25. Poet, Philosopher... Jakob Ziguras

At last, a place with windows, three that gaze upon their shared and inner blue abyss. Like fabric roses in the corner, bliss is but an image of their cloudless blaze. Like wet sheets, steaming in the midday sun, the things outside exhale their images. Wet is warm, secured from damages, and the air freshener is always on. The carpet is a viscous olive green, unmarked by wake of any slender boat. The middling pastel paintings seem to float like icons clicked and dragged across a screen. At times you have to draw the paper shades to veil the vast abandon of the sky. In that memorial moment petrify each unbegotten thing before it fades. I have here the Polish Australian poet, Jacob Zegurus. Jacob, welcome. Thank you Nelson. Pleasure to be here. Jacob, we tried this before and we're trying this again. We had some technical difficulties, but here we are, safe and sound we hope, and the Australian poetry world knows who you are, and in fact the world really should know who you are, but could you tell us who you are? Sure. As you said, I'm a poet translator more recently and an occasional philosopher. I studied philosophy and I still occasionally write some essays, but mostly poetry. Is that a state of mind you dip into or is philosophy with you always? I think it's always there. It always informs everything I do even in poetry, but yeah, but I think I've been trying to pursue similar goals through poetry, but I do find that the states of mind involved in actually writing philosophical prose and poetry are very different and tend to be antagonistic in my case. They get in the way of each other. They don't synthesize. No, some people seem to be able to do both. I just found at some point that I realised I couldn't do both seriously. I pursue both full time, so to speak. I remember I did a lot of analytical philosophy and it helped me a good deal and helped me to think rationally about all sorts of problems, but yes, there is a kind of stumbling block. It doesn't necessarily help you think about the deepest questions. Did the sort of philosophy you study helped you towards that or did you find there was a block that literature had to take you the extra mile? I did study early on, especially I took some courses more in the analytic tradition, I'm very much on the other side of the spectrum when it comes to philosophy. It has helped, but I think it does. But what does that look like that people who might not know this sit very silly? Oh, I'm doing continental. I mean, I did my doctoral work on Aristotle, so I've been very influenced by classical Greek philosophy Aristotle platyneus, for instance, a particular, a particular interest in platyneus. Is he the Neoplatonist or not? Yes, and then later the German idealist's tradition, Hegel and Fichter and people like that and phenomenology and so on. But I think that for me the main thing is that there's just a very different, I don't know what to call it, it's not exactly a method, a mode of thinking that for me that's involved in doing philosophy and in writing poetry it's experientially, it's very different. I find philosophy much more something that can be willed, you know, I can sit down and write an essay, decide to write an essay and there's an effort of will involved in thinking in that way, whereas with poetry that just doesn't work at all, it's much more mysterious to me, what exactly happens. You have to be struck by the lightning, as Gerald said, is that how it is? Yes, I mean that's sure that's part of it, but it's, yeah, and I think the it's relevant to the book I've just recently finished it in a way because there's quite a lot of philosophy in the background there and some very old traditional philosophical themes are addressed in the book, but they're not addressed in the way that I would address them if I was writing it for the philosophical essay. Well, I want to get into this book because I think it's obviously every book is unique, but I really think it is, I don't think that anything has been done like it before, but I wanted to ask about, to go back a bit, ask about perhaps your childhood, if you were happy to talk about that and what led up to something like this book. Sure, well I was born in Poland, my parents were Polish and Greek, my father's Greek, although he was born in Poland, his parents immigrated to Poland from Greece in the 1950s, and then I came to Australia with my mother, my parents separated when I was much younger, and so we came to Australia when I was almost eight, seven years. Do you object to the deadly ethnic hyphenations like Polish Australian or Eastern? No, no, not particularly. What about your religious background? I mean, the idealism in your philosophy and your poetry is so striking. It's not a fashionable pursuit, that sort of idealism, I don't think of it as being so. Sure, sure. Yes, I mean, I wasn't raised in a religious household, but it's hard to know these things when you're talking about early childhood, but I don't think there's ever been a time when I haven't, in some sense, been religious, certainly from the moment that I remember consciously thinking about those