Noir Poetry

Wiktoria Klera

a b s t r a c t

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“The noir sensibility is truly international”¹.

Crime fiction’s rising popularity in recent years has revived an interest in more experimental takes on the genre. In Polish literature, there is an emerging trend of authors and poets who have never before expressed an interest in this area of mass culture suddenly writing crime novels. Marcin Świetlicki in particular seems to have warmed up to the idea of crime fiction, for he openly declared his sympathy for the genre as a reader, thus undoing the curse on what has been commonly classified as “pulp” and all that the term implies: texts that can be produced without any special craftsmanship. Świetlicki’s own body of work includes a substantial share of poems that seem to conform to the conventions of “noir poetry” in its Polish iteration. As it turns out, he is not alone in his desire to use these conventions whose provenance leads back to the Polish and English literary worlds alike, for not only do these tropes evoke film noir; they also (and in fact more significantly) betray a general affinity for hard-boiled stories. These source texts (the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, to single out the authors best known in Poland) were responsible for stimulating a second wave of popularity for film noir, thus giving rise to the phenomenon of neo film noir (“neo-noir”). This mode and its suggestive images influenced poets, who then paid homage to its nuances in texts that were not limited to crime novels (although authors such as Świetlicki and Edward Pasewicz did in fact take this route): poetry noir began to blossom as well.

One indicator of the special status of noir poetry is the fact that from a theoretical perspective, it has drawn scant attention, for theorists typically take the stance that it is a relatively straight-forward reflection of the genre conventions of film, in so far as we can speak of a “simple translation” between two media.² Theme issues of English-language journals tend to fundamentally model themselves as poetry anthologies rather than collections of articles and essays interrogating noir poetics.³ The earliest text I managed to find that addresses the theme of noir poetics is Suzanne Lummis’ article included in the winter issue of Malpaìs Review from 2012-13, titled The Poem Noir – Too Dark to be Depressed.⁴ Lummis reconstructs the origin story of this poetic school. Her major takeaways concern the essence of “good” “poetry noir” that seeks to explicate or cast new light on the darkness that defines the human condition. On the other hand, we are not necessarily dealing exclusively with naturalism, for noir is not only a style, but to a certain degree also functions as a sensibility, and its most consistent feature is its clean break with sentimentality: in fact, Lummis emphasizes that if this last condition is not met, then we cannot speak of the text as a noir poem.⁵

If, however, noir poets of different cultural circles are drawn by the same fascinations, then their work is deeply saturated with local color. The list of subgenres includes “Tartan noir,” “Australian noir” and “Florida noir,” yet there remains no doubt that the essential defining markers of noir poetry are consistent on all continents.⁶ John Challis describes these markers in detail, but I will summarize them briefly here. They include: anxiety (fear) instilled by the usurping of power, a socially or politically foreign space, or the impossibility of communication; a pessimism either produced by the protagonist/reader’s alienation or estrangement from the brutal world or shielding the protagonist from a past or ongoing trauma, and an obsession that can easily escalate into self-destruction.⁷ Challis goes into detail on two British poets: Deryn Rees-Jones (here he flags anxiety as the dominant theme) and David Harsent (in this case, Challis is drawn by the work’s existential pessimism). He also examines the work of the Irish writer Paul Muldoon, who is perhaps the best known in Poland out of this triad.⁸ In Muldoon’s case, Challis emphasizes the role of obsession and its origins in the hard-boiled story.

American takes on noir poetry often reflect echoes of the war (which can also be discerned in poetry of other languages, regardless of how they resonate). This is at least true of the poem that gives the book its title, Michael Spence’s Poem Noir.⁹ In this text, as the narrator is setting the scene, he speaks of a “diner” that was “the kind that thrived / Before the Second World War.” A coldblooded private detective kills (although this occurs after a long series of exhausting investigations) his former secretary who had once expressed interest in working for him and has come to seek revenge for her rejection. At first, all signs seem to indicate that it is the woman who will ultimately be the duel’s victor, but in the end, the narrator concludes his own story:

[…] I fired down

Once more to be sure. Then I walked off

In the rain and thought: I hate this town¹⁰.

