New Poems by Grzegorz Wr?blewsk
Anarchy and Tuna
a group of anarchists throwing a Molotov cocktail bought
for social services money
calculate the cost of finishing off
one policeman
you have to budget cleverly, as there has to be enough left
for canned tuna and lemon
canned tuna is just the thing for a rebel: a cheap foodstuff
that makes you go forever!
state officials regularly pay the anarchists
their dole and in so doing support anarchy
officials and anarchists supposedly being
two fiercely antagonistic worlds!
you can’t mention an anarchist in front of an official unless you
want him to have a fit of nervous hiccups,
or a white shirt tucked into grey pants
in front of an anarchist, unless you want him to get his knife
it’s hard to be an official,
it’s equally hard to be an anarchist,
but it’s shit manners to be an anarchist
in a welfare state
Renoir and Van Gogh
Renoir was not naïve: Painting is there
To decorate walls.
Conversation… The Isshidan Garden in Kyoto.
Tapies’s canvases in stone? Or a poster,
maybe? El Quixote de Antonio Saura.
Since Saura died – there’s only Tapies!
Too many reproductions here, then, and gap-toothed
prostitutes from Thailand.
Barcelona? It’s so far away.
In Copenhagen, only a billiards table,
Jacobsen’s forks and chairs.
No use denying it, I do love cheap jewelry
and expensive, pre-war silver,
and I’ve always felt at my optimum in the city.
That’s why I’d like to pop out to the country.
Because –
I’d like to see a horse again,
though, to be honest, I’ve no idea why…
Horses can be quite dangerous, after all.
Oh, we also have Kierkegaard!
You mustn’t forget.
Camus was under the influence, no doubt.
A horse instead of a smoke, a must at my age,
Nothing more for me now but subtle sunflowers.
And here goes Renoir again: For me, a painting has to be
something nice,
something joyful,
something pretty. I disagree.
Let’s take the jittery Van Gogh,
for example:
I pay for my art
with the risk of life,
it took half my mind away.
Failures. Women in flowing dresses
and old shawls.
Van Gogh. Renoir.
They were right.
(We’ll be carted
To the morgue soon.) Adios, amigo borracho!
Their portraits are immortal, as long as
I look at them.
* * *
You wonder why you find yourself facing everyday ascetic
practice and reading the old stuff by Stephen King?
Because we were out of luck again and the keys
were not right for that car, property of your wife, who is down
with bronchitis (I never even knew you were married),
neither for the other, which some clueless plainclothes dogs
parked right next to hers.
Homage to Short Stays
Maybe it’s because of riots in Albania
or how the clay god Ganesha
affects us. I should count
on nothing pleasant today.
(I’m even miffed at the sweet mangoes
you bought at the Pakistani’s yesterday.)
Looks like these are the only reasons
I called my last drawing Loneliness.
“The disease of civilization…”, sighs
the gallery owner, upset.
I might as well have
called it Eyes.
It would amount to the same thing.
Love, Ecology and Moon
We listen to the faraway singing
of fighter-planes: the Moon sect has not
found our suburban hideout yet!
A momentary idyll… Here, all that matters
are white shells and birds emerging
from pure clouds.
You mean so much to me, more than
the nuclear plant at Barsebäck.
Henrietta on a Date
A grasshopper hid behind the basket belonging
to Henrietta. Stripped naked, she tears down the hot leaves
and fools around with a corn cob.
Sweaty all over, she waits for her man, who
is not coming for another 4 months, not until
he has completed his clerical training in Odense.
The Castle
Cats’ eyes and honeymooning
Russians. On the wall, the immortal
MICKY FROM SWINDON!
The last concierge was be-
headed in 1600…
Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes of poetry and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
The English translations of his poems and/or plays have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Magma Poetry, Parameter Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Delinquent, Chicago Review, 3rd bed, Eclectica, Mississippi Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Common Knowledge, Word Riot, Practice: New Writing + Art, The Mercurian – A Theatrical Translation Review, Lyric, CounterPunch, Exquisite Corpse, Guernica, Jacket Magazine, Otoliths, Cambridge Literary Review, 3:AM Magazine, Past Simple, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, AGNI Online, Words Without Borders, Shampoo, Seneca Review,
Postmodern Culture, West Wind Review
and in the following anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004), A Generation Defining Itself – In Our Own Words (MW Enterprises, USA 2007).
Selected poems Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK 2007),
new and selected poems A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2010).
His chapbooks to date are: These Extraordinary People (erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK 2008) and Mercury Project (Toad Press, Claremont, USA 2008), A Rarity (Cervena Barva Press, W. Somerville, USA, 2009).
Agnieszka Pokojska is a freelance translator and editor, tutor in literary translation at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and author of a number of articles on translation. Her translations into Polish include poems by Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott. Her translations of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s poetry appeared in the anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird, in Lyric Poetry Review, West Wind Review, Eclectica, Jacket Magazine, The Journal, Cambridge Literary Review, Past Simple, Words Without Borders, The Delinquent, 3:AM Magazine, Postmodern Culture, Otoliths and Poetry Wales and most recently in the chapbook A Rarity published by Cervena Barva Press.