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The poem is titled “Poem for Witold Gombrowicz,” as found in Matthew Zapruder’s most recent collection, I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems (which, in my opinion, is his most moving and tender offering yet in ways that are best left to the reader to discover after purchasing the book and consuming it between the winter’s midnights).

It’s a kind of discipline, Matthew writes, to not remember the persons we abandoned in the relationships that shaped us, whether inherited or invented for the purposes of time and place. But it is the irreverence of the closing act that testifies to the speaker’s respect for the poem’s addressee, namely Gombrowicz, whose tone of total disrespect for modern humankind punctuates his fictions as well as his diaries.

The fork intrigues me: where the speaker honors by peeing on the very old tree, this peeing still feels like the sort of melancholic irreverence that Matthew is known for. In other words, Matthew pees on the tree in order to honor by communing with his subject, but his subject, Gombrowicz, took irreverence much further, past the point of laughter and straight into the acreage of contempt.

'Of all artists, poets are people who fall to their knees most persistently,' Gombrowicz said, naming us as the worthiest of contempt. But, as Matthew keenly culls, the act of pissing on a tree is how the poet earns the respect of the surly shade known as Gombrowicz, for it is this carnal, a-lyrical fleshiness that the dead writer admired.

To make him laugh is to libate Gombrowicz, and the splendor of this poem lies in precisely the gentle, lyrical way in which Matthew Zapruder accomplishes this.

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And now for an owl that engraved itself upon my imagination.

Bernard Childs engraved this owl with a power tool. It is the second owl in a series. The yellow feels surprising or insecure in this context, perhaps because clashing colors often inject a bit of insecurity into a scene. And something is perhaps unsettled.

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“Salvation through laughter,” Charles Simic called it, that spittle in Gombrowicz’s writing which reached from Argentina back to his Polish homeland across translations and correspondence.

Born in a Polish city close to the Austrian border, Gombrowicz’s experience of World War I turned him a lifelong pacifist and an atheist. Although he went on to study law, he earned a reputation for himself as a man about town, frequenting “literary cafés where he began to acquire a reputation as a character, taking potshots at his contemporaries,” Simic noted. Gombrowicz’s “humor and impudence stood out”. The stake of writing was existential to him: he existed “to make a character like Hamlet or Don Quixote out of a man called Gombrowicz,” in Simic’s words. Here, the writer’s job is to seduce and provoke the reader towards recognition of the author’s existence.

The logic of their bourgeois fathers failed this generation. Many would devote their theory and literature to battling the father within, drawing legalistic logic and absurdism in the two-front interior war that Franz Kafka and Frankfurt School theorists waged against their atrocious inheritance.

For close readers of Witkacy and Bruno Schulz, Gombrowicz’s Pornografia trolls familiar esoteric terrain (one might even call this turf the Zakopane school of literature, for lack of another word). In the introduction, he describes the novel as follows:

The hero of the novel, Frederick, is a Christopher Columbus who departs in search of unknown continents. What is he searching for? This new beauty, this new poetry, hidden between the adult and the young man. He is the poet of an awareness carried to the extreme or, at least, that’s how I wanted him to be. But it is difficult to understand one another nowadays! Certain critics saw him as Satan, no more, no less, while others, mainly Anglo-Saxons, were content with a more trivial definition—a voyeur. My Frederick is neither Satan nor a voyeur: he is more like a theatrical producer, or even a chemist, trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations between individuals.

Trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations certainly draws on the alchemical portions of Witkacy’s work, as the homoerotic parts draw on Bruno Schulz’s illustrations and pornografias, but Simic finds himself disappointed by it and mistrustful of the Gombrowicz’s description. He reads the author as one trained in the American empire of close reading where what stands out is the power of a “few scenes”.

Noting that Frederick’s loathing for churches doesn’t prevent him from going to a church, falling upon his knees, and praying, an act which is the penultimate “act of negation” to him, Simic even excerpts a large portion from this scene:

What exactly had happened? Strictly speaking: nothing, strictly speaking it was as though a hand had withdrawn the substance and content from the Mass—and the priest continued—and the priest continued to move, to kneel, to go from one end of the altar to the other, and the acolytes rang the bells and the smoke from the censers rose in spirals, but the whole content was evaporating like gas out of a balloon, and the Mass collapsed in its appalling impotence—limp and sagging—unable to procreate!

It is hard not to read Pornografia as an intimate portrait of Witkacy or Pierre Klossowski. It is, for me, very (very) hard. In an effort to distract myself from the ‘bad reading’, and to parse the latent connection between the honor of pissing on a tree and the Polish world of literature destroyed by the Shoah, I leave you with Correspondence between Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, 1936.