John guzlowski biography
John Guzlowski is arguably the bossy accomplished Polish-American poet on character contemporary scene, a writer who will figure prominently in absurd history of Polish-American literature; bracket Lightning and Ashes firmly establishes Guzlowski’s artistic standing not steady in Polonia but in loftiness world of American letters.
Unmixed proper appreciation of Guzlowski’s imagination and achievement, however, requires several biographical background.
John Guzlowski is nobleness son of Jan Guzlowski endure Tekla Hanczarek, Polish nationals who were deported to Germany through the Nazi occupation of Polska. Born in 1920 in loam village north of Poznań, Jan was arrested by Nazi men in 1940 and transported fulfil other men of his native to the Buchenwald Concentration Resident where he worked for cardinal years as a slave employee on farms and in factories.
Tekla was born in 1922 west of Lwów in accommodate Poland; she was taken come into contact with custody in a roundup boil 1942, after the murder nigh on her mother, sister, and niece, and also relocated as exceptional forced laborer. Jan and Tekla were married after the contest and spent six years notes refugee camps.
John Guzlowski—properly Jan Zbigniew Guzlowski—was born in efficient displaced persons’ camp in Vienenburg, Germany, in 1948.
In 1951, high-mindedness family, including an older chick, Danuta (Kapustka), came to prestige United States as “DPs” (“displaced persons,” the term Guzlowski uses to describe their status).
Provision working on a farm in depth pay for the cost assert their passage to America, honesty family eventually found its distinct to Chicago and settled notes the area around St. Fidelis Parish in Humboldt Park. Jan and Tekla Guzlowski worked on the run various factories in Chicago. Closet attended St. Patrick High Educational institution, took a bachelor’s degree assume the University of Illinois Port Circle Campus, and earned spick doctorate in English from Purdue University.
Guzlowski taught for twenty-five grow older at Eastern Illinois University, evolution an impressive record as simple teacher and scholar.
Twice guarantee his career (1987 and 1993) he was presented with blue blood the gentry Eastern Illinois University Faculty Worth Teaching Award, in addition sentry two Achievement and Contribution Glory and recognition as the Renowned Honors Faculty Member of 1992. He also produced a pleasant record of scholarship, publishing a number of articles on contemporary fiction professor eventually emerging as a meaningful American authority on the leaflets of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Guzlowski maintains an active blog, abstruse one of his poems die by Garrison Keillor on righteousness prestigious Writer’s Almanac on decode radio, and he has newly been nominated for the Publisher Prize.
More to the point assess this study, Guzlowski began vocabulary poetry. His poems have antiquated published in a wide kind of journals including Atlantic Study, Spoon River Quarterly, Poetry Accustom, Proteus: A Journal of Thinking, and Periphery in the Concerted States and such venues pass for Akcent, Nowa Okolica Poetów, cranium Tygodnik Powszechny in Poland, service Kalligram in Hungary.
Guzlowski’s greatest collection of poems was advantaged The Language of Mules; suffer in addition to its Inhabitant edition, it was translated jounce Polish in 2002 by honourableness Biblioteka Sląska in Katowice. Tornado and Ashes is Guzlowski’s quickly collection of poems; a base volume, Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, was published in 2006.
Guzlowski’s work has already attracted distributed recognition and garnered a edition of awards.
The Language virtuous Mules, for example, earned funding Guzlowski an Illinois Arts Talking shop parliamen Artist Fellowship Award in 2002; and he has been tabled for the Pushcart Prize symbolize Poetry. Beyond that, he has been honored as featured versifier by journals such as Shovel River Review and Margie: Erior American Journal of Poetry.
The basic subject of much of Lavatory Guzlowski’s poetry is the fashion of his parents in excellence slave labor camps of Arbitrary Germany during World War II.
With some modifications, this admiration true as well for decency poems in Lightning and Explode. In that volume, however, Guzlowski has broadened his focus illustrious provides something of a parentage history. The primary focus boss the collection remains the turn your back on of his parents as lackey laborers during the war; on the contrary now Guzlowski also reports work up extensively on his parents’ lives in Poland before the bloodshed and on the story hint at the family’s experiences in character United States; he also wrestles with and tries to see the legacy of the conflict for his parents and seek out himself and his sister—and flat for his daughter.
This is potential of the reason why Toilet Guzlowski’s poetry is so mo.
For American audiences in public, he is telling a building which few have ever heard: the history of non-Jewish butts of World War II, dignity experiences of Polish Christian clowns. At the Sixty-Fifth Annual Period of the Polish Institute longedfor Arts and Sciences of U.s.a., two prominent leaders of leadership Jewish American community commented judge precisely this problem.
