Review
of Anna Swir’s Talking to My Body
By
J. Hope Stein
To that which is most
important
Were
I able to shut
My
eyes, ears, legs, hands
And
walk into myself
For
a thousand years,
Perhaps
I would reach
—I
do not know its name—
what matters most.
“Poetry
creates around a man a delicate, tender miniworld” Anna Swir declared, “to protect him from the dreadfulness of the
maxiworld.”[1]
Talking to My Body, the collected works Polish feminist Anna Swir, takes
us on a journey of “that which is most important.” What can we learn from the
world contained within Swir’s miniatures?
How do Swir’s poems which were written from the 1930’s – 1970’s inform
and refresh our modern 21st century approach to mind, body and
spirit?
In
the first section of Talking to My Body titled “Poems About My Father
and My Mother” Swir creates “mini
worlds” that give tender glimpses of her nuclear family (the speaker and her parents).
The collection begins with a speaker who defines herself as part of a
threesome. She evokes the preciousness of this magic threesome effectively in
“Three pieces of Candy” “We taste. Three
paradises melt /in our mouths.” And in and the final line of “Christmas Eve,” “ How good it is we’re here, / we
three.” And shows us the touching
vulnerability of a child talking about her parents in “My Father’s Workshop,” “I would wake up at night/ afraid they both
would die, / I listened to their breathing…”
In “An Artist Moves,” the speaker describes her relationship with her
parents with a sibling-like quality of joy and mischief. There is a sense of
“the us” (nuclear family) against “the maxiworld” in the circumstances of
life. Swir creates a world in which
these 3 characters are working together as a single organism to survive and
makes us see family in a way that seems fresh to modern eyes.
An Artist Moves
At
dawn
We
leave on tiptoe
Father
carries the easel
And
three paintings, mother
A
chest and the eiderdown
Inherited
from grandmother, I myself
A
pot and a teakettle.
We
load it all on a car, quickly,
So
the janitor does not see.
My
father is pulling the cart, quickly,
So
the janitor does not see.
My
father
Is
pulling the cart, quickly,
My
mother pushes at the rear quickly,
I
push also, quickly, quickly, quickly,
So
that the janitor does not see.
We
owe
A
half-year’s rent.
As the collection progresses, there is
still a magic threesome, but now it is the speaker who becomes the mother, her
husband and their child. “In Felicia’s
Love – Three Bodies” the final image has the effect of echoing the earlier
familial images and communicating this special tenderness is passed down to the
next generation. “And the three bodies
pool their warmth/ At night, when a pregnant woman/ lies by her man.” Swir’s vision of the nuclear family is
strikingly different than what we see in modern culture where we are surrounded
by images of the failure of family. In
present culture we are encouraged to look beyond family, beyond what we have,
and we ask ourselves if we are happy. Yet, while the soul of Swir’s family may
feel ideal to us, it also feels like the
most natural thing in the world. We rediscover
something about what family means the way we do when we watch a nature
documentary and see animals acting instinctively. Milosz calls Swir’s poems
“anti –psychological.”[2] The lack of psychology and plainness of the
language helps us see family in its natural form. Between political family
values and teen angst the soul of the 21st century family can often
get lost. We are surrounded by art and
media that aim to expose the imperfections of family. Family is often portrayed with sarcasm as
something you need to escape from, something that inspires therapy. Swir’s
poems remind us that family survives as the sum of the parts. What’s interesting about this section in Talking
to My Body in relation to the rest of the collection is the speaker’s strong
sense of self. There is never any doubt
that the speaker isn’t exactly where she belongs. Yes there is poverty, hardship and extreme
vulnerability, but the speaker’s identity is unshaken.
In
the next section of “Talking to My
Body” there is a shift in tone and the speakers of the poems seem very
disconnected and alone in the world. Swir uses the technique of writing about
flesh and body parts in a plain unsentimental way. It’s as though the speakers in her poems are
aliens trying to make sense of body and soul.
In “Myself and My Person” Swir
writes, “There are moments/when I feel more clearly than ever that I am in the
company/of my own person” Then she asks
“what would happen” if she physically turned left but her “own person walked to
the right.” In Czeslaw Milosz’s introduction[3]
he says ”The language of theology lost its hold over the minds of even the most
fervent believers. The language of
philosophy is hardly possible. The
language of science is in it’s optimistic nineteenth century variety has
suffered a loss of self-assurance. In
this situation a poet trying to come to terms with experience has had to
discover his or her own improvised means.”
