Crops (Poetry + Interview)
- Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
These poems appear in the chapbook Crops, published with Rain Taxi and translated by Peter Constantine
Decree
the president of the state of S.
at the instigation of myriad citizens
issued a decree
annulling death
from one day to the next the cemeteries were transformed
into verdant parks
and hospices and hospitals
into kindergartens
we stand on the market square
of one of the towns of S.
watching
the faces of the townsfolk:
we see no fear
no trace of sleepless night
someone has written
on a nearby wall:
innocent sunsets
Crops
our real work is farm work
not killing
although I admit:
the massacres in the swamps have the rhythm of our seasonal labor
and when the rains were heavy we did not go out for crops
Richard Glazar
we arrived in Treblinka at 15:30
we crowded around the windows
I saw a green fence
barracks
and I heard something
that resembled a running tractor engine
I was delighted
the place reminded me of a farm
wonderful I thought
I'll get a job
about which I know a thing or two
Buzia Wajner, b. 1937, d. 1943
I was six when I was killed
my sister Szulamit was four
after we lost our parents we wandered around Rokitno:
we learned to sleep in the fields
and with time crept into cowsheds
and drank milk from the udders of the cows
we didn't have a calendar
so we didn't know when it was our birthday
and ended up celebrating more
than once a year
this sad celebration
Combustion
my sunday friend:
for years we went on long forest walks
you had children and a wife
but you still found time for me
then you fell ill and our meetings became scarcer
and I walked in the forests all alone
you ended up dying
but soon someone new appeared
and filled your absence
had I not dreamed of you yesterday
I would never have thought of you again
that is the way it is
no contrition
new life demolishes and levels all that is old
energy
energy
combustion
combustion
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet, essayist, and musician. He is Artist-in-Residence at Yale University and curator of the series What About Exclusion? and Virus of Hate at the University of Oxford. His essays have appeared in The Guardian, Project Syndicate, World Literature Today, and The Flaming Hydra. His work confronts issues of history, memory, ethics, and violence. He is also a member of the psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa, whose music has been released by Sub Pop and Glitterbeat Records and featured in NPR Tiny Desk and BBC Radio 6 Music sessions
L&T: You’re someone who wears many hats—poet, musician, songwriter, activist, researcher. A binding thread, to paraphrase your translator Peter Constantine, is an interest in the recurring mechanisms of collective tragedy. What brought you to this subject?
I think you’re right. Everything I do is connected with violence, tragedy, and a kind of awareness that human nature is extremely predatory and capable of the worst things. It comes from my family history. My grandfather was a prisoner of the Stutthof concentration camp, and he was a broken man, quiet, traumatized, shattered.
When I was nine, he took me to the camp and showed me something of what he had gone through. But the point is that when he crossed the gates of the camp, he fell into trauma. He cried, screamed, reconstructed it all, and that was crucial for me. That was the moment when, as a child, you begin to ask yourself questions like, why do people build concentration camps, gas chambers, why do they kill each other, murder each other, torture each other?
My path was also influenced by Gdańsk, the city where the Second World War broke out, and at the same time the city where the positive workers’ movement Solidarity broke out, which peacefully changed the political system in Poland and in many places in Europe. Solidarity and [Lech] Walęsa destroyed the communist system in the 1980s. So these things influence me.
I would add to this beautiful nature, because Gdańsk and the Tri-City lie by a beautiful sea, surrounded by beautiful forests, and they have an interesting history. Near my house lived Joseph von Eichendorff, and also, for example, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writings I love. So I have the luck, or the misfortune, of having this kind of family and this kind of place, and it naturally created in me what I do.
Of course, there are more threads, but indeed everything is quite coherent, and I am working on this through my memory art project, which connects art, the subject of human rights, and many more themes.
L&T: In your chapbook Crops, you reframe first-hand accounts of Nazi-occupied Poland as poetry, juxtaposing loss and violence against everyday experience. “Richard Glazar,” as one example, finds a prisoner weighing job prospects upon arriving at a concentration camp. What drew you to this narrative? How did you choose which episodes to spotlight?
When I was a child I went to music school, I played the clarinet and the saxophone, I was told I had absolute pitch, and so on. But the point is that after a few years I stopped going, and instead I tuned my hearing toward a different kind of sensitivity, toward violence, lies, meaninglessness, or threat, and at the same time toward something in language that makes it beautiful, hard, and paradoxically believable.
