impossible it is, even then to grasp this reality. That' one of the paradoxes, is as mu h as he tries, he can never gra p reality, either in the poem r otherwis

00:49:55.540 - 00:50:08.730

This is called the POLKA-DOT DRESS. Her polka-dot dress, that's all I know of her. Once, walking silently with my gun in a forest thicket I stumbled upon her lying with Michael on a blanket spread in the clearing. A plump

00:50:08.730 - 00:50:28.140

little thing. They say she was an officer's wife. Her name must have been Zosia. To the black waters I arrived to dusk. All of them are dead, it was long ago. Peace to you, Zosia, and to your adventures. Going on a vacation, is it not usual to expect that

00:50:28.140 - 00:50:47.100

something might happen: a dark-haired man from the cards, or a blonde one like Michael, just for some change in everyday yawning, calls to a girlfriend, cake in a tea shop. We are induced to sin by boredom and curiosity. But besides that we

00:50:47.100 - 00:51:06.360

are innocent. You should understand, Zosia, what troubl I have when I want to think of your life attentively and f nd here, where you are mine, wha is unique in you, though it' covered by common form. Perha s later you helped build

00:51:06.570 - 00:51:23.640

barricade. Perhaps you sacrifi ed yourself for a sick ch ld. Perhaps, suffering pain fr m a wound or illness, you c me to a high degree of resigna ion. However it was, whether ou perished with your bu ning city, or, old, wandered in

00:51:23.640 - 00:51:51.010

it, not recognizing the st eets. I try to be everywher with you, yet in vain. And all I can do is touch your oo-round breasts remembering yo r dress, red, wit He has poems to Allen Ginsberg. Here's another poem that I'm

00:51:51.010 - 00:52:11.170

just coming upon, a few pages from the one I last read you, in which he talks about realistic art. "Realism," well, I'm not going to have time to do it, but he talks about admiring Dutch painting for that reason. What I will do is I will go on now

00:52:11.170 - 00:52:48.730

reading pages that he wrote in the 1990s. And here a very unlikely poem of his which, if I find it with the savoir faire I'm known for, here is a poem that you would not expect from him. It's about Pooh Bear and- of Winnie the Pooh. And the

00:52:48.730 - 00:53:05.110

inspiration for it was very, very simply, and it is a prose poem, by the way. It's called CHRISTOPHER ROBIN and it has this epigraph to it: "In April of 1966, the International Press carried the

00:53:05.110 - 00:53:29.830

news of the death, at age 75, of Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized in a book by his father A.A. Milne, "Winnie the Pooh," he was Christopher Robin." And here again the ruminating poet thinks as he has Pooh Bear think and talk.

00:53:32.380 - 00:53:50.390

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN, dead at 75. I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with

00:53:50.390 - 00:54:07.730

our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live there and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment. Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an

00:54:07.760 - 00:54:25.220

awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. "Old bear," he

00:54:25.220 - 00:54:44.090

answered. "I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person. I wore trousers down to the ground. I had a gray beard and I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably

00:54:44.090 - 00:55:05.060

just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called for an afternoon snack." Well, it's a very delightful little poem. But it's also very

00:55:05.060 - 00:55:19.730

interesting because here we have this parallel world I was talking about, I think, in the last half hour. Where in this work of art, in the stories of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, who was a real person and who has grown up, now returns to

00:55:19.730 - 00:55:42.950

the book after his death and will live eternally in this book. He is not going to go anywhere, even if he's called for an afternoon snack. And nearly finally here, this idea of history and where it goes is in one of the last poems that he

00:55:42.950 - 00:56:01.100

wrote before the end of the last century. And it's called, "Rivers," and again, I cannot urge you enough to go out and look at and find some of Milosz books. I have done him no service tonight because I have not really read his great, great

00:56:01.100 - 00:56:12.050

poems, which are very long, very complex. They follow the ideas that I have talked about this evening, so that you would understand them. RIVERS

00:56:13.920 - 00:56:34.560

So lasting they are, the rivers. Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the

00:56:34.560 - 00:56:52.800

river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persists, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. Same rivers float in Europe, when none of today's countries existed and no

00:56:52.800 - 00:57:10.680

languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even

00:57:10.680 - 00:57:27.630

known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B.C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a

00:57:27.630 - 00:57:46.080

powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would

00:57:46.080 - 00:58:03.180

like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea. And this is Mort Marcus and we have been reading the poetry of the Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz today and I will be back

00:58:03.180 - 00:58:21.240

with you in two minutes and I will be reading my memoirs of Czeslaw Milosz, which will appear in Metro San Jose, this coming Wednesday and the week after that will appear in Metro Santa Cruz. So, please stay and join us and try to get a picture

