12 poems vs. the daily news

I read Szymborska today, oh boy--she'd left some grains of sand on the bookshelf--and got the usual pleasurable shock I always get from reading her, wondering why it is I don't read her more often, she's so good that by reading her I cleared out all the other reading I'd done earlier in the morning, the morning newspaper for instance with its insistence on the real, on what happened, on the president of this or that country, and so on.

Two women have splashed poison on the face of the exiled half-brother of an asian despot, killing him; an American politician cruises the Rio Grande in a patrol boat, assessing whether a wall should be built on the border of the US and Mexico; a high-tech transportation company is accused of being sexist, overly aggressive in their training techniques and corporate culture, and so on.

What happens when I read Szymborska is that I go into the other world where what matters matters. What matters is made up of all the things I've read about in the morning newspaper, but Szymborska makes them matter more, and so simply. There aren't any big words, I never have to go to the dictionary, if a reference is made to something arcane, which it never is in a Szymborska poem, it is made clear in the poem itself.

Szymborska wrote like an angel, though she clearly wasn't one. For one, she smoked cigarettes. She's no stranger to laughter and lust. There's a poem about pornography, contrasting pornographic participants inside a room with someone 'going to the window and through a crack in the curtain taking a peep out at the street." What's more pornographic? What we do in private or the way we conduct ourselves in public?

Though Szymborska, a Polish writer, a woman, witnessed all the terrors of twentieth century, she wrote with the cleansed palate of non-judgment. She must have read the morning newspaper--there are poems on every subject under the sun. We're extremely fortunate/not to know precisely/the kind of world we live in, she writes in one poem. Maybe all this/is happening in some lab, she writes in another.

I read a half dozen Szymborska poems this morning, then another half dozen. It took far less time to read her poems than it took to read the morning newpaper, and the news I got from them was far more real.