sorts of spiritual, metaphysical questions. I think early on it was obviously much more incoate and instinctive and so on. So that's always been there, and I don't think I've ever had any period in my life where I've been persuaded by a kind of, you know, scientific, naturalist, materialist position, but because there wasn't a religious upbringing as such, I kind of came to it differently, not kind of growing up in a particular tradition, but much more approaching it, you know, it's from a more philosophical and, yeah. Did it wear a Catholic dress for you? I mean, before consciously becoming a Christian myself, I remember as a child at least attending Midnight Mass and that being part of the culture, and it seems like a small thing, but it's a presence in one's life. I mean, was that a part of life at all, or were you really cut off from it? No, no, it was. I mean, I grew up, you know, that time in Poland, it was still during the communist period, but I did go to, with my grandmother, my grandmother was Catholic, she was very pious, and so I definitely went to church occasionally with her, and I think it's, you know, it's just there in the background, in a way that it's not, I think, in Australia, you know, Poland's always been a deeply religious country, so you see young priests and nuns and monks walking around on the streets, you know. Were you attacked as either Pope? About your Pope? No, I mean, he's an interesting figure partly because he was a philosopher, but no, no, I don't have any particular relationship. I must say that aspect of Polish Catholicism, the kind of nationalistic, highly patriotic variant, which is, yeah, that's completely foreign to me. Partly responds to anti-it too. Communism though, I mean that, that's the response, yeah, yeah, yeah, and did that affect you? I mean communism as an antithesis or did it in fact inspire you? I mean perhaps you were moved by it. I mean your interest in haggle certainly suggests some sort of interest in synthesis. That's a good question. I don't go quite how to answer it, except maybe on a more superficial level. I recall when I first came to Australia and my mother I remember told me something similar. I think I was quite viscerally shocked by the the material excess, which is kind of a strange thing, it's some sort of, you know, maybe fusion of a certain kind of religious aesthetic attitude and just the reality of Poland at the time, you know, the the the grainess, the lack of consumer products and so on. Yeah, I think there's some sort of moral aesthetic kind of level. I think it, you know, that's just an example that I think it shaped me, that I still find a certain kind of excess material excess, a little bit of pudding. But also fascinating, I mean you're writing about Venice. Yes, yes, in this book Venetian Mirrors. Yes. This is your latest book. You have a couple of collections of poems preceding it. All of which were published. I mean, you've been writing poetry for many many years before you even sent out. Is this right? And then you wrote to Stephen Edgar who he had on the podcast recently and asked for his opinion and he said go for it, send out as far as possible, the wireless puzzle. Yes, I think if I remember right, I contacted Stephen after I'd already sent the book to to Pitt Street poetry who was a book when you had it. I think so. I think it was, yeah, I can't remember exactly. But I did that's right. I did wait for quite a long time. Just didn't feel that the poems were ready before and I think it. I mean, chains of snow really covers a massive historical period. But I do want them to get the sense of you as a poet. I know about you as a philosopher and you have a wide sweep of history, which is part of the history philosophy I take. They just come together so naturally. But let's get into Venetian mirrors. Sure, so maybe I'll read. How does it work? If you imagine the facing pages on the left hand side, there's a series of formal poems for rhyming quad trains each. And then on the opposite page, there's a free verse, something resembling a prose poem, which is composed from exactly the same words. So I take the words of the original formal poem and rearrange them. And it was actually done by physically cutting up the original poem and rearranging them. You used no new words at all. No new words. And I had to use everything down to the letter. So I allowed myself in subgraces where I would hit a dead end and I would be unable to go further with a particular, I could use prefixes, detach a prefix, say, from one word and attach it to another one. Or in in some cases, anagrams, things like that. But I had to use everything down to the letter, yeah. Let's hear some. This is poem 81, purgatorio. The humbled palaces are at the troughs. They lap at their diminishing returns. The merchant's scales are balanced. What he earns is what this lustrous snake forever sloughs. The filmy future sunlight desicates into a handbag holding lipstick, keys. The floating capital where current sees the slough, invasion that perpetuates the death of Venice. Afterwards, the show, a ghostly montage as the future fades in retrospective video, arcades, buyers