I think I hear quite well those things that are usually pushed away or repressed, and I want to catch and emphasize those moments. Those moments of hesitation, or of saying too much. The point is that a large part of what I write are real voices of real people, so my work is in a way like the work of a sculptor, who leaves these fragments bare, without additional content around them, and exposes them very strongly.
I always felt that poetry lacks this kind of brutality, but not in the sense of shock or cheap provocation or horror. I do not like art that feeds on horror. I felt that in art, especially in poetry, horror is usually presented in a “horrific” way, and that turns it into kitsch or melodrama, and I wanted to present it differently, almost neutrally, because in my opinion this neutrality and naturalness are the most terrifying.
At the same time I did not want to lie or distort anything, so I simply searched for a long time, and I am still searching, for what I need, and it turns out that it is there, it just requires careful listening and careful noting down. Of course, what I wrote does not exhaust my methodology, and it does not summarize it. It is as I wrote, but it is also different. I think art is always wiser than the artist, and it is always a kind of walking in the dark, a kind of uncertainty, and a partial lack of knowledge about what exactly one is doing.
This state of not knowing, and of a certain obsession, is in my opinion ideal for creation and for its effects. So maybe what I said is in fact true, but maybe it is also otherwise, and I simply do not know it. Not knowing is a good thing in art. Not knowledge, but intuition. I think that an artist is always a kind of sponge, so the artist absorbs what is around them and then processes it. And Poland is still a place full of ghosts.
L&T: Some of the poems in this collection appear to pull verbatim from historical sources. Others, like “Buzia Warner, b. 1937, d. 1943” rely on extrapolation, giving voice to victims unable to bear witness. What challenges did you face when channeling or inhabiting personae?
I love Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, I love this book from beginning to end, and for me it is a kind of matrix. In that book, the dead speak from beyond the grave about their lives and biographies. I wanted to create a kind of Spoon River set in Eastern Europe, not in America, and speaking about genocide. I wanted to sketch a landscape of genocide through these voices, because it is polyphony, there are different registers, different people, different voices.
I think that in this kind of writing you can never be sure whether what you are doing is right. You always have to be suspicious of yourself and of your own intentions. It is easy to say that I do this for ethical reasons or morality and so on, but who really knows.
At the same time, my family is directly connected to these themes. My wife has Jewish roots, and her grandmother hid in the forest during the war as a child, and that is how she survived. Later, it remained a family secret for decades. Generally speaking, I write about what is within the radius of what I know, in the sense that similar stories concern people close to me, and in a way I am trying to understand these people.
L&T: Your poem “Decree,” in which the president of a fictional state annuls death, satirizes administrative doublespeak. Where in your research did you encounter this kind of magical thinking? Can you say more about the inspiration for this piece?
I’m glad you’re asking about this poem, because I think it may be the first poem I ever wrote, probably when I was a teenager. For years I did not know what to do with it, until finally it ended up in Crops, and I think it was a good thing that it found its place there.
There is a certain naivety in this poem, a certain wishfulness. There is something there. I do not know exactly what, but this pious wish contains both a register of irony and also something pious and honest. There is a certain ambivalence in it, and I like that very much.
L&T: Apart from your poetry practice, you’re a member of the psychedelic post-punk band Trupa Trupa. Collaboration aside, I can’t help but hear echoes of the themes you explore in poetry. I’m thinking of the cultural amnesia in “Remainder” (“It did not take place”) or the miraculous reunion in “Koszula W Kwiaty” (“What a relief—you are alive/and I was searching for you in the ordinary faces of people”). Is there a connection here or am I reaching? How does your process differ when writing a lyric as opposed to a poetic line?
Actually, the lyrics to “Remainder” were written by Wojtek Juchniewicz, and fragments of the lyrics to “Koszula w kwiaty” come from my poetry. But generally speaking, I am always doing the same thing, whether in poetry, in music, or at the university. I keep trying to get closer to something that is dangerous, but in a way that asks questions rather than giving answers.
