Poesía para principiantes

The texts gathered in these pages have diverse origins but share a common purpose: to reclaim the literary essay as a genre in the age of "pragmatic" nonfiction. For the essay, as Zagajewski reminds us, is a trial, a perpetual striving. Perhaps this is why it has attracted so many poets in their attempt to "bridge the chasm that separates the two principal elements of the poetic world: the stable and the unstable, the predictable and the untamed, literature and epiphany." From the verses of Rilke, Herbert, Miłosz, Szymborska, and Machado to the prose of Józef Czapski, W. G. Sebald, and Hanna Malewska, Zagajewski reflects on what it means to be a poet, the challenges writers face in reconciling artistic distance with the obligation to participate in public life, and, of course, why turn to poetry in dark times.