Valzhyna Mort - Visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark: everything is from shit; the thing is that there is good shit and bad shit

Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears, Trans. by author, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright, Copper Canyon Press; Bilingual edition, 2008.


"Celebrated in Europe for her dynamic performances, Mort, a 26-year-old Belarusian poet, is a fireball, and her American debut collection, nothing short of phenomenal.
This bilingual publication, cotranslated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, features 36 works, including the blistering prose piece White Trash, Polish Immigrants, and Belarusian II Mort's vision is visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark. In Music of Locusts, the narrator laments, "Everything belongs to me but hope" while "the whole colorful universe/ appears like the deep/ hole in the sink" in Hospital Mort takes an unflinching look at a violent world, referencing homeless dogs, dead men, terrorist attacks in Chechnya, stinging memories, bloody bodies, and forced silence. Personal, political, and passionate, Mort's poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences." - Miriam Tuliao

"In her first American publication, poet Valzhyna Mort contends with the joys and sorrows that comprise the heartache of self discovery. Factory of Tears juxtaposes youthful coming-of-age against the struggles of a nation's emergent vitality... Self identification, national independence, and the bounty of metaphor and language take us to an edge where everything is wild."

"The 26-year-old Belarusian Mort has made a big splash in Europe. With help from the popular, Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright, this thin, uneven, but decidedly exciting bilingual first U.S. edition shows how Mort's energies work. Some poems last just a few lines; others stretch out across pages of fast-moving prose, and the best bring into disturbing collision the difficult circumstances of Eastern Europe (crowds, relative poverty, bad weather) and the recent results of globalization (suicide bombers, teen culture, game shows with telephonic life lines). Mort says of her compatriots in Belarusian I, we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread and calls our future/ a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon. Later poems reflect her move to the U.S. (she now resides in Virginia), and contemplate those who have made the same move before: of Polish Immigrants, she asks, how do they break away from the land/ where even stones take root. At her best, Mort shows a ragged power Americans might not otherwise know: she writes in a crackling prose poem, I protest against everything: low-quality goods in supermarkets, pigs in the subway, and those who protest against pigs in the subway... this is the only way to survive." - Publishers Weekly

"Everything is from shit. Absolutely everything," Mort writes in her début American publication. "The thing is that there is good shit and bad shit." It’s a difficult point to dispute in this argumentative collection. Mort, a young Belarusian poet living in America, strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language. (All but one of the poems appear alongside their Belarusian originals.) The poems are driven by a tension between cynicism and patriotism: Belarus, for Mort, is a difficult obsession. Approaching Minsk, her birthplace, at dusk, she writes, "This is how brutally, / this is how tight / heart climbs out of the mouth / and strains eyesight." - The New Yorker

"Mort's style—tough and terse almost to the point of aphorism—recalls the great Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska." — LA Times

“A risen star of the international poetry world,” declares the Irish Times, about Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, who is famed throughout Europe—and now the US—for her vibrant reading performances. Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. Her second book is Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).
There is an urgency and vitality to her poems; the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love—while many poems question what language is and challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how. The New Yorker writes, “Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” Library Journal described Mort's vision as ”visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark,“ and Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears ”a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight.“
Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English. About her reading performance, The Irish Times wrote, “[T]he searing work of Valzhyna Mort, marvelously different in form and in delivery... dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her translations, and to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity.”
Mort received The Bess Hokin Prize for her poems in the December 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine, the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005, and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowshiip at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw, Poland. She is a recipient of a 2009 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in the anthology, New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Factory of Tears has been translated into Swedish and German.
Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person to ever be on the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland.
About COLLECTED BODY (2011)
Collected Body is Mort's first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down."
About FACTORY OF TEARS (2008)
Factory of Tears is the American debut of Valzhyna Mort—and the first bilingual Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the US. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems, and startlingly fresh images—desire as the approaching bus that immediately pulls away or pain as the embrace of a very strong god “with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you”—occupy and haunt the mind. The music of lines and litanies of phrases mesmerize the reader, then sudden discord reminds us that Mort's world is not entirely harmonious. “I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears”, she writes in the final stanza. “I have calluses on my eyes...And I'm Happy with what I have.” Engaged, voracious, and memorable, Factory of Tears is a remarkable American debut of a rising international poetry star. The translation was in collaboration between Mort, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright." - Alison Granucci