I am deeply immersed in this kind of probing into a wound, in this way of looking beneath the surface of reality. There is a great Polish British writer, Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness, which shows that darkness is primarily within us, not outside us. I think this seemingly simple knowledge is in fact a kind of secret knowledge for many people. We do everything to survive, and to make sure that our morally wrong actions do not slow down our drive toward survival and victory. This is what occupies me very strongly. This subject.
L&T: On a related note, I want to ask about song structure. Trupa Trupa favors hypnotic riffs and incantatory refrains. Consider, for example, the following stretch from “Coffin” on Jolly New Songs (2021): "And trees are burning/And the birds are singing/And the trees are burning/all the people are singing//Burning them, burning them/Burning them, burning them/Burning them, burning them." Can you talk about the commitment to repetition here or elsewhere in the Trupa Trupa catalog? What does this tool—or constraint—do for you as a songwriter?
I’m glad you chose this song, because it is a very poetic text, I would even say somewhat T. S. Eliot-like, a bit like The Waste Land, which I love.
The point is that my lyrics for Trupa Trupa, the ones I sing, or most of them, come into being during rehearsals, in the studio, while playing and improvising. I simply mumble something under my breath that fits the drums, the guitar, and so on, and after some time it turns out that these are actual words, and that they even have some kind of meaning. But for me it is always a kind of subconscious process.
I have never written lyrics for Trupa Trupa in a structured way, like first verse, second verse, chorus. I do it by feeling my way through, and after some time it turns out that it is almost the same as my poetry, which I supposedly do not create blindly, and that makes me think that in general I am always doing the same thing.
L&T: You gave us a sneak peek at the collection you’ve been drafting during your residency at Yale. As with Crops, these poems grapple with complex, overlooked legacies connected to the Holocaust. To what extent does this project continue the work you’re doing in Crops? What new pathways has your research revealed?
It is the same kind of work, but a few years later. I listened to hundreds of hours of testimonies from the Fortunoff Archives, and my work was the same as when I was writing Crops. I stopped at the places that I considered worth emphasizing, places that were also extraordinary musically and literarily. These were testimonies of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, and it was a very important experience for me. What is interesting is that my wife, who has her own Holocaust family history, also listened to these testimonies, and these stories helped her. They did not weaken her, but gave her spiritual strength. That was also extraordinary and completely unplanned.
L&T: At this point in your career, you’ve shared your work with a wide range of audiences. I’m curious to hear about the reception. Do you get different questions when reading abroad? How does the conversation shift at events in Poland? Are there questions you wish more people would ask?
Most of my work, my activism, my music, and everything I do happens outside Poland. Or maybe differently, it happens in Gdańsk, and then outside Poland. That has been my path. I did not plan it, but that is how it turned out, and I do not complain about it.
The reception abroad is different than in Poland. Bigger and stronger. Poland was destroyed historically, first by the Second World War, and then after 1945 by the Soviet Union and communism. We were spiritually castrated. It is terrible, frightening, and sad. In Poland, we are still deeply distrustful of one another, because how could we not be?
But in fact, this is exactly what I deal with, these themes of trauma, for example the trauma of my grandfather. So I try to understand it. I do not criticize, I do not judge, I do not moralize. But the fact is that I work mainly outside Poland, and that is significant. The reception is much greater there than here, because here many spiritual things are still blocked, and there are still many things one is not supposed to talk about.
L&T: Speaking of engagement, we find ourselves in a political present some have described as "technological totalitarianism." As someone who balances artistry with activism, what advice do you have for creative resistance? Are there artists who inspire you on this front?
My advice is this: Try not to be afraid, but also, above all, look for evil first in yourself, not outside yourself. When you are aware of your own flaws, you see things around you better, and you are more helpful.
I cannot stand moralizing combined with having corpses in your own closet. I cannot stand the tendency to generalize, and you can see in this conversation that from time to time I also have these moments when I generalize, for example what I said about Poland and the state of the country. The fact is that I do not know all of Poland, and I cannot generalize what this country is by referring only to what happened to me, because that is not reliable. You do not conduct research on one person.
To see evil in yourself, to fight every day to be a better person, and not to be afraid, this is, in my opinion, important. And last but not least, I think the ideal medicine for this is literature, art, and music. They help you X-ray yourself and your hidden, wicked intentions. It is worth exposing them, illuminating them, and doing something positive with them, so that they do not harm, but create the opposite.
