I’ve never met a more affable Pulitzer-Prize nominated poet. Tall, thoughtful, honest John Guzlowski seems most like your friend’s well-read dad who commands respect even as he offers Thanksgiving leftovers. Retired from teaching contemporary American literature and poetry writing at Eastern Illinois University, Guzlowski continues to teach through his writing – in addition to poetry, he maintains his blog Lightning and Ashes with poignancy.

Guzlowski writes about his parents.

“He is a man held together/with stitches he laced himself.”
-“Nights in a Labor Camp”:

“She is the poet of dead ends, old despairs/written in whispers, beads slipping between/her fingers like peas dropping into soup.
-“My Mother Prays for Death”:

Guzlowski’s wife, Linda Calendrillo, served as Western’s English department head. After living in five different states over the last 30 years, Guzlowski speaks of Bowling Green with nostalgia. “The only place I really miss is Bowling Green. What makes a place worth living in is the community there, the people and friends you have. Bowling Green has a wonderful community. The people I’ve known there are happy. They like being in Bowling Green, being connected to Western Kentucky University. They seem happy in their work, happy in their lives. I’m happy when I’m in Bowling Green. I love walking around the WKU campus. Even the students seem happy to be there! Really, from what I’ve seen, this is rare.”

Accolades and appearances aside, who is John Guzlowski? His blog, “Everything’s Jake,” shares a brief biography thick with experience and tangible nouns, much like his poetry: “I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons [DP] in 1951. My parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.”

Our grandparents are likely members of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” and while they are members, more of them become were each day. We have likely heard their war stories. We have likely traced our family trees, branches now rooted in U.S. soil but germinating in foreign countries, watered in unfamiliar tongues. As each generation ages, their stories age too, cracking and splintering and in time, washing away. John Guzlowski carries his parents’ stories in stanzas.

Guzlowski tells his students: “Write about what hurts you the most and makes you the most happy.” But it took him a few years to get around to that. At the reading, John explained when he first started writing around our age he was writing science fiction. Back then his stories featured a crazy butcher-type character. What was nineteen, an age he mentions in a couple of poems, like? John answered in an interview for Rise Over Run:

“When I was 19, I was pretty happy, adventurous. I saw the world as a place of possibilities. I was in college, and thinking that all of that family stuff that I found so embarrassing was behind. As I started moving into my early teens, I was like most teenagers probably. I didn’t want anything to do with my parents and their past. I thought of it as all of that “Polack” or immigrant past. It was so old world, so old-fashioned. I had parents who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t talk about baseball or movies, couldn’t spend a night without fighting with each other.

College was the opportunity to get away from all of that. I started reading the beat writers (Kerouac and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti) and listening to folk music and traveling whenever I could, driving or hitchhiking to the east coast or the west coast. I was also involved in the anti-war stuff in Chicago. (On my blog, there’s a picture of me dressed as a Viet Cong guerrilla.) This created more distance between my parents and me. I saw the Viet Cong as peasant warriors trying to save their country from American imperialists. My parents saw the Viet-Cong as communists, the same communists who destroyed Poland after WWII and prevented them from returning there after they were freed from the concentration camps. This distance was okay with me. I wanted to spend as little time as possible thinking about my parents and what my mother sometimes called “that camp shit.”

19 was a pretty great age for me.

In the 1960s, the college years, his earliest poems “tended to be about happy moments, about insights I was having and good feelings I was feeling.” One was entitled “38 Easy Steps to Carlyle’s Everlasting Yea.” After about a ten year hiatus, when he started up again, “I was writing about my parents, and all of these poems seemed to have the grayness and darkness of a bad Baltic winter.”

A lot of us dreamers who hope to see our own stories in books wonder how writers began writing about what they write about, a meandering question that certainly mirrors the self-reflective process through which one finds his or her niche. John explains:

What got me started writing again was that one day I was sitting at a desk proof-reading an essay, and I started wondering what my parents were thinking about. Thoughts and images came into my head, and instead of thinking about them for a moment and then going back to the proof-reading, I wrote those things down. It was an accident, really.”

Guzlowski has another WKU connection in Dr. Tom Hunley, English professor and director of Steel Toe Books, the press publishing John’s latest book, Lightning and Ashes.

What first attracted me to Steel Toe was the reading fee. Most poetry presses require a reading fee between $25 and $35 to consider your manuscript.

Steel Toe had a $15 reading fee. And, you got to choose one of the poetry books from its catalogue for free!

I should have been keeping track of how many reading fees I’ve paid out over the years but I haven’t. Let’s just say that I’ve probably submitted my manuscript about ten times to publishers. Maybe $300 in reading fees!