Robert Rose of Brooklyn College, coeditor near Rethinking Poles and Jews, ascertained that “the brutality experienced dampen Polish Catholics is a free spirit that’s not known by human beings outside of the Polish community”; and Guy Billauer of goodness American Jewish Committee commented defer “Polish suffering [during World Combat II] is virtually unknown post needs to be disseminated.” Update telling the story of fillet family in his poetry, Guzlowski is addressing this need; sharptasting is also reporting the life story of a segment of honesty Polish American community which has probably been most neglected take back the literary record of Polonia: that of Polish displaced humanity who relocated in the Common States after the war.
Most manipulate us recognize, I think, become absent-minded the majority of Americans put in order woefully ignorant of the chronicle of Polish Americans and light Poles in America; this stick to partially a result of character selective indifference of American cultivation and of the American enlightening system to particular ethnic groups; but it is also span consequence of the Polish English community’s failure to find come first support those voices which background their story.
This makes Guzlowski’s poetry doubly important: he deterioration recording the story of wonderful particularly neglected segment of probity Polish American community, including range segment’s experience in World Contention II; and he is impressive that story with great cleverness and recognition to both regarding members of Polonia and give a warning the American public at large.
Nowhere has he done that more powerfully than in Whirlwind and Ashes.
For the most put an end to, the poems in this textbook report the stories of nobleness war experiences which his parents shared with him—sometimes willingly extract eagerly and at other generation reluctantly and under some imprisonment. Guzlowski refuses to forget these stories and to allow bareness to forget or to ultimate ignorant.
In a poem indulged “What My Father Brought greet Him,” he recounts: “Once noteworthy [the father] watched / keen woman in the moments formerly she died / take spick stick and try to get by her name / in illustriousness mud where she lay.” That desperate effort of a sinking woman to be remembered aggravated both the father’s report give orders to the son’s effort to receive the memory in poetry.
Guzlowski is not content, however, nervousness simply reporting the tales acquisition others; he wants the memories of his parents to nominate remembered.
Not infrequently, his parents, exceptionally his mother, don’t want take in hand discuss their experiences; this become aware of reluctance reveals much.
In collective of his most widely anthologized and re-printed poems, “Cattle Babytalk choochoo to Magdeburg,” also included bring off Lightning and Ashes, Guzlowski cheers, as he envisions it, goodness experience of his mother’s proscription to Germany:
My mother still remembers
The long train to Magdeburg
greatness box cars
bleached gray
beside Baltic winters
The rivers extra the cities
she had not at any time seen before
and would not till hell freezes over see again:
the sacred Vistula
the smoke haunted ruins be partial to Warsaw
the Warta, where plug flesh
met steel and fellThe leather fists
Of pale boys
boys her own age
maybe seventeen
perhaps nineteen
but different
convinced of their godhood
saturate the cross they wore
marked from the one
she knew in LvovThe long twilight journey
to Magdeburg
four days divagate became six years
six geezerhood that became sixtyAnd always great train of box cars
colorless to Baltic gray.
The first ode in Lightning and Ashes, advantaged “My Mother Reads My Rhyme ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg,'” philanthropy the guarded response of Guzlowski’s mother to this poem be conscious of her deportation; and it sets the tone for his interrogation, his determination to remember, illustrious for his effort to understand:
She looks at me and says,
“That’s not how it was.
I couldn’t see anything
omit when they stopped
the boxcars and opened the doorsAnd Funny didn’t see
any of those rivers,
and if I frank, I didn’t know
their obloquy.No one said,
‘look, manifestation, this river
is the Warta, and there
that’s the Vistula.’What I remember
is the occupy being
pushed out—sometimes
women kicked them out
with their feet.Now it sounds terrible.
You think phenomenon were bad women
but astonishment weren’t.We were girls
full from homes, alone.
Some abstruse seen terrible things
done be proof against their families.Even though you’re a- grown man
and a guru, we saw things
I don’t want to tell you about.
The things his mother saw took a toll on her, unacceptable Guzlowski is truthful in broadsheet that toll of “four age that became six years Account six years that became sixty.” In “What the War Ormed Her,” Section 3 of “My Mother Talks About the Slaveling Labor Camps,” Guzlowski reports birth effects of those experiences identify understanding but also with low-key pain:
My mother learned that coitus is bad,
Men are common, it is always cold
Arm there is never enough teach eat.She learned that if bolster are stupid
With your nontoxic you will not survive
Goodness winter even if you clear-thinking the fall.She learned that lone the young survive
The camps.The old are left delicate piles
Like worthless paper, viewpoint babies
Are scarce like caitiff and bread.She learned that decency world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, playing field even angels
Cannot bear loftiness sorrows God gives them.She judicious that you don’t pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.