00:58:21.270 - 00:59:30.070

of this man and what he was like personally. Unknown: This is KUSP Central Coast Public Radio, KUSP Santa Cruz, KBDH San Ardo. We're on the web at KUSP.org. Morton Marcus: Hello, this is Mort Marcus and tonight I have

00:59:30.100 - 00:59:45.250

been lucky enough to take over "From the Bookshelf" because I'm going to read you a piece of prose, a piece of prose that I read and it will continue with the last program of the Poetry Show. In this case, I will be reading my memoirs of Czeslaw

00:59:45.280 - 01:00:04.630

Milosz, the great Nobel Prize winner of 1980. And I will be reading my memoirs of him and I hope that what you get out of this is some sense of the man himself and what he brought to his work. This is from a memoir in progress, which is called,

01:00:04.630 - 01:00:19.210

"Striking Through the Masks," and is in many ways an autobiography of yours truly, but at the same time, it is a literary memoir in which a lot of writers I've known are mentioned, and in which you have similar instances of anecdotes

01:00:19.420 - 01:00:31.240

to which I recorded here so you get an intimate picture of some of these people whose works you've been reading through the years. So, let us go right to the memoirs which is in three parts.

01:00:32.200 - 01:00:54.670

And this is called, REMEMBERING CZESLAW MILOSZ. And it has this epigraph from a couplet of his which goes like this: "The gates of grammar closed behind him, search for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary." And it's a two line

01:00:54.670 - 01:01:17.350

poem of his called, "The Death of the Poet." And as you know, the reason for these two programs is that Czeslaw Milosz has passed away this past August 14th in Krakow, Poland. He moved back to Poland in old age, and he died at the age of 93.

01:01:21.740 - 01:01:35.300

In the fall of 1968, a few months after I had moved to Santa Cruz, I took part in a reading with Ronald Johnson, Dennis Schmitz, and Jack Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley. The occasion was the publication of,

01:01:35.300 - 01:01:49.850

"The Young American Poets," the first all-inclusive anthology of new American poetry in ten years, and the publisher had given the book a big national publicity campaign, featuring poets in the anthology reading in the sections of the country

01:01:49.850 - 01:02:08.150

where they lived. For our reading, one of three in the Bay Area, the publisher hired Kenneth Rexroth to be master of ceremonies and guide and treated us to a dinner at a restaurant of Rexroth's choice. Rexroth chose a wonderful French bistro

01:02:08.300 - 01:02:23.750

in Berkeley, fussed over the menu as if we were his children, and ordered several bottles of expensive wine while regaling the four of us with wonderful tales and some highly unorthodox opinions, such as his comment that the anthology was, "already

01:02:24.200 - 01:02:40.130

passe," since the poetry of the future would be, "off the page," or completely based on performance. Slightly inebriated, but in an elated mood, the five of us made our way by foot to the campus to find a crowd of three or four

01:02:40.130 - 01:02:55.250

hundred waiting for us in Wheeler Hall. I read second, after which there was an intermission, and members of the audience, clucking their praises at what they had heard, crowded around us. One of their number, a middle aged man with high

01:02:55.250 - 01:03:07.850

cheekbones, pushed to the front of the others and stood quivering in front of me, "You'll come home with me," he demanded in a strong Slavic accent. Tears were crossing(?) down his cheeks and he had obviously been crying for some

01:03:07.850 - 01:03:26.630

time. I didn't know what to say, and was as confused as the people around me. "Come home with me," he repeated. "Well, thank you," I finally said, "but-" "I open a special wine for us," he interrupted me. The crowd around us began to thin.

01:03:27.710 - 01:03:43.340

"I'd like to," I said, "but I have classes tomorrow and a long ride." The man straightened, regained his composure and said, "Oh, you think I am weird," and stalked away, heading for Rexroth, who was talking to several people. The man grabbed

01:03:43.340 - 01:04:00.920

Rexroth by the arm and dragged him over to me. "Kenneth introduce," he commanded. "Well, yeah," said Rexroth in his most grandiose world-wary manner as if bored by the man's feverish behavior. "Morton Marcus," he said this, "this is Czeslaw

01:04:00.950 - 01:04:18.920

Milosz." I was surprised, but immediately understood the man's agitation. For my reading I had selected a number of poems from my forthcoming book, citing the influence on it of post World War II East-European poetry, especially Polish poetry, and

01:04:18.920 - 01:04:35.630

recommended Milosz's Anthology, "Postwar Polish Poetry," to the audience. I was honored to meet him, grasped his hand warmly. "Wonderful poetry," he said, obviously extremely moved. "Now you come home with me." I refused again, once more citing

