Piotr Sommer

Posted in Past Guests  |  Tagged N-S

Piotr Sommer’s publications in Polish include eleven poetry collections, two books of essays, and several anthologies of American, British, and Irish poetry. He has translated John Ashbery, John Berryman, John Cage, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Kenneth Koch, Robert Lowell, James Schuyler. Sommer’s poems have been widely translated. He lives outside Warsaw.

Of Course

he won’t tell you his whole life
in three hours or in three days, even
if he really wanted
to show you that he likes you

and trusts you. There’s just
no way to do it, because
whoever said sympathy
has to be sustained by detailed knowledge.

No one, of course. Perhaps that’s why one can
not hurry, and permit oneself
silence, and words

only when one wants.
And now try to trust him in this absence
of words and sentences and stories.

–
From Poetry International