Best American Poetry Blog

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Andrew Zawacki

Agrapha

Giving up isn’t giving in, but a different kind of poverty

And if we didn’t mention them all in order, it wasn’t our fault:

Our strength gave out before the daylight tapered,

Schedules were strict, the weddings obliged to go forward

Even with strangers involved, and sisters and mothers of strangers,

Playing Russian roulette with five bullets coughed into the chamber

And swallow the razor and other old parlor games,

Keeping appointments with overcoats and nautical charts of the crime

While someone kept telling lies about factory bylaws, saying

Don’t be afraid, I have called you by name, you are mine

And almost believing it, a survivor peddling insomnia’s cure,

Calculating which bridges to burn, which heretics, which beds:

A package that never arrived from a mispronounced province

Or a lightswitch left on overnight at the back of the hall,

Rehearsing the wreckage of telegrams, padlocks, and skeleton keys

And storms on the coast with other betrayers to please.

— Andrew Zawacki

from The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, v. 57, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review often publishes poets who are “little known,” whose poems rise on their own merits out of immense slush.  So it was with “Agrapha,” one of  Andrew Zawacki’s first publications.

When it appeared later in his by reason of breakings (Georgia, 2002), the poet included a note on the title: “Agrapha is Greek for ‘the unwritten places.’  The italicized line is from Isaiah 43:1.”  The title thus introduces a paradox in space, and the italics confirm his uncanny tone – wry, sacred, both.

Posted above is the poems as it originally appeared. All inaugural capital letters — except the first and the Isaiah — were removed in by reason of breakings. To me, the capitals support line autonomy, increasing tension, by additionally resisting "unwritten places." Any comment? Debate? Dear reader?