ZBIGNIEW?, John Guzlowski

 I was born Zbigniew Jan Guzlowski in a refugee camp in Germany after the war. My father Jan Guzlowski loved that name Zbigniew. When he was a kid, there was a famous Polish wrestler who had a name like that, and my dad wanted me to have it.  My mother was okay with the name too. Zbigniew was a common enough Polish first name, and she couldn’t see any harm in naming me that. Also, the roots of the name come from a couple of words in Polish that mean “to dispel anger.” After spending 3 years in a German slave labor camp, my mom was okay with dispelling some anger, I bet.

When we came to the US in 1951, however, we discovered something.

No one in the US could pronounce my name. Not only could they not pronounce my name, they had a great-old-time mispronouncing it. I was just a kid and other kids loved to make fun of my name. They called me big shoe and zigzag and bishop and zbubby and zuggy and on and on.  They did this in the streets before I started school, and they did it in grade school even though I went to a predominately Polish grade school in Chicago. And they did it when I went to high school. Maybe it was even worst in high school. The guys there took to mocking my beautiful Polish name by mispronouncing it, and they accentuated the mocking by doing it in a high whining singing sort of falsetto.

I put up with this for 18 years.

When I finally became a citizen in 1968, I legally changed my name Zbigniew to John. Every American can say John. (Although most Americans still have trouble with Guzlowski–but that’s another story I’ll tell you some other time.)

But a funny thing happened to me when I got to be about 32 and started writing and publishing.

I decided not to use John Guzlowski or John Z. Guzlowski as the name my writing would appear under. Instead, I decided to write under the name Zbigniew Guzlowski. That’s right. Zbigniew Guzlowski.

I thought “Zbigniew” would catch the eye of any and every editor. You got to remember, this was the time in the late 1970s and early 19802 when Polish writers like Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Różewicz and Wisława Szymborska and the great Zbigniew Herbert were getting a lot of press. I figured using “Zbigniew” would help me place some poems and stories and essays. You understand, I’m sure.

Maybe it would have happened, but I never got the chance to find out if re-attaching “Zbigniew” to “Guzlowski” would be the thing that helped me create a career for myself as a writer.

When my mom, a Polish immigrant, heard I wanted to use “Zbigniew,” she blew a fuse and said I couldn’t do it. I was 32 and she was telling me I couldn’t!

I was an American now, my mom said, and I had to have an American name.

Of course, like every good Polish boy, I listened to my mom.

ZBIGNIEW? by John Guzlowski was originally published via Dziennik Zwiazkowy. The original publication, in both Polish and English, can be read here.

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac.   

The Spirit of Location: Mapping Tomorrow, Mike Sonksen

We need an alternative social geography to promote tolerance & perspective

historical reference to celebrate

the power of place

to understand the past & illuminate the present

There are two primary methods of doing research and deeper investigation on a place or a subject. First, there is physically going to the location, spending time there and talking with others who have been there.

The second method is to read previous essays, stories and other writings about the location, author or subject in question. As a longtime journalist as well as poet, I have spent many years doing both.

Both methods of research performed in tandem enable a writer to achieve deeper knowledge and move towards being an authority on the topic. I have an equal love for both the physical research, what some call “pounding the pavement,” and the voracious reading that comes from the other method of research.

In conjunction with both methods of research, the spirit behind my poetry and prose is guided by geography, public history and respect. Respect to my elders and those who came before me. This ties in especially to geography and history. As Susan Schulten writes: “geography grounds events in space and history grounds them in time. Every space has a story.”

Multiple stories. Every landscape is a palimpsest with generations of stories. I try and record as many of them as I can. At the same time, the idea is to inspire others to do the same.

Mapping a human tomorrow refers to the possibilities of a more enlightened world. The historical references are meant to show where we have been. The reminders are also there so we do not forget.  

Rewriting memories is attaching stories

to spaces

speaking          landscapes

the spirit of location

   generations    of oral histories

                                    collections of public memories

  Anchoring experiences to Place

A scheme of arrangements, a utilitarian framework

A city of emotional landmarks

                                                      Mapping a human tomorrow

Back in 2001, I was interviewing the poet Lewis MacAdams, the founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River, at his house and he showed me a book that had been very influential to him. It was Investigative Poetry, by Ed Sanders.

MacAdams let me borrow it under the condition that I would return it soon. Like MacAdams, the key concepts espoused by Sanders stayed with me. The subtitle explains the work further: “that poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history.”

Sanders advocates for ideas like, “presenting data on the page,” and “story wheels as ‘memory gardens.’” In later works like America: A History in Verse: Volume 1, 1900-1939 and 1968: A History in Verse, he uses these techniques to record historic events in verse. I have always been driven by a similar impulse, and for this reason, I have always connected to Sanders’ work. 

The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal writes “documentary poetry” kindred to Sanders in books like, Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems. The poetry scholar Robert Pring-Mill writes about Cardenal’s poetry in the book’s “Introduction” stating: “These poems demand more than just an alert response, because the poet wishes to prod us beyond thought and into action: his texts are never just concerned to document and understand reality, but also to help change it… But the data have to be recorded before reality can be reshaped, and the reshaping lies beyond the poems themselves: the changes for which the poet yearns lie in the future.”