01:04:35.630 - 01:04:51.110

my ride back to Santa Cruz that night, and early classes the next day is my excuse but we made an appointment for dinner at his house two weeks later. In 1968, Milosz was virtually unknown as a poet in the United States. His reputation here, if

01:04:51.110 - 01:05:06.350

he had one, was based on a political volume in which he described the reasons for his defection from communist Poland in 1951, and another volume, a novel, about the miseries of living under a communist regime. The first book, "The Captive

01:05:06.350 - 01:05:21.110

Mind," as well as, "The Second Seizure of Power," came out in the 1950s. Milosz spent the remainder of the decade in Paris, where he had defected, struggling to support himself and his family. But since 1960, he had quietly taught in the

01:05:21.110 - 01:05:38.000

Slavic languages department at Berkeley. Like many other artists living in the United States in political exile, he was renowned in his own country, but unknown and ignored here. Two weeks after the meeting in Wheeler, my wife and I and our

01:05:38.000 - 01:05:51.920

two small daughters pulled up to Milosz's house off Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley. It was a small house with a steep roof set in a thicket of trees and foliage and looked like a cottage out of a Grimms fairy tale. It was November so

01:05:51.920 - 01:06:07.460

darkness had already descended. Our knock on the thick wooden door was answered by Milosz himself. He was excited to see us but dismayed at first by our arriving with our six and one year olds in tow. I explained that we couldn't afford

01:06:07.460 - 01:06:22.190

babysitters, and Milosz, calling to his wife for assistance, good-humoredly found a place for the girls to amuse themselves, and the visit began in the way I gathered from Milosz's renewed enthusiasm he imagined it should have started.

01:06:23.740 - 01:06:37.240

He formally introduced us to his wife, Janka, a striking woman with straight white hair and bangs, a sharp nose and a kindly manner who would take in the girls to play in the Milosz's youngest son's room, then Milosz opened one of the promised

01:06:37.240 - 01:06:50.920

bottles of wine. And while Janka and Wilma talked in the kitchen, he hustled me to his study where he told me with a feverish emphasis I was beginning to suspect was his manner, about the new preface he was writing for the next edition of,

01:06:50.950 - 01:07:09.550

"Postwar Polish Poetry," which Hank- Penguin was bringing out the following year. It was written, he said, with me in mind. He had been impressed by my poetry, but he wanted to warn me and other young poets not to overuse sarcastic irony. Relying

01:07:09.550 - 01:07:25.090

on such irony in one's poems, he said, was tantamount to accepting the horrors perpetrated by governments and individuals, since it implied in its tone and attitude an acceptance of them as the way the world worked. At times,

01:07:25.090 - 01:07:40.120

irony is fine to warn the readers of impending political or social catastrophes, he said, but when the catastrophes occur, the poet has to sing songs of hope and redemption, for that, in the end, is the primal direction of the human spirit.

01:07:42.520 - 01:07:56.470

He spoke with an artist's vigor, and I was once more beside myself with humility and gratefulness, that he would be so moved by my poems that he would write a warning to me and my generation, concerning a dangerous path he was afraid we

01:07:56.470 - 01:08:14.230

were following. I was so struck by his passionate words that the whole tenure of my work changed from then on. It was as if he had expunged sarcasm from my soul. After he stopped talking, he calmed down and all four of us spent a pleasant evening

01:08:14.230 - 01:08:26.710

getting to know each other and talking about literature in the world. For the rest of the evening, Milosz was not only composed and charming, but subdued. And I got the impression that his agitation at the reading and earlier in the

01:08:26.710 - 01:08:42.070

evening had to do with a passionate warning he had delivered to me in the study, like a wisdom figure out of some Slavic folk tale. We visited the Miloszs several times after that. And I remember on one occasion, two months later, how

01:08:42.070 - 01:08:57.160

upset Czeslaw was about the strange death in Thailand of his friend Thomas Merton, the great Catholic contemplative. Milosz was a Roman Catholic at heart, and his continued search for spiritual meaning in a world where moments of transcendent

01:08:57.160 - 01:09:13.780

beauty imply a godhead amid the horrors of history and the dehumanization of science and technology can be understood in that context. Certainly, Milosz's formidable intellect was fed and honed by a classic European Catholic education, as

01:09:13.780 - 01:09:29.740

our conversations revealed early on, but it was his Slavic soul that drew me to him like a magnet. If he embodied the exiles' isolation I had felt all my life, he also exemplified the Slavic personality in his passion as well as his

01:09:29.740 - 01:09:44.530

intellect. Nowhere are both attitudes more clearly voiced that in his poem to Robinson Jeffers, where he delineates the difference between the Slavic and Anglo-Nordic temperaments. The poem is also an excellent example of Milosz's methodology.