"Even more than its neighbors, Belarus remains chained to its past. Landlocked by Russia and the Baltic states, the country was decimated in the 1940s by the Nazis; over the next two decades, it was absorbed into the Soviet Union, its language and culture suppressed. The majority of postwar poets exported from the former Eastern bloc have been Polish (Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska), and Belarus, still crouching in Moscow’s long shadow, has yet to produce a bard of international stature. So when the press release for Valzhyna Mort’s Factory of Tears declares it “the first- ever Belarusian/English book of poems published in the United States,” the statement comes tinged with urgency.
Unlike her cultural forebears, Mort, born in 1981, does not seem keen to exhume her country’s past. She is similarly ambivalent about its future: “Belarusian I” ends with the cryptic lines “and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future / was leaping through the fiery hoop / of the sun,” suggestive of both courage and reckless self-obliteration. Likewise, the title poem concludes with a series of declarations—“I have compound fractures on my cheeks. / I receive my wages with the product I manufacture. / And I’m happy with what I have”—that hover between bitter sarcasm and weary sincerity. This is not to say that Mort argues against the pro-Western spirit of the many political movements, like the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, that have spread like wildfire throughout Eastern Europe. It’s just that her focus is trained elsewhere.
On sex, for instance. Often (too often, perhaps), Factory of Tears taps the vein that was first opened by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and that, over the past forty years, has been drained almost dry. If Mort aims to shock, one can only assume that Belarusian audiences are scandalized by lines like “Lust is sitting inside me like a cherry pit” and “Who will pinch the ass of love.” Americans have heard it all before. The otherwise elegant translation occasionally dips too eagerly into slang, as if hinting that not all Belarusians are the dreary pensioners that we (admittedly) tend to picture them as.
What’s most compelling about these poems—especially the multipage “White Trash,” whose lines seem written for performance rather than reading—is that they are political, but obliquely, almost sneakily so. “Your glance in certain circumstances can replace tear gas” serves, for instance, as an apt metaphor for Mort’s continual obstruction of the political with the personal. This strategy, if not always well executed, ultimately succeeds. It suggests that the author has captured a perspective that many Americans may have simply overlooked: that of a European generation for which the United States is not a blazing torch of democracy but a bizarre admixture of puritanism, militarism, and sex—a collective export the author approaches with skepticism rather than adulation." - Matthew Ladd

"When asked why she chose Belarusian as the language for Factory of Tears Valzhyna Mort said she always wanted to be a musician and was able to achieve a certain musicality through the Belarusian language that she couldn’t achieve with the Russian Language. Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears –the only book of poetry to be written in Belarusian with side-by-side English translation—And the musicality translates to English through Mort’s chorus-like lyrics, alternating rhythms and short percussive line breaks. But why does she choose Belarusian, when the language is not expected to survive the next generation?
Belarusian is an Eastern Slavonic language with about 7.5 million speakers in Belarus. In “Bellarussian I” Mort establishes that she is part of a history of Belarusians who have fought in difficult circumstance to keep their language alive.
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again
She continues this theme throughout Factory of Tears and culminates with “Belarusian II” where she refers to the fact that part of the vulnerability of the Belarusian language is that no one can agree on a spelling system for the language.
“Belarusian II”

Your language is so small
That it can’t even speak yet

Letting another’s language suck your own milk?!
A bluish language lying on the windowsill—
Is it a language or last year’s hoarfrost?
For Mort, choosing to write in Belarusian is a form of political activism. By physically connecting Belarusian to the English language, Mort has taken action towards keeping Belarusian alive and as she says in “Juveniles” “…no one is going to deny us the city we grew up in.”
Mort was 14 years old when Belarusian lost it’s status as the exclusive language of Belarus. There’s a childlike fearlessness and vulnerability preserved in Factory of Tears which seems to urgently fight against the system that is depriving the survival of the language. Many of the images used in Factory of Tears belong to a child. And almost all her poems use a crayon-like palette of simple primary colors to reinforce imagery. In “Juveniles’ she writes from the perspective of a child “…painting our faces like Easter eggs,” often repeating “ because we are children.”
In “For A.B.” for she writes – Our skin so thin/That veins blued through it/Like lines in school notebooks.” In “White Trash” She writes - “Who is building his joy like a snowman, a dumpling….who is pinching the ass of love.” In one poem Mort uses a multiple choice test to show the thought process of a child trying to logically understand terrorism.
Mort uses “we” and “our” throughout her poems, talking for her generation. In that sense Factory of Tears gives voice to her generation with an urgency. Very early in the book Mort identifies her generation with the fragility and vulnerability of the Belarusian Language– “we discovered we ourselves were the language.”
Mort says that she was so close to her grandmother that it was almost as if her grandmother wrote Factory of Tears. In this sense Factory of Tears is about the survival of Mort’s grandmother and how they saw the world together. In “Grandmother,” she writes “…Put me in your lap,/tell me the stories about the world that is standing on tortoises. Your/hands feel like a tortoise’s shell. Let me hide my head in them.”
Factory of Tears is a document of survival. Survival of Belarusian language, survival of Mort’s Grandmother, survival of Mort’s generation and survival of Mort’s childhood. Mort achieves her music with modern poetics and strong images drawing from a generation’s nostalgia and frustration, childhood references and a grandmother’s insight. The technical musicality of her poems furthers her cause to brand Factory of Tears and Belarusian on its reader." - J. Hope Stein

