Talk with a Czech Poet
STEPANCHEV, STEPHEN
METAPHORS AND MICROSCOPES Talk with a Czech Poet By Stephen Stepanchev One of the best and most popular of contemporary Czech poets has been living quietly in New York for the past two years,...
...Are you a breath-line poet...
...you see them through a microscope...
...The crucial year in this development was 1956, when shocking revelations about the repressive character of Stalinism were made at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party and led to widespread disillusionment and skepticism in Eastern Europe...
...I try to achieve effects of suspense with my long lines and tremendous emphases with my short ones...
...he shouted, laughing triumphantly...
...They both dislike non-representational painting...
...He thought for a moment...
...Holub seemed amused, for his eyelids wrinkled...
...that is, he is interested in the morphology of immune processes...
...Holub began as a poet when he was 30 years old and produced rhymed poems, at first, mostly in what he calls "dactylotrochaics...
...Describing a biological event is as subjective as creating a poem...
...METAPHORS AND MICROSCOPES Talk with a Czech Poet By Stephen Stepanchev One of the best and most popular of contemporary Czech poets has been living quietly in New York for the past two years, virtually unknown to the public until last June 22, when Robert Lowell introduced him to an audience at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street ymca under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival for 1967...
...The latter is a leading organizer of the new movement but seems to be acceptable to the Communist party hierarchy...
...In the poem called 'Suffering,' for example, you look at human beings as though they were part of some experiment...
...He returns to Prague in November to continue his work at the Institute of Microbiology of the Academy of Sciences...
...I think you'll find that there are astonishing similarities among politicians, East and West...
...Yes, exactly...
...But I think I should add that I'm open-minded about all the phenomena of experience, including the irrational...
...He is an energetic man of 44 who likes to walk up and down and gesture with his hands as he thinks and talks...
...I've noticed that many of your metaphors come out of the laboratory...
...They expect a scientist's poems to be dry, factual, like a laboratory report...
...Yes," he said...
...He is of medium height and balding, and his hair is graying at the temples...
...The work is slow and demanding, and Holub uses high-powered electromicro-scopes to assist him in seeing into the fantastic world beneath human vision, the microcosm...
...This suggests a dizzying sort of mdeterminacy...
...In your opinion," he asked, "which contemporary American poet is like me...
...But I like science...
...I must have equilibrium in order to meditate, to interpret reality...
...You see, with us it's been a matter of national survival...
...But you obviously couldn't make a living by writing poetry—or could you...
...Biology, after all, is a much less exact science than physics...
...there are many different ways of making a poem and making it new...
...Things move too fast...
...No, there's no conflict...
...I asked...
...His name is Miroslav Holub (the last name, interestingly enough, means "dove"), and he is here at the invitation of the Public Helath Research Institute of the City of New York...
...He has doubts about the appropriateness of Marxism in the practice of literature...
...It's a risk, I know, but I do want to suggest the atmosphere of science in my poems...
...And you can't interrupt scientific work for two years, you know, and then hope to pick it up again where you left off...
...Of course they are...
...Holub sighed...
...I asked...
...Recently, in the course of an interview, I asked him whether there was any relationship between his vocation and avocation...
...Is there any relationship between your methods as a biologist and your methods as a poet...
...He has been Secretary of the Czechoslovak Writers Union and is, at present, editor of Literarny Noviny, the literary weekly of Czechoslovakia, with a circulation of 150,000...
...Are your lines units of attention, units of rhythm, idea, breath, or what...
...He has a wide, creased brow and brown eyes that wrinkle agreeably when he smiles...
...The biologist has relatively few methods at his disposal...
...As you know, I'm a poet of ideas, not of images...
...There's no conflict, is there...
...I imagine the ideas you entertain as a scientist are the same as those you express in your poems...
...I don't mean to exclude human emotions, but I'm afraid of sentimentality...
...Scientists tend to be suspicious of poets...