I am citing Spence’s poem here as an English-language activation of noir poetry that offers an example from which we might easily extrapolate the style’s overall signature features. The poem features a protagonist cut off from his emotions, operating solely in isolation, distrustful of women, distanced from the outside world, and contemptuous towards his own city.

Lummis perhaps played the most decisive role in defining the term “poem noir.” Lummis is deeply wedded to Los Angeles, which also happens to be Chandler’s hometown. It was Lummis who, in the text The Poem Noir – Too Dark to be Depressed, identified the first twentieth-century “poem noir” as Crime Club, a poem by Weldon Kees,¹¹ who never received much attention in Poland. Lummis then reinforces this “founding” gesture by rooting it in her own autobiography: she is the granddaughter of an LA Times editor, and is therefore continuing her family tradition. She relays her experience of an assault during which she was held at gunpoint and robbed of a keepsake from her grandmother. This event ultimately influenced the themes she took up in her poetry. She explains: “The film noir sensibility gave me a way to do that [to write about violence – W.K.] without being sentimental.”¹²

Writing noir poetry has become more of a trend in English-speaking countries than it has elsewhere. A great volume of websites publish texts in this vein (by established writers and online amateurs alike).¹³ What’s more, many creative writing programs now offer courses on writing noir poetry. In its Polish iteration, this branch of writing has taken a somewhat different shape.

Polish poets have applied noir conventions to various effects. It would suffice to examine the tests collected in the anthology Farewell, My Lovely. Noir Poetry.¹⁴ It seems relevant that this term hardly appears anywhere else.¹⁵ As the anthologies’ editors, Marcin Baran, Marcin Sendecki and Marcin Świetlicki, all concede, the idea for the anthology’s subtitle was proposed by the book’s editor, Irek Grin (who is also an author of crime novels, yet not of poems). The new 2010 collection included a reprint of texts from 1997. This fact is worth highlighting, for in 2010, the term “noir poetry” was not yet in wide circulation, even in English-speaking countries. The cover of Farewell, My Lovely cites Świetlicki: “Just as the dark crime novel brushed close to poetry, so was poetry ashamed to openly approximate the dark crime novel. It’s time to put an end to all this shame. This book came about to make it clear that film noir and noir literature can go hand in hand with poetry.”¹⁶ From the perspective of today’s great abundance of noir poetry, these words might come as a surprise. Wojciech Burszta and Mariusz Czubaj have written more on the features of dark crime fiction that define language as the basic material of poetry: “[…] we often speak of its realism: of images of vast cities in the throes of economic crisis, the disintegration of social bonds, and the resulting ethical amorphism and complexity of its protagonists. However, the salient feature of this variant of crime fiction is its fascination with daily life in its most tender expression – in manners of speaking and on the layer of language.”¹⁷

The 1997 anthology was an homage to Raymond Chandler, which explains why most of the included texts directly reference his work or signature hero (Philip Marlowe has proven to be a powerfully generative figure).¹⁸ The texts anthologized in 2010, however, are organized by more flexible criteria (or at the very least, the reader gets this impression). Aside from select poems commissioned for the book, the editors included several older works, thereby expanding our sense of what falls under the category of noir poetry and foregrounding the fact that the “noir sensibility” is not by necessity the product of intentional and conscious self-stylization. Among the texts whose affiliation with this mode is less obvious, we find Wisława Szymborska’s Black Song (Czarna piosenka):

The long-drawn saxophonist, the saxophonist joker,

he’s got his system for the world, he does fine without words.

The future – who can guess it. The past – who’s got it right.

Just blink those thoughts away and play a black song.

They were dancing cheek to cheek. When someone dropped.

Head struck floor to the beat. They danced by him in time.

He didn’t see the knees above him. Pale eyelids dawned,

plucked from the packed crowd, the night’s strange colors.

Don’t make a scene. He’ll live. He must have drunk too much,

the blood by his temple must be lipstick. Nothing happened.