I follow the template set forth by Sanders and Cardenal. The many years I have worked as a journalist further reinforce my urge to record historical narratives. As Cardenal’s quote correctly notes, reality needs to be recorded before it can be reshaped and therefore “investigative poetry,” and the closely related “documentary poetry,” are critical actions for mapping a human tomorrow.

 

Letter to Jane Alexander, Adrienne Rich

July 3, 1997

Jane Alexander

The National Endowment for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20506

Dear Jane Alexander,

I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright.

In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art — in my own case the art of poetry — means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.

I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.

Sincerely,

Adrienne Rich

cc: President Clinton

Editor's note: More info, via The New York Times, here.

Cal State Writing Board Letter, Will Alexander

Our present psycho-lingual engulfs the past not unlike a psychic lahar, not unlike an exploded embolism where former states of consciousness can no longer procure the right to organically instruct. We have now entered the realm of alchemical lingual resonance. To attempt to procure a recursive lingual agenda can only be seen via a deprived and disordered instruction. To retreat to the English language as it sought to express itself at the cusp of Jim Crow can nothing other than atrophy the mind. The future is upon us. And this future is not a thriving cliche, or an enabled relic, brought to view to theoretically surmount a destroyed position. Thus we cannot instruct language via the vestiges of a disabled heritage that has no place in the living scheme of our current neural unfolding. For the Cal State lingual environment to retreat into such a debased climate of instruction can not be tolerated or condoned as organic promotion. Decades after Rodney King, and what feels like an eternity after the murder of George Floyd, the recent flowering of the Cal State writing board cannot be defamed by retreat into the minor codes of obstructionist academia. Language should not be instructed from a deadened point of view. Of course I am not speaking from some didactic warren, or some constricting molecular substrate, but from an existential dynamics that now registers by overcoming regressive lingual instruction. The lingual dimension of the Cal State campus represents what I understand to be transmuted planetary English. From Formosa to Persia English there now subsists indigenous planetary expansion not spores that persist and emit themselves from condemned climate proto to Jim Crow. Let us take the English that was Philip Lamantia, or the English that brewed in the cells of Bob Kaufman as living examples. We can no longer breed relics as models for future lingual instruction. And no this is not a cry for blind lingual wandering on my behalf but for an alchemical emergence of world language via the 250,000 terms that flood our language as a wondrous psychic blessing. Evolving students cannot be forced to devolve and swallow old destructive sub-texts. This amounts to nothing other than a deformed and catastrophic gesture that will negatively reflect on itself as a willful squandering of energy during this inflection point as we open onto a newly living planetary history.

A SMALL, WHITE BOTTLE, James Cagney

             I hadn’t seen her in more than 20 years. I had to ask for a hug. She paused, as to think: Did I pack one? We took a breakfast of family drama centered around her aunts' only son and his pack of dogs. He was last to the table, New Girlfriend in his wake. He hugged me, long-time ______ to his aunt and adoptive mother. The 8-year old I once knew is now a hairy, rugged dude who laughs easily since his mother now holds all the reasons to frown. Over breakfast, she fell mute after he sat at the table. She paid the check, financial problems whatever, and in turn was offered not even a crumb-sized Thank You.

But anyway, my friend said. Back to me now, she said.

She passed her phone for a séance of photos -- a white tiger cub in proxy for having no children, her smiling brilliant and alone before a Niagara Falls robed in fog. She waved off photos of her mother and brother taken at the same restaurant where she’d once, foolishly, married.

But anyway, she said. Never mind that, she said.

We ate. When the waiter reached for her untouched plate, she growled un-ironically and kept going. The boy and his lady laughed. The boys’ mother did not. I begged the waiter to stop pouring coffee, even as my friend could not stop talking. So we waited.

After breakfast, the boy showed off his pit-bull terriers. One sociable girl, one suspicious boy, one blue-eyed puppy. The only one who survived, he said, lifting the shivering pup out of my arms.

My friend and I then waved to the boy, the girl, the frowning aunt, and the smiling dogs and drove across a town she hadn’t seen since high school. It was the same and not the same. As we were. Forgot something back at the hotel, she said. As she drove, I rushed my decade summary before she snatched the conversation and ran.

The loneliness of the long distance conversationalist. I, her valet of words.

I sat on the twin bed across from her. Audience to her vaudeville of years.

Mid-monologue, I raise my hand, ask: How do you keep from drowning in your own life?

And right then, she marches over to the dresser to exalt her one, true and faithful God. The One who never falters. In her palm, a small white bottle glowed.

She'd asked her doctor for either the answer to everything or how to make everything stop, and her doctor said: Take These. She talked through me as opposed to with me. Compressed the word suicide into a syllable so small I nearly missed it. But it was there, like a pill rolled beneath an oven. She was dazzling – cursive landscape of hair, triumphant hips. I’ve loved her for a fourth of my life. So what. The friend who dated her back when we were teens, once asked why I never, Why I Never. Whatever I was to her over the years, was nowhere near as devoted as the benediction rattling like keys in her tight little fist.