"Factory of Tears, originally written in Valzhyna Mort's native Belarusian, appears with the translation alongside the original work. According to the book jacket, it is the author's intent "to reestablish the traditional language of her homeland." The country’s official language has been divided between Russian and Belarusian since 1995. Belarus, situated between Lithuania and the Ukraine, is a country with a history of fighting for independence.
Mort's work reflects a poetics of survival in "Belarusian I":
even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing
and later:
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again
Other works present the implications of youth and aging in the context of change and sameness; others, in boredom, loneliness, frustration and disgust with life. Still others, like "White Trash," strive to be epic in a Whitmanesque sense, but the effect is more that of a pointless rant. "White Trash" is interspersed with stanzas about Chechnya that seem out of place in the midst of such lines as "Who is ready to take luck by the throat, and make it sit on the potty whispering into its ear: 'Finally you're mine, pain in the ass'?"
"Fall in Tampa" provides a mediocre evocation of seasonal metaphor while poems with titles like "Cry Me a River" come off as cliché and unimpacting. Mort uses abstract language without the abstractions themselves. An example of this is in "You see your life as something borrowed," where Mort writes, "It's not your life that teaches you—it's you who gives your life a lesson. To be yourself. To give yourself to the end." Lines like these abstract a grounded sense of reality, and are philosophical without providing concrete examples.
"Belarusian I," along with "Factory of Tears" are two of the most effective poems in the collection. Mort's strongest attribute as a poet may be her ability to synthesize life in political upheaval with a poetics of continuity." - Cynthia Reeser

"That is the title of a collection by Valzhyna Mort. What a wonderful title. A poet’s work, poems’ work, life, one’s homeland… The last poem in the book has the same title, and starts –
And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.
It ends –
I’m a recipient of workers’ comp[ensation] from the heroic
Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I’m happy with what I have.
Great to see the language of Soviet era central planning put to such absurd use. And to be made to wonder about the Factory of Tears that is poetry.
The last line takes us back to the smiling workers of socialist realism. If the poem had been written by someone from any other former Iron Curtain country, we might suspect ironic Ostalgie. But Valzhyna Mort is from Belarus which is a dictatorship, very repressive; see the BBC, today. See also the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, if you want to enter the strange land the Factory came from – note that in the menu of news topics, President comes first, before Politics, Economy etc. It’s hard to imagine that Mort is popular with the Belarusian authorities, though her first poems were published there.
Valzhyna Mort now lives in the US. Factory of Tears has Belarusian and English in parallel text, the translation done by the author and Elizabeth and Franz Wright. An excellent idea – if only there were more such poetry books. Someone who has a Slav language and Cyrillic script can follow the original, which makes a huge difference to the reading experience. (I was reading it yesterday sitting on the train, and became aware that a young man with a check shirt was standing there, staring intently at my book.. he then turned abruptly and walked off. Had he thought it was Russian and then realised it wasn’t?)
However, this may also be a disadvantage. Mort said in an interview: “For me this is something that I would like to escape, this label of being a Belarusian poet because I truly don’t know what is Belarusian about my poetry and when I come to a reading, I feel people have some kind of expectation that I will not be able to fulfil unless I wear a national costume!”
I confess I find it hard to get away from the Belarusianness: the Belarusian text, the book’s title; even the novelty value, the costume. In the poem quoted above, the Factory of Tears has ‘adopted a new economically advantageous / technology of recycling the wastes of the past - / memories mostly’, and the theme of memory, some of it very Belarusian, runs through the book. It is a first full collection, published in 2008; her next book will be written in English. Maybe the interview comment, from 2010, is more about her recent work.
Anyway, one of the book’s strengths is the poet’s ability to draw on the unusual material provided by her country of birth. The opening poem, ‘Belarusian I’, begins
Even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing…
and later
completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
…..
…and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future
was leaping through the fiery hoop
of the sun
That’s the end of the poem (read it here, plus a video interview), which she says is a response to criticism she and her contemporaries received for writing in Belarusian rather than their first language, Russian. It shows another of the book’s strengths, the vigorous imagery which drives so many of the poems. She often starts with something simple – a tiger, a train, snow – but the way she uses the images is very striking. The short poem ‘Fall in Tampa’ ends
..summer is standing stock-still
like a white heron in green water
‘for Rafal Wojaczek’ has death as a fly:
getting into your eyes
mouth
ear
like a filthy fly
death is circling
interfering
with seeing
eating…
A grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated and whom I understand as symbolic / folkloric as well as very real and loved, appears in the poems; this one’s called ‘Grandmother’.
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to america