Just some guy on the floor. He fell himself, he’ll get himself up,

he made it through the war. They danced on in cramped sweetness,

revolving fans mixed cold and heat,

the saxophone howled like a dog to a pink lantern.¹⁹

This poem is given the approximate date of 1949 and betrays a repertory of devices that justify its inclusion in the anthology. The protagonist, a saxophonist described as a “joker” equipped with his own system for the world, is suspended in the present moment, straddling the past and the future, which are both uncertain. Echoes of existentialism ring loud and clear in Black Song, offering one of several features that qualify it as a “poem noir.” The mood that dominates the cramped dance hall where people dance side by side but anonymously – all individual figures melting into the crowd – is saturated with a mixture of cold and heat. By joining the dancing crowd that appears as a discrete and rhythmically pulsing organism, the individuals composing it are ultimately isolated. This movement also resembles a kind of Danse Macabre. And in fact, this motif resurfaces in Farewell, My Lovely in Marta Podgórnik’s poem Renewable Dancing (Odnawialny dancing). As a rule, the protagonists of the noir genre are no strangers to death. Detectives experience extreme ups and downs, and their weakness for alcohol makes them fall prey to fleeting romances. The man who falls down drunk is dead to the world – he is useless.

Szymborska’s poem is one of many texts in the anthology in which crime does not appear as an explicit feature of the content. After all, in this world, “[one] does fine without words,” for there is always rhythm, music, and the “dog’s howl” of the saxophone. The man who hits his head on the dance floor, “just some guy on the floor,” must reckon with his own fall, but for him, this poses no problem. After all, “he made it through the war.”

Black Song is preceded in the anthology by Bolesław Leśmian’s poem Migoń and Jawrzon, and the third reprinted text is Ryszard Krynicki’s Blow (Cios). The remaining twenty-eight texts were written specifically for the book by Bogdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski and Tadeusz Pióro. Also in the mix are writers once strictly identified with the ‘60s generation but now read in more flexible terms: MLB, Paweł Paulus Mazur and Cezary Domarus.

What catches the eye in the English-language poems discussed above is the link between signature noir conventions and aspects of local mythology.²⁰ To stimulate their imaginations, Polish writers turned to crime fiction, but they also read Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances (Ballady i romanse). As early as 2007, in an interview published in the book Demolition (Rozbiórka),²¹ Marcin Świetlicki identifies other sources that shaped his writing. Describing his poem Karol Kot,²² he offers his own definition of dark crime fiction. He notes: “evil is a phantasm that is constantly laying siege.”²³ He goes on to say (enigmatically) that the first crime novel he read began with the words: “Crime is ineffable, / the woman kills the man.” Świetlicki’s body of work includes many texts that thematically graze the subject of crime. Not all of them conform to noir conventions.²⁴

Echoes of Mickiewicz resound in Świetlicki’s poetry and beyond it. A similar pattern emerges in an excerpt from Grzegorz Dyduch’s poem Two Men and a Clown Talk about Chinatown (Sketch for a Scherzo) (Dwaj panowie i klaun rozmawiają o Chinatown (szkic scherza)):

Once upon a time in the Chinese district

The body of a virgin was found

Without limbs, head clipped off

A carcass in terrible form.

All the neighbors ran out to see

And with them came the usual gaggle of gossipers.

Tramps and pimps.

Around the corpse they start to frolic.

Ufff!!!

Chinese lanterns burn and oil crackles in woks.

The police set off on the murderer’s tracks.

The renowned detective appears at long last

And reveals a slight secret to all present.

During the autopsy the victim’s sex has changed:

A male body: but without its privates!!!²⁵

These words are recited by a clown who – as the author indicates – “might well be the voice of the people,” but in fact is not, for “he loathes the people.” The allusion to Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown is repeated in the illustration appearing on the Polish anthology’s cover.²⁶ Piotr Sommer’s contribution is stylized along similar lines:

Choir

The tragedy had happened

The woman killed the lad

The knife was lodged in his larynx

She must have been strong.²⁷

This poem brings up yet another feature specific to noir poetry (and one that seems to locate the mode even closer to hard-boiled stories): their knack for delivering a specific kind of joke. Black humor and the absurd are prominent throughout the anthology.²⁸ We might take Paweł Paulus Mazur’s text Detective Ragman (Detektyw Szmata) as an example.

[…] he lived alone like a bit of lard. His only company was a tailor’s dummy.

The dummy was over a century old.