01:09:44.950 - 01:10:02.020

A strong intellectual arguments suffused with an intense concrete sensuousness, or is it an intense concrete sensuousness suffused with a strong intellectual argument? Although I thought I came to understand Czeslaw in our handful of

01:10:02.020 - 01:10:26.890

meetings in 1968 in 1969, I was totally unprepared for the dramatic evening I was to spend with him in the spring of 1970. In 1970, I was the State Department's West Coast host for the great Yugoslav poet, Vasko Popa. Through enthusiastic

01:10:26.890 - 01:10:39.970

Milosz, I arranged the second of two readings in Northern California to take place at the Slavic Languages Department in Berkeley. And four nights after he arrived, Popa, his interpreter and I, found ourselves on the Berkeley

01:10:39.970 - 01:10:56.410

campus. Milosz had primed his colleagues and students and an audience of several hundred crowded into a small auditorium. Milosz was very excited and his face flushed, ran from one side of the room to the other. Introducing Popa to one person

01:10:56.410 - 01:11:08.410

here and another one there, and making sure everything was in place for the reading. He had greeted Popa with a warm embrace and kept returning to him, saying several sentences in French before he would rush off again.

01:11:09.970 - 01:11:24.610

Vasko and I presented the same bilingual program we had at our first reading, and as before, received an enthusiastic response. Afterward, Milosz hurried us away from well wishes, and told me to drive to his house. When we arrived, we

01:11:24.610 - 01:11:38.950

were greeted by what seemed most of the audience at the reading. Cars lined both sides of the narrow street, and it seemed that more than a hundred people were jammed inside Milosz's small, fairy-tale-like cottage in the forested hills above

01:11:38.950 - 01:11:53.410

Berkeley. Milosz should arrive before us, and with his face still flushed, was moving with Janka from group to group, making sure everyone was taken care of. Several of the students came up to Popa, but most of them spoke neither

01:11:53.410 - 01:12:08.320

Serbo-Croatian or French, and his interpreter lost somewhere in the crowd, soon Vasko was ensconced alone on the sofa with a glass of red wine in either hand. Now that his responsibilities in Northern California were over, he looked

01:12:08.320 - 01:12:24.250

relaxed and pleased and stared in glassy-eyed exhaustion at the milling guests. His quiet contentment was disturbed only by Milosz, who would break away from his duties as host to join Vasko and speak to him animatedly in French. Milosz was

01:12:24.280 - 01:12:40.690

obviously keyed up by Popa's presence. I thought I understood the excitement. He and Vasko had been in the Resistance against the Nazi invaders in their separate countries. Neither one knowing about the other, but both engaged in a common cause.

01:12:41.470 - 01:12:57.760

Both of them had survived as well, while many of their friends had not, and each had gone on to be an important literary figure, not only in his respective country, but throughout Europe. It made no difference to Milosz, a staunch

01:12:57.760 - 01:13:15.370

opponent of communism, what Popa's politics were. He and Popa shared a brotherly bond that was welded together by history and blood. For the most part, Popa listened to Milosz, smiling and nodding. He seemed very comfortable talking to him

01:13:15.640 - 01:13:31.150

and his demeanor radiated affection. I watched the two of them with mounting emotions, pictures fluttering through my mind of haggard refugee faces and bombed out cities. The students strolled around the two men, or sat in groups on the

01:13:31.150 - 01:13:45.250

carpet, and it seemed that the world was going on around Popa and Milosz who were encapsulated on a bubble of time, none of the guests could understand or willing to allow themselves to imagine, even though they certainly knew, that both men

01:13:45.430 - 01:14:01.510

had experienced some of the most traumatic historical events of the century. The guests in fact seemed totally absorbed in their own concerns. Many of them wore white handkerchiefs as armbands, which identified them as demonstrators against the

01:14:01.510 - 01:14:16.710

government sending troops into Cambodia. This group was going straight from the party to the staging area of a huge protest march that was to take place the following morning. Milosz talked to Vasko more vehemently as the evening wore

01:14:16.710 - 01:14:32.100

on, darting away to refill his glass or say goodnight to a departing guest. Soon he was more flushed than ever and slightly drunk. The party was beginning to thin. Those who stayed were the students wearing white armbands. They stood

