THE RETURN OF THE FORESTER On Reading Tymoteusz Karpowicz* * The author would like to thank Karen Underhill and Frank Kujawinski for their help in adapting the revised version of this essay (originally published in Gazeta Wyborcza) for American audiences. even when time orchestrates our arms to sing up and down all along the sleeves in the music-stand set at moderato and in unison with the arms of others -Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Musical Evening Stroll' Czeslaw Milosz had this to say about him: has continued, in his solitude, to add splendor to Polish poetry. Another poet, Boguslaw Kierc, lamented that he was master not present-referring to the nearly thirty-year period during which the poet, playwright, and essayist Tmoteusz Karpowicz (b. 1921) refrained from publishing. His most influential books of verse, Kamienna muzyka (Stony music) and Trudny las (Difficult forest), and his philosophico-poetic treatise, Odwr6cone swiatlo (Reversed light), were published in 1958, 1964, and 1972, respectively. Following the publication of this last volume, he repeatedly rejected requests to contribute individual poems to periodicals, and refused to authorize a new edition of his works. Instead, for the last quarter-century, Karpowicz has been working on a single volume of poetry, Stoje zadrzewne (Rings beyond the tree). Composed of more than three hundred poems, spread over three hundred pages, the volume became a literary sensation immediately after its appearance in Poland earlier this year and is currently a key candidate for the Nike Prize 2000, the most prestigious literary award in Poland. But who is Karpowicz? What kind of wordsmith-so convinced of the power of silence, and completely indifferent to the possibility of losing several generations of readers-makes himself wait decades before publishing a new volume? During the years of communist rule in Poland, Karpowicz co-edited the literary journals Poezja and Odra, and used his influence to promote new writers-including Rafal Wojaczek and the New Wave poets of the rebellious 1968 generation, such as Stanislaw Baranczak and Adam Zagajewski. In 1973, as if choking on the flood of statesponsored political kitsch, Karpowicz elected not to return from a lecturing post in West Berlin. Stripped of his editorial positions in Poland, he made his way, via Paris and Iowa City, to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he began teaching as a professor of Polish literature in 1974. As a writer, he withdrew into total privacy, insulating himself from the banality of American democracy and the menace of PolishAmerican anti-intellectualism. It was from this vantage point of solitude that the author began to peer back, through his own binoculars, into the forest of his earlier poetry-and to evaluate the degree to which his poetic forest had aged or grown diseased. Each of the earlier poems that did not meet his standard of innovation was to be pruned. The results of this work, supplemented by his most recent poems, have finally been published as Rings Beyond the Tree. Karpowicz is, for some, a geologist of literature who knows its complex historical strata and is therefore able to ruthlessly distinguish between what is new in contemporary poetry and what only pretends to be. And it is precisely the truly new that Karpowicz- an admirer of Rimbaud, Rilke, and Lesmian2-demands of himself as a poet. He is a nightmare for critics who would try to bushwhack their way into his Difficult Forest or Rings with the axe of structuralist or linguistic analysis. Possibly the most difficult of all Polish writers, in the words of the poet Krzysztof Karasek, Karpowicz remains the first forester of the Polish avant-garde. Much has been written about Poland's so-called linguistic school of poetry and its key representatives, among them Karpowicz and Miron Bialoszewski. From the 1960s on, Karpowicz in particular was given the (unfairly reductive) label of poet: he was understood as a specialist in the preservation of games of language and of the semantic tensions produced between words. …