Poetry and the Self

I am growingly attracted to autobiographical poetry.  Poems like Nazim Hikmet's "Autobiography" and Adam Zagajewski's "Self-Portrait" are so richly personalized, the specificity of their accounts conveys a creative ownership over experience that inspires me greatly.  I have reached an impasse in my own writing: I am eager to create poetry, yet can't get past a few lines that I self-edit incessantly.  My insecurity stems from questions of entitlement and experience.  I have always been told to write what I know, but find I know a few verses (occasionally a stanza) for a poem about any experience or observation and am unable to reach closure with any attempt.

This creative muzzle is entirely self-imposed, and I know it is entirely up to me to remove.  My desire to create something meaningful is paralyzed by my own feelings of inadequate content, but reading poems like the two mentioned above encourage me that the sum of experiences that are wholly and fully mine can yield poems that are extremely instructive for broader audiences. 

While my creative standstill leaves me in no place to instruct the creative process of others, I find "Autobiography" and "Self-Portrait" extremely encouraging that we ALL have the content and material to create, share, and recreate our own experiences in forms that are not purely self-indulgent.  

Autobiography

by Nazim Hikmet

I was born in 1902

I never once went back to my birthplace

I don't like to turn back

at three I served as a pasha's grandson in Aleppo

at nineteen as a student at Moscow Communist University

at forty-nine I was back in Moscow as a guest of the Tcheka

       Party

and I've been a poet since I was fourteen

some people know all about plants some about fish

        I know separation

some people know the names of the stars by heart

I recite absences

I've slept in prisons and in grand hotels

I've known hunger even a hunger strike and there's almost no

food I haven't tasted

at thirty they wanted to hang me

at forty-eight to give me the Peace Medal

which they did

at thirty-six I covered four square meters of concrete in

half a year

at fifty-nine I flew from Prague to Havana in eighteen hours

I never saw Lenin I stood watch at his coffin in '24

in '61 the tomb that I visit in his books

they tried to tear me away from my party

it didn't work

nor was I crushed under falling idols

in '51 I sailed with a young friend into the teeth of death

in '52 I spent four months flat on my back with a broken 

heart waiting for death

I was jealous of the women I loved

I didn't envy Charlie Chaplin one bit

I deceived my women

I never talked behind my friends' backs

I drank but not every day

I earned my bread money honestly what happiness

out of embarrassment for another I lied

I lied so as not to hurt someone else

but I also lied for no reason at all

I've ridden in trains planes and cars

most people don't get the chance

I went to the opera

most people can't go they haven't even heard of

the opera

and since '21 I haven't been tot he places that most people

visit

mosques churches temples synagogues sorcerers

but I've had my coffee ground read

my writings are published in thirty forty languages

in my Turkey in my Turkish they're banned

cancer hasn't caught up with me yet

and nothings ays that it has to

I'll never e a prime minister or anything like that

and I'm not interested in such a life

nor did I go to war

or burrow in bomb shelters in the bottom of the night

and I never had to take to the roads under driving planes

but I fell in love at close to sixty

in short comrades

even if today in Berlin I'm croaking of grief

I can say that I've lived like a human being

and who knows

how much longer I'll live

what else will happen to me.

This autobiography was written in East Berlin 

on September 11th in the year 1961.

Self-Portrait

by Adam Zagajewski

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter

half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers--but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife's face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don't know.
I'm truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that--so far--
belongs to me.

“Self-Portrait” from Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski, translated from Polish by Claire Cavanaugh. Translation copyright © 1997 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15866