Strata
BY Ewa Chrusciel
(Emergency Press, 2011)

In Polish, strata means “loss”; in English it means “accretion.” In the hands of a Polish poet writing in English, this single word becomes an enigma that opens itself up to the exploration of language and culture, and in so being is an apt title for her first book of English poetry published in the U.S. Not only does Chrusciel write and publish in both English and Polish, she has also taught and received graduate degrees in both countries. The consequent linguistic stratification that has taken place in her mind as manifested in her writing is the lens through which her poems are written, and indeed this transparency becomes a fascinating subject of the poems in its own right.

Chrusciel makes her writing process transparent to the reader, which is fitting, and perhaps even necessary, for a book that deconstructs the boundaries of language. She only presents the process, though, and is careful not to impose any explanation or analysis on it. In the poem titled (and I quote the title’s form exactly),

Chrusciel asks “What’s the evidence of belonging?” when she says “I am at home and I write in English” (p. 39). She is in her native land, but not writing in her native language: how then to prove she still belongs there? She conveys the flip side of this puzzling experience over the course of other poems: documenting her experience of writing the poem “I lose home every time I send it” in the course of the poem itself, she writes “I count these sentences in Polish. Lexicons trespass; cross-code breakdowns” (p. 4). She cannot compartmentalize her Polish and English vocabularies, so when “the black milk of the mother tongue” (p. 40) spills over the poems she writes in her adopted tongue, the transparency of her writing displays it. Indeed, we see this spill happen over and over again in other poems, the milk always tinged with the taste of displacement, for example: “What illness springs from the lost place? Places are extensions of people. I count everything in Polish” (p. 5) and “She is a confused sunflower. I counted again in Polish” (p. 7).

She is in her native land, but not writing in her native language: how then to prove she still belongs there?

Straddling two languages may make the speaker feel like a “confused sunflower,” but her native-level command of the English language allows her full range of word choice and play. This quirky combination of confusion and assurance can be seen in her play on the phrase “native tongue,” which threads throughout the book. Her poem, “what s [sic] the evidence of belonging,” opens with an italicized Polish phrase, “Kraina na bosaka,” then the statement “Your first sentence will always be in your native lung” (p.3). Read it too fast, and any English speaker will read “native tongue.” Similarly, in the last sentence of the poem “time hanged itself / on a tree branch,” she states, “Your last sentence will always be in your native lung” (p. 8). The replacement of “lung” for “tongue” connotes the idea that language is breathed in and out of the body, and in doing so sustains us; it is not just about what sounds sit at the tip of the tongue.

The Polish phrase Kraina na bosaka is italicized in both poems mentioned above, in keeping with correct English grammar: words in languages other than English are italicized. However, Chrusciel breaks this rule in other poems, such as “water has memory”:

Polish and English blend into a single language here (which itself delightfully eschews the rules of capitalization and grammar) into which italicized French phrases are inserted. This italicization sets the French apart from the unitalicized Polish/English language in which the poem is written. In so doing, this single poem effectively shuffles Polish and English together like two decks of cards, creating a linguistic layering effect. This layering of Polish strata and English strata embodies the feel of the collection as a whole.

Perhaps the most dominant tool used in achieving this stratification is repetition: it takes on the function of form in a collection of texts that are, with a handful of notable exceptions, entirely prose poems. The repetitive phrases take on a grounding effect for readers as they make their way through the poems. In “A Poem,” the speaker asserts that “The intensity of the instance burns. For it has to turn into another instance. There is nobility in asking the same thing over and over” (p. 43). Repetition can thus be seen as a phoenix that rises again as another bird, in another place, for another purpose. And the tone here is at the same time serious — the speaker is calling attention her continuous repetition and asserting its importance — and humorous, poking fun at herself a little bit, as if to say “I know I’m repeating myself a lot. Well, it’s noble!” Throughout the collection, she does not take herself, or her subject matter, too seriously — despite the fact that she tackles such hefty issues as her parents’ difficult marriage, the sense of loss and exile, and her Catholic faith.

The poems that bookend the collection touch on these issues in a repetitious drumbeat of sentences beginning with “They…” Here is an excerpt from the opening poem “na no la,” which I quote rather lengthily to capture the rhythm and feel of the language and the fluid rapidity of staccato allusions to painful memories and embedded Biblical language:

Note that the sentences which do not begin with “They come” or even “They” function the same way as prosodic elements such as caesuras, startling enjambment, and stanza breaks do in a lineated poem: they give the reader a chance to take a breath, prevent the poem from becoming monotonous, and take the reader by surprise. Repetition provides the structure which creates these “prosodic” elements as much as meter or regular line/stanza lengths provide the structure for lineated poems.

Throughout the book the speaker herself makes statements and poses questions about what repetition is. The poem titled:

begins with the question “Is repetition a repression?” and two phrases which are repeated throughout the collection: “Do you see a mulberry tree in a mustard seed? What illness springs from the lost place?” The former question is, of course, a Biblical reference, and the latter a reference to her expatriation: both are indicative of subject matter that is deeply personal and easily repressed, only to resurface again and again. She speaks to this later in the poem, as well, asserting that “Repetition is virginal. Mnemosyne. Before we forgot what we knew we have to recover what we have forgotten” (p. 40). And in the earlier poem, which has perhaps one of the best poem titles I’ve ever heard:

she asserts that “Repetition is innovation. Repetition is an” (p.7). This is one of many unfinished sentences throughout the collection, left hanging as if completing it would be at cross-purpose to expressing its meaning. No word, either Polish or English, can connote the open-ended meaning which only the lack of a word in that particular instance can. Another instance of this is seen in the poem, “annunciation of light,” which begins:

Here, it is the speaker’s emotion that breaks up the utterance. When we are upset, choked up, or crying, this is how the words come out: broken into stuttering pauses. Chrusciel replicates this feeling by writing in dramatically incomplete sentences. Writing the same words in one complete sentence would not have come close to conveying the speaker’s longing for home, emotive memories, and flickering insights on her native faith. The poem continues with three unpunctuated sentences which dissolve into loose lines and white space, ending with another dramatically incomplete sentence:

The closing poem in each of the “Eras,” or sections, of the book, all begin as prose poems and dissolve in just the same way the above poem does. This begins to happen several pages from the end of the last Era, leaving the very last poem to be the book-end that matches the opening poem in the book.

The poems in the last Era begin to illustrate the same dissolution of language on a smaller scale. Not only do full words break away from each other in poems, but so, too, do syllables themselves start breaking apart. In “Dear Hoopoe,” the speaker tells:

It is not clear whether the speaker intended to spill the syllables or not, but either way, the spilling of syllables is an unavoidable part of the linguistic patriation/repatriation process, the movement of continual accretion and loss. Six pages later, the thread is picked up again in the poem titled

The speaker repeats, “We walk on a frozen lake and spill the syllables into dusk. The purgatory souls inhabit us. We are their morphemes.” She is living in limbo, inhabiting the in-between state of purgatory in which her bilingual status places her, now broken down into mere morphemes: linguistic building blocks so small, they can almost be used to build utterances in either language. The poem closes with a rumination on the consequent ontological status of syllables:

These poems collectively break the strata apart: with the lungs of a poet and the eyes of a geologist, the speaker finds that the linguistic layering doesn’t neatly break apart into the original languages that joined to form the whole. They crumble away word by word, syllable by syllable, morpheme by morpheme: now that the writing of this bilingual poet has been stratified by two different languages, there is no going back to her native tongue — and no leaving it behind.