remorse in purgatorio, where gradually each hungry ghost admits what all along he knew. The merchandise, though fake, was offered at a tempting price. Policeman liked a pie of counterfeits. Another reflection. Cast dices at a slick pit. The hungry snake scales are balanced. Diminishing, humbled, the price offered, the future returns, seizes the key in sunlight's invasion of death. All the fake palaces, the forever tempting montage of remorse the ghostly policeman perpetuates. That ghost capital admits the liked gradually fades in a pyre, a long lap in what heat. A purgatorio where what merchandise merchants are holding, their bad lustrous counterfeits hang this filmy floating show, each earns at the buyer's trough, reverts to sacred poetic currents. What they knew was a video, a future Venice sluffs the slough as though afterwards, where he is. I'd like to say, first of all, what amazes me about these poems and we're going to get the hang of them pretty soon is that, sorry, that's the wrong tone of phrase, we're going to and start to understand what's going on, is that the the poems work as poems on their own. It's one of the problems I find with a lot of modern poetry. It started in the United States where everything became a book of poetry, especially with Robert Loll, and you had a note books of poetry, but you have individual poems, all of which could be read as individual poems, and each of which has a reflection. That's quite a masterstroke. That's the last pure complement I'm going to give on the podcast, otherwise it's going to seem like a fan's tribute to his guest. But I'd just like to say that. Now, what's going on there? It's a wonderful refraction, isn't it? Is it a reflection or a refraction of the original poem? The strange world that. A bit of both, I suppose. I mean, you know, this conceit of reflection, obviously I did want it to be treated to literally and it would have been impossible, so there's no attempt to have the one poem reflect the other in some kind of obvious way. It's more. The original idea I had was the image of Venetian buildings, of Venetian architecture reflected in the canals, and the sense of these original, older, traditional ornate forms being distorted at times revealed in the water. So, the relationship is very much one where the reflection moves between moments of clarity, you know, in some cases it's even verging on something like a kind of philosophical prose. There are some passages that are quite abstract, make some quite general metaphysical sounding claims, and then it will blend into something quite surreal, quite dreamlike. There are moments which are really verging on nonsense where the passages where they're always grammatically coherent, but sometimes it'll turn into something that's more like a series of strange images. But this could so easily have become a game, couldn't it? I mean, you took a big risk with this. Yes, yes, yes, you're right. Actually, that something that came up recently in a conversation with another Australian poet, we find Australian poet Peter Boyle, about whether or not this was a question of just using a method that was meant to generate poems in some kind of more, not mechanical way, but you know what I mean, and that was very much not my intention. No, indeed. You've managed not to make techniques, the subject. Yes, yes, all right. have no interest in that kind of experiment where you choose a constraint of more or less at random and then just the relationship between the two sides is very much connected to the broader sort of philosophical and other themes that are explored in the book. So just to give you one example, whereas on the left-hand side with the formal poem, there's more of a sense because it's working within an established tradition of meter and rhyme schemes and other forms and so on. So there's more of a sense that the form is there before hand in a sense it's being imposed to some extent from before, from above onto the substance of the poem. Whereas on the right-hand side with the rearranged poems, the form is in a sense while the constraint is provided by the matter of the poem. So there's a kind of reversal there, because traditionally, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, there has been a tendency to privilege form and to associate it with intellect, with intelligibility, over matter. So on the one hand, one is more tends to determine the structure and on the side of the reflected poems, what kind of constraints more is just the contingency of what happens to be provided by them. Well, you might say that truth is often what we see reflected. It's not necessarily the idea that we're supposed to gaze at directly. Yes, yes. And on the other side, part of the point in being so strict about using every word, every letter, not adding anything was again, because I wanted the sense of committing to making some sense, doing something transformative with this contingent kind of stuff that's provided to me by the by the original poem. And so yeah. I love that you get the news into your poems, as Peter Porter used it to say. I mean, the palaces that lap at their diminishing returns. I