"Anger is Not a Bad Energy": In Conversation with Olga Tokarczuk
Editor's Note: This interview took place in the fall of 2010 when Olga Tokarczuk was in the US on a book tour for Primeval and Other Times. Olga Tokarczuk was a guest of the Brooklyn Public Library in 2018, and was lauded this past December with the Nobel Prize in Literature. However before she came to Brooklyn Public Library, I had the chance to interview her in the autumn 2010, when Olga Tokarczuk's book Primeval and Other Times was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd Jones. Tokarczuk was then invited by the New Literature from Europe Festival and took a short…
How to Be a Poet
Many years ago, in the distant 70s of the last century, an outstanding Polish poet of the postwar generation, practically unknown to the American reader, Edward Stachura, wrote, Everything is poetry, everyone is a poet. To form this truth I was slowly led by what I had seen, heard, recognized, noticed, or sensed, what was cursed and blessed, and what I read here and there. Everything is poetry; everyone is a poet. As a young girl, I strongly believed in this statement, which is why I started to write poems. These poems remain unpublished and perhaps that is for the best. I wrote…