...I mean, how do you break up your lines...
...In Czechoslovakia, Holub is identified with the new "poetry of everyday life" as opposed to the dogmatic, Communist party-line poetry that was dominant from 1945-56...
...Anyway, I'm afraid that, if I had all the time in the world to write my poems, I would write nothing at all...
...Is this all true in biology as well...
...In scientific circles I try to hide the fact that I write verse...
...Well, as a matter of fact, I could...
...He brushed his forehead with his hand...
...I wonder if your literary friends are as suspicious of your scientific work as the scientists are of your poetry...
...However, the methods of the poet are much more various...
...One of the reasons I use metaphors in my poems is to avoid the aridities of rationalism...
...Well, I think I've fooled them...
...At the 11th Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist party in 1958, both the magazine and its contributors were attacked, and Miroslav Holub was singled out for particularly vehement criticism, though he was not one of the editors, As often happens, the attack produced an effect opposite to the one intended...
...It's an uneasy relationship," he said, smiling...
...By studying cell differentiation in cell cultures, he hopes to understand the mechanics by which processes of immunity develop in man and animal: In some cases these involve engulfment or absorption of enemy cells, in other cases their neutralization...
...The Czech language and literature have been modes of preserving the national identity...
...The poet is not a Party member, though he is on the Central Committee of the Writers Union...
...And they say that the observer influences the event he observes...
...My books sell well, and the Czechoslovak Writers Union has offered me a stipend equivalent to my salary as a research scientist to do nothing but write for two years...
...But the metaphors can't be too technical or the reader will consider them merely odd...
...I hate superstition...
...Later we had dinner in an Italian restaurant in Flushing, where we saw crudely painted murals depicting the bridges, canals and gondolas of Venice...
...Well, Robert Creeley, perhaps," I said, hesitating...
...The physicists say that in the world of nuclear particles it is virtually impossible to determine, with precision, both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time...
...In Czechoslovakia the poetry of everyday life began appearing in Kveten, a liberal journal that is now defunct...
...Do you work best under the influence of powerful feelings or in a state of equilibrium...
...Socialist Realism," he remarked, and we both laughed as we sat down to our meal...
...But it antedates Marxism...
...Did you know that Khrushchev and Eisenhower agree on art...
...Units of attention, I think...
...The Czech people have always been at one with their intellectuals...
...He is a pathologist working in the field of immunology...
...My poems, by the way, always begin with an idea, an obsessive idea of some sort...
...He nodded his head and laughed...
...the poetry of everyday life suddenly became popular...
...How about emotion...
...The other reason is that I like the play or dance of metaphors, just as I like the play of ideas in a poem...
...I want to find poetic equivalents for the new reality of the micro-world...
...I'm a scientific realist...
...As a scientist, I believe in an objective reality...
...Like Wallace Stevens, he regards verse-writing as an avocation...
...they feel that poets are, somehow, irresponsible...
...Oh, of course," Holub said...
...Yes, you're right...
...Holub sighed when he saw them...
...The idea that literature should teach as well as please, and that the writer should therefore communicate with his audience, is deeply rooted in the Czech national consciousness," he said...
...Although political or "slogan" poetry still exists, notably in the work of the conservative poet Ivan Skala, it is being displaced by experimental verse on themes of a non-heroic, recognizably human scale...
...Stripped of their ideologies, they are completely interchangeable...
...I can't write when I feel strongly...
...f f ¦ really believe," Holub said, | "that the success of my books has been due to the attack leveled at me by the Party...
...Among the poets associated with this movement, which has had an enormous influence on the practice of Czech poets, notably the younger ones, are Karel Siktanc, who writes narrative poetry, and Jiri Sotola, who experiments with verse form...
...Now he writes in free forms that relate him to a number of poets on the international scene who have been influenced, in part, by William Carlos Williams...
Vol. 50 • September 1967 • No. 19
