“Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words / then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” Wisława Szymborska writes in “Under One Small Star.” The poet kept her scholarly labor largely out of sight, avoiding public lectures on technique and eschewing essays about the craft. “I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion I’m not very good at it,” she confesses in a Nobel Lecture that is notably concise. She goes on to describe her own work as “hopelessly unphotogenic:”
Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down
