U-M English Department Zell Visiting Writers Series

Today: poetry reading by Piotr Sommer, a Polish poet and translator whose “language is quite plain, understated, but so fastidiously gestural and resonant with the everyday that it resists translation,” says one translator of Sommer’s 2009 collection, Morning on Earth.
5:15 p.m., U-M Museum of Art Helmut Stern Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710. 764-0395.

Today at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art I attended a poetry reading hosted by the University of Michigan’s English Department Zell Visiting Writers Series. The feature poet of the night was Piotr Sommer, a Polish poet and translator. Sommer, and accomplished poet has translated into Polish Frank O'Hara, Charles Reznikoff, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney. He has published several dozen books of poetry, literary criticism, anthologies. He also writes poetry for children and is editor of the monthly "Literatura na Świecie / World Literature."

While listening tonight’s reading I noted that Sommer’s poetry is marked by his emphasis on everyday things as he works to turn the pathos of everyday life into humor. The serenity of Sommer’s voice allowed me to use my imagination to illustrate each word as he read his works. Sommer has written frequently about the fate of his generation, including some political verse, but as a poet he is ostentatiously private. The world he writes of in his poetry is the world he shares with his family and friends, and above all the world of the pleasure of conversation. These are conversations held in the here and now, even though they are often conversations between the living and the dead. They always feature a bit of irony and contrariness, but there is also warmth and a respect for the presence of others.

As he read from his collection Morning on Earth it became apparent that above all Sommer is concerned with the human voice speaking out in an attempt to express private experiences. There is also a sense in these poems, even in the ones that do not make this explicit, that to voice one’s experience as directly and as precisely as possible, without exaggeration or parabolic distortion, is itself an ethical act. I truly enjoy Piotr Sommer’s reading and gained from a new experience by attending.