Szymborska’s funeral

This is quite remarkable. Truly sombre, in a way you never really see anything sombre any more. And moving. The death of Wislawa Szymborska passed over Baroque, not because it didn’t seem to matter but just for personal life-based reasons that prevented me being able to write anything that week. On the contrary it did matter. I was quite thrown by it, once again in spite of her age, 88. (There’s a generation of poets recently being felled in numbers, all in their mid-to-late eighties, whose passing turns out to be more of a shock than you’d think. Of course Logue was among these. You just imagine their spirit will carry them through, their necessariness. Every generation says this, maybe. Especially as we begin to find ourselves within sight of the finish line…) The sombre dignity of this event feels right and good.

Watching this tiny film clip of her funeral makes me aware again what a personal poet Szymborska seemed to be – not that her poetry is purely ‘personal’ (and indeed she herself tried to argue that they were ‘persona’, rather than simply ‘political’) but that her poems had that astonishing intimacy that the most surprising poems have, where you feel they’re like private letters to you. In this case, letters from an intensely sophisticated, intellectually honest woman.

There’s a wonderful quote from her in the Guardian, which I’ll leave you with:

“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation,” she said, going on to wonder why anyone would want to interview her. “For the last few years my favourite phrase has been ‘I don’t know’. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”