We find ourselves in a similar time of rugged individualism. There is this sense that everyone is walking
down the street listening to the sound of a different drum - literally on their Ipods. In Swir’s case it’s almost as if she has
created the most simple unit of religion where she has made her body the temple
or church by which she seeks and prays in search of self. In her often painful search for self, there
are moments of ecstasy in which the mind body and soul align in just the right
way. (These days we have a drug called
“ecstasy” that will do that for us.) In
“A Woman Talks to Her Thigh” she describes a profound soulful state which she
reaches through physical intercourse– “The souls of my lovers/open to me in the
moment of love/…I read as does an angel/thoughts in their skulls/…I enter their
souls,/I wander/ …I come to myself slowly.”
She concludes – “the most exquisite refinement” of her soul cannot do for her what the good
looks of her thigh can.
In “What is a Pineal Gland” the
speaker describes her lover sleeping and the physical work going on inside his
body, his lungs and digestion. And asks
“do you belong to me?/I myself do not belong to you.” She then describes her
own body processes, lungs and digestion and with an outer body perspective
writes, “homeless, I tremble looking at our two bodies.” She further dissociates between the self and
the body in “Large Intestine.” “Here is my naked body. /Apparently you like it,
/I have no reason to./Who bound us, me and my body?….Where am I, I, I
myself?” She wonders where her real self
is— if it’s in her belly, her intestines, her toe, and concludes “apparently in
the brain.” The repeated use of “apparently” is darkly comedic and resigned.
She continues, “Take my brain out of my skull.
I have the right/to see myself.” And at the end of “Large Intestine” she
is further resigned and defeated by the eventual decay of the body. “slowly
annihilated because of the body/I will become kidney failure/or gangrene of the
large intestine. /And expire with shame.”
Between soul and flesh, the mind struggles to find the self in Swir’s
poems. Swir is flesh-obsessed, as we are. While our culture replaces flesh with
silicon, freezes flesh with injections of Botox, worships giant billboards of
flesh that looks like it will never die, Swir is obsessed with the body
decaying. In “You Sleep” – the speaker is so debilitated by this
struggle she cannot answer a simple question from her lover - if she is happy
–because she is flooded with images, fear of death and the end of the body and
earthly relationships. The question “are
you happy” is something we as 21st
century Americans feel entitled to ask ourselves everyday. And depending on the answer we will abandon
jobs, parents, friends, marriages, kids to strive towards a more perfect
happiness.
Towards
the end of Talking to My Body we see another slight shift in tone. The
poems in which Swir talks to her body become more resolved and even ecstatic at
times.
Thank
you My Fate
I
made love with my dear
As
if I made love dying
As
if I made love praying,
Tears
pour
Over
my arms and his arms.
I
don’t know whether this is joy or grief,
I
don’t understand what I feel, I’m crying,
I’m
crying, it’s humility
As
if I were dead,
Gratitude,
I thank you, my fate,
I
am unworthy, how beautiful, my life.
In
“Thank you My Fate,” the speaker embraces her fate as she understands it and is
in a unique state of euphoria which her body and soul worked in unison to
reach.
Similarly
in “The Iron Hedgehog,” Swir restores a sense of inner world and although
vulnerable, the speaker is connected to
something in her poems about
family. She returns to her ‘miniworld”
against the “maxiworld”.
The Iron Hedgehog
A
happy woman,
I
am as an embryo in the mother’s womb,
I
sleep hidden in you.
Don’t
give birth to me yet,
I
want to be in you always….
…The
world is freezing, I am afraid…
Do
not ever give birth to me
I
want to sleep in you
Swir’s
detached, matter-of-fact way of talking about the flesh and organs,
strips out the sexiness and deflates our modern notions of body. It removes us from a perpetual state of denial and “by expressing reality,
attempts to master and overcome it.”[4]
Swir’s quiet style has a similar effect in her war poems which are discussed in
the afterward of Talking to My Body.
In “Manhunt,” in very simple
strokes, she conveys every citizens’ vulnerability under the Gestapo—
“…the man who stepped up to the door holding a
sleepy child on his shoulder did not know that the house was surrounded.” In “Ghetto:
Two Living Children” she writes of a shooting of 2 children in the
ghetto “ hidden behind a street corner, wrapped in mist, a German soldier at a
machine gun…” Again, the power in Swir’s poems comes from her plain approach on
matters unspeakable, like decay of flesh and war. Swir said “Let our words be as necessary and
useful as once were words of magic. This
is an unachievable idea.”[5] Yet Swir herself is able to achieve a certain
magic by connecting us to our deepest unarticulated fears about “that which is
most important” and concluding in “I
Talk to My Body” “splendid possibilities/are open to us.”