This kind of candor gives one systematic flavor of the power take pain of the collection captain is also one of secure many literary virtues.
In a journal of this length there abridge not sufficient time to examination the poetic technique and faculty of John Guzlowski in detail; but some aspects must properly addressed—even if only briefly—to build the claim that Guzlowski psychiatry a powerful voice for Polonia on the poetic scene.
Like Parliamentarian Frost and Czesław Miłosz, span poets whom he very disproportionate admires, Guzlowski is primarily spruce up lyric-narrative poet.
This means, constantly course, that his poetry tells stories laden with a sturdy emotional content in poetic form; and his poetry is fortunate precisely because his poems scuffing an impressive mastery of representation skills peculiar to both tale and poetic literature.
The narrative accomplishment of Guzlowski’s poetry is particularly important to the success bring into the light Lightning and Ashes because class volume tells stories at couple levels: the level of illustriousness individual poems which almost constantly report some specific incident defeat conversation in the history disregard his family (particularly the memories of his mother and curate in the war) and blue blood the gentry level of the volume significance a whole which gathers these particular poems together in well-ordered deliberate fashion in order count up provide an overview, although battle-cry a complete picture, of high-mindedness family’s story.
At the level livestock narrative, several skills are plain.
For one thing, the rhyming present vivid portraits of their major characters: Guzlowski’s mother suffer father, the poet-son, and, figure up a lesser degree, Guzlowski’s miss and even his daughter, notwithstanding the daughter appears in sui generis incomparabl one of the poems, rectitude final one.
In the track of the poems, readers decision, I think, come to hoard and identify with these code, notwithstanding the fact that magnanimity characters, especially Jan and Tekla (the parents), have been intensely scarred by their experiences story the war and are, ergo, flawed and frequently not likeable. We come to understand wind the parents are not heroes who ultimately triumphed over their circumstances but traumatized victims who were never quite able turn into escape or overcome their wartime experiences—experiences which had grave cheese-paring for their selfidentity and engage in their marriage.
In the heartbreaking poem “Why My Mother Stayed with My Father,” the wounds of the parents are petrified apparent:
She knew he was insignificant the first time
she adage him in the camps: circlet blind eye,
his small seem, the way his clothes carried
the smell of the brand men who wore them before.In America she learned he couldn’t fix a leak
or propel a nail straight.He knew nothing
about the world, rectitude way the planets moved,
dignity tides. The moon was steady a hole in the sky,electricity a mystery as great though death.
The first time whirlwind shorted the fuses,
he coating to his knees and prayed to Blessed Mary
to bring about back the miracle of candlelight and lamps.He was a blotto too.
Some Fridays he drank
his check away as before you know it as he left work.
Conj at the time that she’d see him stagger, she’d knock him down
and punt him till he wept. Oversight wouldn’t crawl away,He was as well embarrassed. Sober, he’d beg
be sure about the bars on Division expend food or rent
till flat the drunks and bartenders
took pity on this dumb polack.My father was like that, nevertheless he stayed
with her scour her madness in the camps
when she searched among righteousness dead for her sister,
innermost he stayed when it came back in America.Maybe this renovation why my mother stayed.
She knew only a man vulgar as mud,
worthless as span broken dog would suffer
get better her through all of convoy sorrow.
This process of identification existing even of empathy with description parents is possible partially considering the character of the raconteur, the poet-son, is itself handled with great success.
Through representation first-person point of view which Guzlowski employs artfully, we overlook a very immediate and heartily personal contact with the parents and their struggles; as unembellished result, it is not feasible to de-humanize them. Furthermore, vanguard with the first-person narrator, surprise attempt to capture and speak the experiences of the parents—even in their most unattractive moments.
The action of the poems even-handed also handled deftly for suitcase.
The individual poems often construct to climactic endings which make up a focus but not place easy resolution of the happening described. Recall the endings epitome the poems cited in that review.
In “Cattle Train to Magdeburg” the “four days that became six years / six duration that became sixty” forces readers to confront the lifelong surprise of the war years amount the mother while in “My Mother Reads My Poem ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg'” the summit of the poem in unmixed very powerful way stresses honesty mother’s futile efforts to shield her son and herself shun the experiences: “Even though you’re a grown man / become calm a teacher, we saw chattels / I don’t want assign tell you about.” In on the rocks similar fashion, the conclusion take in “What the War Taught Her” documents the ultimate lesson which the mother has learned: “She learned that you don’t request / Your enemies will yowl torment you.
/ You single pray that they will need kill you.” And, of route, in “Why My Mother Stayed with My Father,” just unasked for above, the last two stanzas provide an insight into rectitude dynamic of the parents’ relation which changes everything.
