There is a form that hovers between notebook, diary, chronicle and collage, written from the exploratory imagination, and filled with unexplained events and mysteries, lines of poetry, quotes from others, daily events, objects noticed, sounds retrieved, speech overheard and distant voices within and without. While we are in Greece, I would like you to attempt such a notebook and while you are here, write at least a half page each day, perhaps more than that. Our model are the notebooks of Anna Kamienska, which follow.
In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
Industrious Amazement: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
Here is what Clare Kavanaugh, Kamienska's translator, has to say about them:
Introduction
BY
CLARE CAVANAGH
“I sought a dead man and found God.”
With this enigmatic entry from 1970, the poet Anna Kamienska summarizes the
narrative thread that inadvertently gave shape to the first volume of her Notebook,
containing entries from 1965–1972. The Notebook, she warns her
Polish readers, is “not a memoir or diary by any stretch of the imagination.”
It grew, she explains,
from my poetic rough drafts, from my
habit of jotting down observations, thoughts, snatches of poetry. I’ve also
always taken notes from my reading, quotations, ideas. Both these streams
converged and grew into a sui generis account of my inner life, written in
shorthand, often in those approximations of sentences called thoughts.
In her introduction, Kamienska
refuses to identify the crisis leading to the hardwon faith that is the subject
of so many later entries. The Notebook’s first part, she
comments noncommitally, “was written by a nonbeliever. But an intellectual and
spiritual turning point is followed by the drama of an ever-changing, always
embattled faith.” The transformation was in fact triggered by the
sudden death of her husband, the poet Jan Spiewak, who died of cancer on
December 22, 1967. This is the J. or Janek who appears in several of the
entries translated here. Kamienska had always been “a soul in revolt, a
spiritual quester” who “experienced every wrong the world committed intensely”
from the start, as her childhood friend, the poet Julia Hartwig, recalls. The
trauma of her husband’s death turned this quest into the purpose of both her
poetry and her life.
The fascination with mysticism of all
shapes, with archaic religions and folk cultures, that her earlier writing
betrays becomes explicitly Christian in the later work, though it never takes a
settled, comfortable shape. The intellectual breadth, relentless self-testing,
and passionate introspection that mark her Notebook make her
one of the great poet-mystics of postwar Poland. They may also explain why she
never achieved the popularity of her close friend, the far more accessible poet
Father Jan Twardowski, who appears in many of her entries. Her beloved husband
remained her muse until her own death in 1986. In one late entry she recalls
her many visits to his grave with Twardowski:
We’ve been walking among these graves
for ten years now. Father Jan put a bunch of lilacs on Janek’s grave. I was
surprised that lilacs still exist. We come and go, but the flowers remain the
same and continue to bear the same names.
—CC
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