love all that sort of stuff. I love when poets do that. I mean, that's I think that that is one of the initial things that saves it from being experimental writing, to use experimental writing, that sort of purely arbitrary, technical form of sense. This is a real love affair with Venice, or real some kind of affair anyway. It's a fairly sorted affair at times. Yes, yes. It's not always saints and churches. It's sometimes there are hookers and jaded plutocrats, which is how Venice is and was. What is this connection with Venice? So originally this project arose because I wrote a few poems in this form, I think maybe five or six. And I thought that it would stop there. You know, I thought it might be just a short sequence. And I just love the form and I gradually realized that this was something that could be expanded to a larger canvas, so to speak. And at the same time, I realized that Venice was really the perfect setting to explore lots of other themes that I wanted to explore. For all sorts of reasons, you know, because of the whole central conceit of reflection, it works on so many different levels, you know, at a very general philosophical level. It goes back to the central importance of Platonism in the Western philosophical tradition, and this very basic philosophical distinction between, you know, being an appearance between, so that's what you have there. For those who are not, you have in Plato the ideal forms, the ideal chair, the ideal man, and you have the copies, is that right? Is that you have the copies which are imperfect, and that's awesome, that's the stuff around us. Yes, yes, and the distinction between the world of the intellect, of intelligible things, and the world of the senses, and so on. And also in Venice, another reason for this connects back to what we were talking about at the beginning, the differences between philosophy and poetry. There's a wonderful passage in Platinus, and I'm going to just paraphrase it because I can't remember exactly how he puts it, but he's talking about the nature of intuitive intellectual activity, so not discursive thinking where you kind of move step-by-step, because he, unlike some philosophers, believed that there was a kind of intuitive intellect that allows us to grasp truths immediately. And interestingly, he thought that this kind of intellectual experience is similar to a sort of higher imagination, and he gives the analogy of higher glyphics. He says that the wise men of Egypt used images rather than sentences, because they realized that it more adequately expressed the non-discursive character of the spiritual world, of the, you know, of the world of the intellect. And part of what he means by that is the sense that everything is present at once in that kind of intellectual grasp. It's like rather than thinking through a series of thoughts one after another, you somehow grasp a complex of thoughts all at once. And why I mention all that is because that's part of what I've been trying to do in this book, and part of what I think poetry can do, far better than philosophy, is weave together different elements so that you somehow have the sense of, for instance, different, you know, possible meanings of a word, different possible meanings of a line, various references to other texts and so on. And you can have this sense that somehow you're seeing all of these different levels or hearing all of these different levels at once. And so that appears throughout the book in all sorts of different ways. For instance, there will be poems where fictional characters interact with historical characters or where figures who are somehow connected with Venice, but lived at different times meet each other in the same poem. So there's a, there's one poem where the German poet Rilke is pictured as meeting the Italian poet Gasparas Stampa, who appears in his Dueno allergies, and they're pictured as looking at each other from two sides of the water. If you can imagine one person standing on a bridge looking down into the water and seeing the other person reflected as if they were on the other side of the mirror, so to speak. So there's lots of this kind of thing where there's different historical periods, different. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Okay, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to find it. Look at Rilke and the index. There isn't an index unfortunately. Maybe I'll read because it's going to take me a while to find it, which is read the one, the other one that I, of course, I chose. So this is, this is one from a few years ago now. It shows how long this, I've been working at this. This was a poem written on my 42nd birthday. I was in Venice at the time. The title is a patient breeze. Your 42nd birthday, wake at 8, answer a message, still among the quick. The thought of death waits, hanging like a tick. Set at a cafe, start to speculate on rising accents, futures still in flux, while fairies churn the throth as they depart for San Mikayle. Not too late to start, heeding the seal imprinted in the wax, still redulent of flowers, buzzing fields, blue mantled days among the plant blades, eating a book while