"Mr. Kowalski" by Dawn Potter
Betsy Sholl is a poet, her 10th book of poetry, As If a Song Could Save You, will be published in the fall of 2022. For her Read & Loved selection she highlights Portland-based poet Dawn Potter’s poem "Mr. Kowalski" from her recent book Accidental Hymn. Sholl has this to say about the piece:
“I first heard Dawn Potter read “Mr. Kowalski” from her forthcoming book of poems, Accidental Hymn, then I got the book and read it for myself. I love it when a poem you hear continues to hold up after multiple readings, as this does.
Mr. Kowalski was a real person, a child prodigy, ambitious performer, who was caught in the grip of the Nazis in World War II, and ended his life as the adolescent poet’s violin teacher in America. Many things make the poem remarkable, including the way the speaker interrogates both herself and history, and brings in a rich range of themes, including fear and ambition, the tensions between choice, chance and fate. But there is nothing pretentious in the voice. The speaker refuses to romanticize anyone--not Mr. Kowalski, not herself, not even the notion of greatness. There is a no-nonsense tone here that serves to make the history, and the questions feel more serious and real. I love the way the adult speaker, watching her goat eat, can wonder “how it feels to delight in voracity/ instead of coaxing it into harness, year in, year out….” And the language is stunningly precise, from the goat’s “elven ears,” to Mr. K’s “steel-sprung fingers.” There are darkly funny moments, as in her account of an anxiety dream in which the speaker has to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge on a moped, steering with something “that was more or less a shoelace.”
I love the way the poem opens with that dream and then the speaker’s rural life, the inner life, before we are introduced to Mr. Kowalski and the pressures of history. Such a rich combination of physical life, mixed with high art, and the stunning way in which the two merge. The war details are vivid and restrained, allowing us to experience them in a fresh way. The poem asks itself about ambition and fate and choice, but always within the specific situations each section enacts. Nothing is abstract. I experience this poem, in a way I live it. Even as a non-musician, I experience the speaker practicing:
My automaton fingers plugged invisible dikes⎯
G,A,B,C,D,E,F sharp, G,A,B,C,D,E,F sharp⎯
three octaves up, three octaves down….
Potter makes vivid the pressure the girl is under, when Mr. K says, improbably, “and you will marry my son, and you will play the concertos.” In this poem everything exists in the context of everything else. The adolescent’s experience of her teacher’s expectations looks back to his own early training, which the poet says was as if he’d been “fed Machiavelli instead of music.” Such sharp insight and wit!
I love the way Potter really gives us the whole world: not just great art, but the historical necessity that pressures it; not just concert halls, but a goat barn needing to be mucked. There’s an ironic bite that makes this all more honest and engaging as the poet looks back at having crossed paths with a man who once may have been a great musician, before stepping across a world of history to stand before her, ‘a short old man in brown socks.’”
“Mr. Kowalski”(excerpt) by Dawn Potter
1
In last night’s dream I was preparing myself
to travel over the Tappan Zee Bridge on a moped
at midnight in the sluicing rain.
.
I would have to steer by means of a contraption
that was, more or less, a shoelace,
and the bridge was not, as during my lucid hours,
.
a long cantilever span over a broad river
but a viperish snarl of tarmac and iron grates,
twisting, coiling,
.
exits merging into on-ramps,
cars caroming from the left, from the right,
howling like an onslaught of wasps.
.
I filled my tank with gasoline
and imagined home, wherever it might be,
imagined my narrow tires—
.
how they would grip hopelessly at the metal road,
slide from lane to lane among the furious wasps
as I wielded my impotent steering-thread.
.
But I knew I had no choice: I had to cross this bridge
because my mother was watching me fill the gas tank
and I could not let her know I was afraid.
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