I became interested in Polish poetry for a couple of reasons. First, my own heritage. My mother is half Polish, and her attachment to that bloodline has always been strong. Her grandparents emigrated early in the twentieth century, so the links between my American present and this patch of ancestral Europe feel unusually near and raw, given that every other branch of my family has been dug into American soil for hundreds of years.

As an apprentice poet, I knew nothing about Polish literature, nothing about Polish art, beyond Chopin. But then my mentor, Baron Wormser, introduced me to the poems of Czeslaw Milosz. I read, and kept reading, and then found the work of Wislawa Szymborka, Zbigniew Herbert, and others. All were very different from one another, yet they shared something. What was it? A tonal sorrow, perhaps. But also a candid drive to speak as individuals in the midst of destruction.

Poland, as a nation, has long been at the mercy of its powerful neighbors--pressed by Austro-Hungary and Germany on one side, Russia on the other; its borders hacked; its people subsumed, subdued, manipulated, murdered. Like a geographical amoeba, Poland shrinks and swells.

What is it like to be a poet in a country with this history? Those who were writing during and after World War II had, in some cases, been children during World War I. All were squeezed between German poison and Soviet poison. All felt the long, long history of Poland-as-pawn. And yet their poems, in large part, are not a chronicle of specific incident but are the voices of people tracking the coils of their own minds. The fate of their nation was an omnipresent dread, but they wrote as individuals, comic and tragic, within that dread.

Our situation today as Americans is in no way equivalent to theirs in 1950. Yet I think most of us have become acquainted with dread. How do we address this public miasma in our work--not as political beings only, but as people who love and hate and laugh and daydream and listen to music and cook dinner and lie awake at night worrying?

Those are the kinds of conversations I hope we have during my upcoming Frost Place Studio Session: The Nation as Muse: Learning from the Postwar Polish Poets. Maybe you want to write some new poems; maybe you want to talk to others about your complicated feelings around dread and creation. Whatever your impetus, I hope you'll consider joining me in March for an online weekend of camaraderie and experiment. Already this class is half full. I'm excited that it's attracting so much interest, but I also understand why. We are living in hard times.