angels play charades. The breathing body, still more deeply yields, facing the walls, aflame with cypress trees, a city fallen, sacked by broken hordes, dispoiling its economies and lords, their flag a circle of light, a patient breeze, and now the reflection. A too thrifty ego of light, thought breathing, speculate on the economies, the second not fallen departs while still within, by the blue mantled answer to the message birthed among accents, flag, seacloth, to imprint the future start more deeply in the flux, yields, hanging, facing the wall of city, book, dispoiling death and its buzzing lords, tick angels eating. A late day still redulent wax waits at a cafe, sacked, still the froth San Micale Ferries churn at, start while still pliant as fields heeding a quick breeze, shed theory, play charades. A late through a day among patient trees, wake as a cypress, like their seal, your broken body, rising, flowers aflame. I should probably have mentioned at the beginning, if anyone's unfamiliar with Venice San Micale is the cemetery in Venice, which is on a small island. There is that distinction, isn't there? The Venice that the tourist first sees. I remember going to Venice for the first time, and indeed I've only been once, I was a child. You are aware simultaneously of the squalor of things, and also of your idea of things, even as you look at them, even as you stand in St. Mark's Piazza. And it is amazing, isn't it, the way that experience does this to us, that we know what we are meant to see, and we see it, because it is there. And we also see what we are not meant to see, and that is also there. Yes, yes, and in the case of Venice, I mean that's again another of the themes in the book. This has been said many times by many different people, that it's impossible to write anything new about Venice, because it's a place that, maybe more than any other city I'm not sure if that can be defended. Certainly it's a place that's, to a great extent, been mediated for us by previous representations, whether it's in movies, photographs, poems. So that's also part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to give us sort of not a chronological history at all, there's not really a narrative in a straightforward sense in the book. A sense of a kind of portrait of the city, which is also at the same time in a history of the way it's been represented by different figures in different contexts, in different art forms. Well, it's an island where times intersect, isn't it? It's a multi-dimensional place in your book. So, yeah. When I think of Venice, I'm thinking now of Brideshead revisited of all things, and I'm thinking of Charles Wright approaching his friend's father's palace. As you say, the Venice affiction and the historical Venice and the doges and the masked balls and the. And, gosh, even the Venice of Robert Browning, it's all so strange. And it's always strange, whenever you enter Venice, you are entering a different world. Whatever book you're having to be reading. And it's also one of those places, which, again, it comes out at times, where, for instance, the fact that today, you know, Venice is associated with a kind of crass tourist industry, as well as the more interesting, more beautiful aspects of the place. You know, parts of it are so intensely touristy, so intensely crowded with tacky souvenirs and so on. But that might seem initially like a kind of a superficial skin over the real Venice, but in another sense, it is the real Venice, and it's always been the real Venice, right? You know, it's always been a fairly, in many ways, a moral kind of, you know, placed focused on commerce and also on selling a vision of itself. So, that kind of interested me too, that it's a place where finding the, you know, the real Venice is only really possible through the veils. And even then, it's not always clear, so that's part of what I was trying to explore. What do you think it means to you, philosophically, writing all these poems and thinking so hard and long about it? I think one of the things that most essentially concern me is, I think philosophy of the sort that I've always been most drawn to, you know, for all of its strengths, I think there's always been a difficulty in making sense of the world of our immediate experience. In a way that doesn't make it seem like a kind of appendix to something else, you know, something that is not really ultimately substantial in itself, is ultimately good. And so, that, I think, is one of the central philosophical themes I was trying to explore is that on the one hand, obviously, it's not a matter of finding or of identifying every chance experience of the place with some things. It's substantial with something good. But the sense that, yeah, but the only way that we have into something deeper is through these, through these initial seemingly more superficial experiences of the place. Because they give a kind of richness to the ultimate idea you have, you know, if you just approached it more abstractly and try to think about a place like a city, not by going through a variety of different experiences, a variety of different perspectives on the