Poetry Friday: Remembering Paul Janezcko

Thank, Robyn for hosting today at Life on the Deckle Edge. I’m glad you’re part of the Poetry Friday community.

Winter can be a cruel season. Just last month, we month, we mourned the passing of Mary Oliver. This week, just about one month after Oliver’s death Jan. 17, 2019), the poetry world lost another incredible poet, Paul Janeczko (Feb. 19, 2019).

In 2011, the CYBILS Poetry committee selected REQUIEM, Poems of the Terezin Ghetto by Paul Janeczko. This is the blurb that was used at the CYBILS site.

Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto
by Paul B. Janeczko
Candlewick Press
Nominated by: Tricia Stohr-Hunt

 “I am a watcher/sitting with those about to die.” These are the words of Elisha Schorr/25565 as imagined by poet Paul Janeczko. In  Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto, we all become watchers, viewing snapshots of the Holocaust, one after the other, each one deepening the grief and raising questions to which there are no answers.

We watch, but we also hear the story of Terezin, voice by voice, insistent and haunting, so that the effect by the end of the collection is almost choral. For each song of despair, there is a concordant and essential song of anger, tenderness or resignation; like a recurring melodic theme, the voice of one child appears and fades and appears again. We hear the violin of one victim playing “as only the heartbroken can play.”

Cybils committee members agreed early in the deliberations that this slim volume of poems was a strong contender for the prize, with words like “stunning” and “haunting” coming up repeatedly in our conversation. Ultimately, the voices Janeczko created could not be forgotten.

I also interviewed Janeczko on March 14, 2012. And featured his favorite book from REQUIEM for Poetry Friday, March is 15, 2012.

This fall, at the Poetry For Children workshop at Highlights, we were gifted with a copy of A KICK IN THE HEAD, AN EVERYDAY GUIDE to POETIC FORMS. These were selected by Janeczko. It’s a book that resides near my desk as a reference.

I’m sharing a couple of pages that from the Highlights workshop in which I played with ideas for a Persona poem. (AKA Mask or Apostrophe).

Thank you, Paul Janezcko for sharing so much poetry over the years.