01:14:32.100 - 01:14:46.440

talking in groups or chatting while seated on the floor. At one point, Milosz returning from refilling his glass almost fell over one of the seated figures. "What do you think you're doing?" He asked the person, a young man in a white shirt, who

01:14:46.440 - 01:15:01.470

looked at him uncomprehendedly. "What do you think you are doing with that armband?" Milosz explained, swaying and pointing at the white handkerchief on the young man's arm. The young man looked down at his arm, then up Milosz. "We are demonstrating

01:15:01.470 - 01:15:17.220

against US involvement in Cambodia." "And what are you demonstrating for?" Milosz retorted. "For peace and love," replied a young girl seated in the group. Milosz swayed again, saliva flicking his lips, clearly belligerent, "Love? Love

01:15:18.030 - 01:15:32.160

for what?" He asked in a challenging voice. The party had grown silent, and everyone in the room was staring at Milosz and the girl. "Love for everything and everyone," the girl replied. "I taught you better than that," Milosz

01:15:32.160 - 01:15:48.540

growled. "If you love everything and everyone, you love nothing. Love is selective." The young man Milosz first interrogated now came to the girl's rescue. "We demonstrate to stop the injustice going on in Vietnam and now Cambodia," he said.

01:15:49.140 - 01:16:03.600

Milosz's face was crimson. "Children!" he spat out, "you're children, you know nothing. If you marched in Poland or the Soviet Union, they would shoot you down." The girl was now incensed, and said, "What's wrong with love? It's the only

01:16:03.600 - 01:16:19.290

way to stop what's going on. We have to love each other." "Love, love, love!" marked Milosz's voice rising to a shout. "Talk to me about love when they come into your cell one morning, line you all up and say, "you, and you, step forward, it's your

01:16:19.290 - 01:16:38.070

time to die. Unless any of your friends loves you so much he wants to take your place." Shocked silence washed over the room. Milosz blinked and swayed, his feet planted angrily. Then he hoisted himself erect and made his way over to Vasko where

01:16:38.070 - 01:16:54.420

in agitated French he translated what had just taken place. Vasko listened, nodding and smiling, his eyes half closed, balancing the two half-filled wine glasses on his knees. The young man in the group Milosz had just harangued, snickered and

01:16:54.420 - 01:17:10.530

murmured some words to the others who laughed and turned toward toward Milosz. Other chortles and snickers sprouted around the room. Milosz almost certainly heard them, but chose to ignore them and continued talking to Popa. Once more, I

01:17:10.530 - 01:17:27.060

visualize the two of them encapsulated in a time bubble. In no way could the students fathom the agony, as well as the anger that prompted Milosz's words. It was an anger at the memory of millions of dead bodies and agony felt for all

01:17:27.060 - 01:17:43.770

those who had lost their lives in another time and place. At the same time, Milosz seemed incapable of understanding the young people's commitment to their history and the lives they were seeing destroyed around them. It was one of those

01:17:43.770 - 01:17:58.740

moments filled with tragic irony. The kind of irony Milosz never abandoned in his work, and which is all too poignantly a part of the human condition. THREE

01:18:02.080 - 01:18:19.420

I continued to see Milosz on and off, although my trips to the San Francisco Bay area became more infrequent as the years went on. After he won the Nobel Prize in 1980, Milosz was extraordinarily busy, in demand everywhere, and I felt

01:18:19.420 - 01:18:32.410

uncomfortable bothering him. When he came to read at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he asked specifically to see me and at the party after his reading, he asked the host to allow us to talk alone in an unused room. He

01:18:32.410 - 01:18:50.110

asked after me and was sorry to hear about my divorce, and told me that Janka was ill. It was a quiet meeting, a father asking after his long-absenced son. A few years later, Bob Haas would become his reader as well as his translator, plucked me out of an

01:18:50.110 - 01:19:05.770

audience waiting for Milosz to read in San Jose, and told me Czeslaw wanted to see me backstage. There was a brief but warm meeting and I congratulated him on the many honors that had been stowed on him since I'd last seen him. Our last meeting

01:19:05.770 - 01:19:25.240

was at the reception following another reading he gave, again in San Jose. It was 1989 and Milosz was to fly to Poland several days later, his first visit to his homeland I think since his defection in Paris in 1951. Janka had died three year

01:19:25.240 - 01:19:43.630

before and Czeslaw had a ne female partner who acted a organizer and go-between. When told her I was an old friend an wanted to say hello, she led m to him. His eyes were rheumy an he had aged greatly. I sai hello, and realized he didn'

01:19:43.630 - 01:19:54.160

know me. I tried to spark hi memory but by briefly recallin our first meeting in Wheele Hall and Popa's reading, but h didn't remember what I wa referring to