place. Very poor, very abstract kind of vision, whereas going through all of these details sometimes, sometimes quite sorted ones, as you said, sometimes more elevated. Were you attracted by Oscar Wilde's idea of services revealing everything? It is appealing to me. Yeah, I think it's something that, you know, very much was a part of my doctoral research because I worked primarily on Aristotle, but I was looking at Aristotle in conversation with Gerta, who, apart from being a great poet, obviously, was also a scientific researcher. He had known unusual, you know, unorthodox at the time, conception of science and scientific practice. And in his case, it was very much a matter of, really much like Aristotle of going rather than speculating about hidden physical causes that are sort of behind the scenes that we don't have immediate access to through our senses, which tended to be the the way people thought at the time when he was writing, his conception was very much that science is about seeing how the elements of the phenomena relate to one another, the sense they make in the experience. So, really the only thing I knew about Goethe's science was that he objected to Newton's ideas of color because he found them insufficiently appealing aesthetically. He didn't like Newton's. Yes, that was part of it. He also did work in botany and biological theories. But anyway. If you view this research as a live still, for most people it's the poems. Yes, yes, very much. There's been a sort of a resurgence of interest in Goethe. This is a mother's book and I'd like to hear one more poem from it. I think poem number 10 actually appeals to me very much. If I've got it right, is it the bees of heaven? Sure, yes. I mean that may not be your ideal finishing poem. No, no, no. It gives a very beautiful and still sense of Venice's religious history. So, yes, so this one is written in St. Mark's. No, no. Before we begin, are these Byzantine sort of icons? I know very. Well, it's an interesting kind of mishmash of different elements, which is part of what appears throughout the book as well. The way that Venice has taken elements from different places, whether it's from the Byzantine Empire or from other, even the relics of St. Mark, you may know, the story were stolen essentially and brought back. So, yeah, anyway, I'll read it. There's one word in there that we should identify Panto Crater. Yes, yes. What does that mean? All ruler, I suppose. Ruler of everything. Yes, yes. And it refers to, you know, there's a particular. That's guard in case anyone's interested. Yes, so a particular representation of Christ in this case, in St. Mark's. The bees of heaven. The lanterns are barbaric samovars, suspended from the domes on chains of thorns. The Panto Crater rules beyond the stars. Too real, the pixelated gold adorns, the cupolas, are smurched by clouds of mer. And frankincense, a church of smoky wax. You can't help trembling and the photos blur. A splendid doorway guards the golden picks. In front, the saints with wings of peeling leaf conceal the jewel in trusted opulence, behind the pallid frescoes of belief, behind the smarty majesty of sense. Below the prophets on the altar dome, the bees of heaven buzz as one, the name, imprisoned in their priceless honeycomb, or harvest swaying fields of candle flame. Bees buzz as prophets of the honeycomb, wings blur and harvest the beyond. Pallid guards by the doorway of belief with a candle help the besmirched senses. The stars of lanterns suspended on the dome of the picks of the golden heaven. The church and the cupolas too, a majesty of mer can't conceal you, the one priceless jewel beyond opulence, name behind smoky clouds from the altar. Below barbaric samovars on the fields of the front, imprisoned in splendid frescoes, or the frank incense of swaying pixelated domes, smarty wax encrusted photos, saints. Chains of flame adorn their gold leaf peeling, the panter crater rules trembling in real thorns. Well, with that beautiful last line, which is clearly not nonsense from cut up, it is a very precisely executed reflection. We'll end this podcast, but I encourage everybody to go out and purchase Venetian mirrors and check if they were as other books and indeed to be aware of him when he's published in magazines throughout the world. Jacob, thank you very much for coming and sharing these poems with us and for giving us just a taste of this wonderful book. And thank you very much Nelson. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. [music] In middling past all times that damages have secured, you draw each thing's last cloudless image upon the blue screen of the moment, a vast veil that fades. Warm shades, their gaze dragged across paintings, exhale at midday, steaming before icons, windows to the blaze of the begotten sun in violet atona, float on the abyss of the inner sky by slender green boat. Inside, like outside images, their bliss, the three always awake in their shared abandon. Unmarked paper is a memorial from the place unlike anything. The corner roses seem wet and viscous, fresh and air and petrified to carpet fabric with sheets. But it clicked is, is like is and.