So Inspector Ścierwoński assigned the job to Ragman. Ragman had never solved

a single case entrusted to him. But he did love soup, cucumber soup […].²⁹

Even these extremely naturalist descriptions intone a certain distance that allows them to sneak in a hardened laugh at the sad fates of dead bodies, as in Marek K. E. Baczewski’s text, which describes a “reclining clod of meat” (“leżąca kupa mięsa”) that is “generally none too kind” (“ogólnie niemiła”) and “runs off at the mouth” (“zajeżdża z pyska”):

According to set theory

this corpse is particularly dead.

We might even say it’s the corpse of a corpse,

in all possible respects,

not least rhetorically,

and from every angle:

passive, generative, active.³⁰

The conclusion hardly offers any consolation: “the corpse of a corpse lives” (“żywy jest trupem trupa”). We might say that Marcin Baran takes this strategy to its most extreme limits in his short work of prose poetry titled Bałagang (“Killing Joke Noir”). It would be ill advised, however, to fall prey to the misleading impression that all these jokes mitigate the general mood of the protagonists’ infinite hopelessness and pessimism. To the contrary – in this milieu, these feelings become all the more dominant. Bałaang appears in two versions: one American, and one British. Depending on his background (the narration starts in the first person and then moves to the third person in the second part), the detective suffers from a different set of compulsions. The American detective “drinks substantially, consistently, and diligently,” while the British one “thinks compulsively, pedantically, and systematically.”³¹ Yet their stories converge as they come to a head in a gesture that lucidly reveals the international nature of noir poetry: “But it was clear to see that it wasn’t so. It isn’t on the menu and will never be. And into the ages – / the world will always be poisoned by crime…”;³² “But it was clear to see that it wasn’t so. It’s not on the menu and won’t be, ever. Until the end of time / crime will always poison the world….”³³

The heroes of the poems comprising this noir anthology are all exhausted. Take, for example, Agnieszka Wolna-Hamkało’s At the Last Minute (Pop) Poetry (Spontan (pop) poetry): “With the diagnosis ‘exhaustion & destruction’ / I found myself in the springtime ward. They told me to sleep, / so I slept. I seem to recall being by a river. […].”³⁴ At times, the protagonists describe themselves from split perspectives, and often they are torn in two, as in Darek Foks’ poem D-Day: “Suddenly I feel a dizzy spell brought on by a sudden solid / flash of light, women, a purse, a dog, and the splitting of a soul.”³⁵ These characters can be found in offices crowded with the accouterment typical of those leading a life of crime. The women who rear their heads in these spaces often have “raw mouths” (“krwiste usta”),³⁶ and on the desks we spy “pencils whose ends are bitten through” (“ołówki z obgryzionymi na wskroś końcówkami”) alongside “fake leather notebooks that look like they’ve been through a flood” (“notesie w pseudoskórzanej oprawie z prawdziwym śladem zalania”) and a “battered pack of Gauloises” (“pomiętej paczce gauloise’ów”).³⁷ In the noir world, even objects lead lives of solitude.

Świetlicki adopts his hero’s voice with great poignancy, in a direct style, as he stands alone, abandoned by his woman, in close proximity to the evil he has conquered (for now) and the crimes (creaking ominously yet again, for we all know that we can never truly conquer them):

I won’t play nice. I won’t be sweet.

I will be dry in perpetuity.³⁸

The anthology extensively cited here also includes works with more debatable noir affiliations. Contrary to appearances, this is no straight-forward genre, and tacking the descriptor “noir” onto the title is not a permanent solution.

To conclude, I find it interesting that pessimism in noir poetry does not lead to stagnation, immobility, or total resignation. The characters do not suffer from catatonic depression: “Will we live much longer? After all, our trajectories have been plotted / in advance. […]” (“Czy długo pożyjemy? Trajektorie są przecież z góry / wytyczone”).³⁹ The characters are constantly starting the conquest of evil from scratch and combatting crimes despite their total certainty that at the end of the day, nobody can overcome them. Yet all of them fall prey to an incumbent duty to put in their best effort. They have no time for sentiment. The years go by and “the losses only pile up” (“dokładają im strat”),⁴⁰ but this risk is part of the game. An undying willingness to take this risk is what links the heroes of noir poetry from all continents.

translated by Eliza Cushman Rose

A b s t r a c t