It is not easy for a woman to be a poet, as the two roles or identities are not readily compatible in patriarchal culture. Even though it has been over a century since Edmond de Goncourt formulated his famous maxim “There are no women of genius; the women of genius are men”, the prejudice against female creativity persists and women poets still have to struggle for their art to be taken seriously.
The struggle must have been even harder for Anna Świrszczyńska who practiced her art – and yoga, and vegetarianism – in the rough reality of communist Poland. And yet she succeeded: she played both roles. Not only did she write serious poetry as a woman; her femininity was ostentatious, flamboyant and unapologetic. She wrote about love and sex. She wrote about the pain and joy of childbirth. But she also wrote about illness and aging.
Świrszczyńska is rightly famous for her anti-heroic poems from the Warsaw Uprising (collected in the volume titled “Building the Barricade,” also translated by Piotr Florczyk). But her greatest transgression might actually have to do with writing about an older woman’s Eros. The speaker of “Tomorrow They’ll Cut Me Open”, a woman awaiting an operation – fearful and hopeful, thankful and assertive about her life – declares: “I ate with admiration / my slice of happiness.” The poem foregrounds the body – both strong and fragile, still full of desire but also evidently aging.
Eating and appetite are among this poet’s favored metaphors. The body she celebrates is neither clean nor isolated from the world, on the contrary, it is a body-in-process, an open body, a fat and moist body, receiving food and lovers, birthing children (and pearls).
“Female and Male” – the more mysterious of the two pieces – is about that, birthing. To my mind it is a deeply spiritual poem, but Świrszczyńska’s spirituality is earthly and fleshy, not metaphysical. Female and male – in the original samica and samiec – suggest animals rather than human beings, but of course humans, too, are animals. An animal-like, creaturely union of the sexes triggers an avalanche – what else could that avalanche be but life itself? Life “without eyes and ears”, both fragile and powerful, is the source of genius: female and male and, in the end, in a sexed being’s wildest dream, androgynous. Complete.
Read the two poems by Anna Świrszczyńska here.
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