Wednesday 17 July 2013

Czeslaw Milosz

The next Poetry Cafe at Bank Street Arts is on Wednesday 7th August, from 12pm.  We're looking at poems by Czeslaw Milosz in the first part of the session.  All the poems we're reading are online:

Poetry Foundation has 14 poems
There's another three at nobelprize.org and "Artificer" at Poets.org

Poetry Foundation also has some interesting essays, not just about Milosz, but around the political and cultural issues that might offer some potential ways of contextualising his work.  Here's a quote from one of the essays (by Bradford Gray Telford):

Chief among Milosz’s many gifts was his Virgilian assuredness—a contribution unique to Milosz the Poet-Philosopher-Dissident-Statesman-in-Exile—that guided innumerable Polish writers and readers through war, occupation, totalitarianism, and post-Communist bewilderment.