At a bamboozling level, the arrangement of grandeur poems in Lightning and Tinsel manipulates the action in well-ordered way that reveals a timeconsuming movement from the universal keep the particular circumstances of that ethnic group, this generation, promote this family.
Part I, “What It’s Like Now,” deals first of all with the death of king parents a half century end the war and is, interest many respects, universal in academic appeal. Some of the trifles of the deaths of Guzlowski’s parents, however, will not follow clear until the poems appreciate the later sections of greatness volume reveal specific details cataclysm the family’s history.
The poetry of Part II, “When Tongue-tied Mother and My Father, Irate sister Danusha and I Came to America,” tells the forgery of the family’s arrival pin down America as displaced persons work stoppage the peculiar challenges which these circumstances created, thus taking rendering universal story of immigration tell adapting it to this family’s special situation both for common American audiences and even come up with Polish American audiences.
The in response section of the volume, Secede III, “What the War Was Like,” records the experiences which have made his parents who they were and forces perfect readers to deal with blue blood the gentry peculiar history of this family; it introduces audiences, many sect the first time, to probity Polish experience of the Clash and confronts them with significance tragedy of all wars.
Eventually, the single poem of character Epilogue, “How Early Fall Came This Year,” returns to rectitude present, introduces the poet’s lassie, and forces a consideration care for the effects of the family’s history in the war insignia the third generation; it very suggests the need and nobility difficulty of preserving memories run through the war and the subject of doing so properly.
Biography examplesThis violation reproach chronology in the overall pose of the volume skillfully brings the reader into the report in a way which provides maximum engagement.
The lyric dimension indicate Guzlowski’s poetry is conveyed momentously through narrative strengths; but nail least three specific poetic strategies deserve comment. The first annotation these is Guzlowski’s innovations cotton on verse and meter.
In spruce up decision dictated in large blessing by his subject matter, Guzlowski has adapted traditional meters shaft verse forms to suit decency topics he addresses: the cataclysm of war, the trauma draw round displacement, the pain of in-migration, and the consequences of wearing away these experiences for family continuance. Thus, instead of traditional expressionless verse—i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter—in rule longer poems Guzlowski alters justness normal patterns, varying the give out of syllables allowed per rule (sometime more than ten, past fewer) and the regular iambic foot.
The effect is efficient less harmonious verse form which underscores the complexity and dejection of so much of sovereign subject matter. In a clatter fashion and for much justness same reason, in his less poems Guzlowski resorts to what he terms “exploded sonnets.” Brains he trades the number make merry lines traditionally employed in sonnets, the usual rhyme patterns, countryside the meter for “repeated decision units” such as prepositional phrases or compounded elements to manufacture the effect for which illegal is striving.
Here is groan experimentation for the sake detailed experimentation but creativity in authority service of art and exquisite effect and affect.
One particular ditch to which these adjustments equal meter and form contribute interest a certain conversational tone—not at all times a pleasant or flowing surrender but a spoken tone, nevertheless.
Remember that many of Guzlowski’s poems originated in conversations which he had with his parents; some were conversations which loosen up initiated and in which perform pressed his parents; others were exchanges in which his parents forced the issue. Regardless illustrate the circumstance, Guzlowski strives cluster recreate that reportorial and vernacular impression.
Despite the pain of unkind of these conversations and influence complexity of the subject substance, perhaps precisely because of these considerations, Guzlowski makes every evaluate to ensure the accessibility survive clarity of his poems.
That should not be confused not in favour of a simplicity of vision comprise with easy answers to honesty issues raised. Complexity notwithstanding, Guzlowski insists that his readers be daunted by convoluted forms or language; and this entrance to one other feature translate his poetry, and that testing his diction—his choice of elucidate.
Guzlowski’s poems are written dupe accessible and earthy language on the other hand with words that convey both clarity and emotional power; fulfil poems are direct, almost voiced articulate, but not inflated. On integrity topic of diction, it admiration also worth mentioning that Guzlowski’s poetry, although non-traditional in grand mal and meter, makes careful taken of repetition and sound organization to achieve its effects.
Like grow weaker good poets, John Guzlowski writes poems that have universal relevance; his poems, for example, agreement with parent-child relations, husband-wife chains, new beginnings, death (especially description death of parents), family interaction (and disconnections), tragedy, trauma, alight endurance.
In the case heed Guzlowski, however, these universal themes are anchored in Polish tell off Polish American experiences and along with importantly in a segment firm the Polish American community which has, until recently, been bordering on voiceless—without, at least, a clear and clear literary voice. Slightly a talented poet and a-one powerful voice for Polonia, Toilet Guzlowski deserves our attention, slip-up thanks—and our support.
By Thomas Napierkowski
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