This [Steel Toe] was a deal. I grew up in the DP camps in Germany, and slept in shacks in America. I knew a deal. I sent Tom Hunley, the publisher, my money.

I’ve recommended Tom and Steel Toe to everybody I know who’s looking for a publisher.

And how would his parents describe his own personal history, what he has accomplished?

My dad liked to think of me as the professor, an intellectual that didn’t have to work in the factor…But my dad, probably like all dads, also liked to think of me as the boy I was, shy, moody, thinking too much about stuff. I remember so many times when I would be sitting in a room staring at something, and my dad would catch me doing that, and he would say, “Don’t think so much, don’t worry so much.”

My mother? I think she was proud of what I had accomplished but there were also times when she thought I was just like my dad, a fool incapable of doing anything practical, a clumsy babbler. …

My father was a guy who told me too much. He talked about women getting their breasts cut off by the Nazis, about his friends who were castrated and killed, about the death that was around him for so long. I tend to be that way too. What I’ve had to learn is to hold things back… There are enough horrors in my parents’ experience – I will give you some here and some there, but not everything at once.

And perhaps it is out of duty – to create captivating poems to draw in listeners, to draw in readers’ attentions. So his parents’ stories will be remembered. So all of the many different groups victimized in the Holocaust will be remembered. So our own legacy will survive.

I think an interesting question would be “Why don’t you read your personal poems at these readings?” I’ve never read any of these poems before an audience.

Perhaps all of us, in the memories we choose to sift awake, in the identities we’ve constructed for ourselves, in the people we claim as integral to our development, we peek through. The oft-quoted and certainly cliché axiom – A picture says a thousands words – can be an apropos application: We define ourselves by tangential people, places, events.

It was actually refreshing and really meaningful to see someone as composed as Guzslowski become affected by his words- sometimes pausing, at times smiling, other times simply resuming by repeating the phrase in order to compose himself. He was asked what the thought process was in those situations, when the language chokes him up, especially in a public place where he has to keep reading. The question also remains, if a person remains so composed, is he being true to his experience? His emotions? His memory?

Guzlowski’s reply in the memoir class spoke about how it was easier for him, recently, when reading Louisa May Alcott and knowing how she was in incredible pain (apparently Alcott could not even stand up when she was writing “Little Women”) to put the book down, and step away for a while. And yes we do put the poem or the book away when things get too emotional or hard on us. When we write we can file away that sheet of paper or hit “Save” and return later. But in public, the emotion is forced to play out in real time. Guzlowski explained he finds it hard not to be affected and he imagines what it would be like if Alcott were reading “Little Women” to an audience, how real and emotional that experience would be.

Guzlowski went back to Poland and had a Polish author translate his work. He said when it was read to him it was as if his parents were speaking. When he returned home, he brought a Polish version to his mother because it was the only language she could read. When she read the poem about the boxcar to Magdeburg, to Germany, to the camp, passing the rivers, she said it wasn’t like that. And then he wrote a poem about that experience too. Guzlowski realizes, “The ones that carry my parents’ voices [affect him].”

Those are the poems in which I use pieces of what my mom and dad said, their dialogue or their lessons or the phrases they liked to use. We all have phrases we like to use, our catch phrases. And if our friends or family read these phrases, they can hear us, our voices.…

When I read my poem about my mother’s cancer, I hear her voice. Each stanza has something she said, and that is hard for me to read.

From “My Mother’s Optimism”:

When she was seventy eight years old
and the angel of death called to her
and told her the vaginal bleeding
that had been starting and stopping
like a crazy menopausal period
was ovarian cancer, she said to him,
“Listen Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

And I have to say something else about my mother here. She was not a person who would show her grief. When she got a letter saying that her sister had died in Poland, she didn’t tell us. She just went to one of the bedrooms in the apartment, closed the door, and cried to herself. My mother was the kind of person who at partings would push you away, and wait till you were gone and she was alone before expressing any kind of emotion about your leaving. Maybe I have some of that too, that and my dad’s quickness to feel emotion.

Lately, Guzlowski spends his time writing (of course) and responding to comments and e-mails. He has “received letters from people who had been in the camps or people who had family in the camps. We exchange stories, problems, insights. I find this kind of writing inspiring—it helps me understand my parents and it helps give me ways of opening up my own memories.” Through his words, John Guzlowski may not show us how to heal, but reminds us to remember.

The English Department has lined up quite a prolific group of visiting writers this year – Thomas Larson stopped by this past Monday , Scott Russell Sanders spoke on Wednesday, and Wendell Berry arrives in late November. Go; be moved.