her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
By now it will be clear that she writes in free verse, without much punctuation, and that the line breaks mostly go with the sense. The translators have done a good job of being faithful to this without losing the energy.
The poems that don’t work so well lack the thematic force that otherwise welds different metaphors together within one poem. A long prose poem, ‘White Trash’, in the middle of the book has some great bits which could be more effective on their own, each as a short prose poem.
I suppose it’s a cliché that the first post-war generation of East European poets wrote politically, and the post-Fall of Berlin Wall generation turned towards individual experience. Though Mort belongs to the younger end of the latter group (and writes poems about sex and growing up) it seems to me her poems contain elements of both, and her surreal metaphors certainly recall some of the former, such as Różewicz and Holub. Her perspective can be both very personal and broad at once, as in ‘for A.B.’:
it’s so hard to believe
that once we were even younger
than now
that our skin was so thin
that veins blued through it
like lines in school notebooks
that the world was a homeless dog
that played with us after class
and we were thinking of taking it home
but somebody else took it first
gave it a name
and trained it stranger
against us
Mort has said she is old-fashioned in that she believes in ‘inspiration’. Audios of her reading in Belarusian sound great – she’s been described as a ‘fireball’ and ‘electrifying’. The best poems come across on the page with the force and originality of something inspired. Wherever she’s going, I hope she doesn’t abandon the national costume completely, to be lost in the great American crowd." - Fiona Moore


Selected Writings

ZHENYA

1.
… Zhenya moves as if her left side were heavier than her right. She leans like an old village fence, almost kissing the ground, and a shred of green cloth, scudded by the wind around the grazing, has finally caught hold of one of the boards and hangs on it—and it is Zhenya’s jacket. Enveloped by the damp October soil, under unending drizzle, the fence is rotting. Leisurely, Zhenya rots at a forty-five degree angle, her putrid insides wrapped carefully into her skin. Unable to tear my eyes off Zhenya, as she limps away, stops to thoroughly read the university announcements, smokes leaning against the corner of the International Affairs building, I imagine God’s invisible hand that carries the white paper wrap around the
city, unable to find a proper trash bin.



PREFACE

on a bare tree—
a red beast,
so still, it has become the tree.
now it's the tree that prowls over the beast,
a cautious beast itself.

a stone thrown at its breast

is so fast—the stone has become the beast.
now it's the beast that throws itself like a stone,
blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day,
and the moon is trying on your face
for the annual masquerade of the dead.

death decides to wait to hear more.
so death mews:
first—your story, then—me.

—from Collected Body


BELARUSIAN I

even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing
we couldn't tell which of us was a girl or a boy
we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread
and our future
a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon
was performing there
at the highest pitch
bitch

we grew up in a country where
first your door is stroked with chalk
then at dark a chariot arrives
and no one sees you any more
but riding in those cars were neither
armed men nor
a wanderer with a scythe
this is how love loved to visit us
and snatch us veiled

completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with
our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads
alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future
was leaping through the fiery hoop
of the sun


A Poem About White Apples

white apples, first apples of summer,
with skin as delicate as a baby’s,
crispy like white winter snow.
your smell won’t let me sleep,
this is how dead men
haunt their murderers’ dreams.
white apples,
this is how every july the earth
gets heavier under your weight.

and here only garbage smells like garbage…
and here only tears taste like salt...

we were picking them
like shells in green ocean gardens,
having just turned away from mothers’ breasts
we were learning
to get to the core of everything with our teeth.

so why are our teeth like cotton wool now...

white apples,
in black waters, the fishermen,
nursed by you, are drowning.


Untitled

for A.B.

it’s so hard to believe
that once we were even younger
than now
that our skin was so thin
that veins blued through it
like lines in school notebooks
that the world was a homeless dog
that played with us after classes
and we were thinking of taking it home
but somebody else took it first
gave it a name
and trained it “stranger”
against us

and this is why we wake up late at night
and light up the candles of our tv sets
and in their warm flame we recognize
faces and cities
and courageous in the morning
we dethrone omelets from frying pans...

but our dog grew up on another’s leash
our mothers suddenly stopped sleeping with men
and looking at them today
it’s so easy to believe in the immaculate conception

and now imagine:
somewhere there are towns
with white stone houses
scattered along the ocean shore
like the eggs of gigantic water birds
and every house carries a legend of a captain
and every legend starts with
“young and handsome...”


Grandmother

my grandmother
doesn't know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water

her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick
her hair bees' wings
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to america

her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
there's nothing else you can do with it
only a rose

her arms like stork's legs
red sticks
and i am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
i'm telling you it's not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you


Factory of Tears

And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels
while the Department of Heart Affairs
was beating hysterically
the Factory of Tears was working night shifts
setting new records even on holidays.

While the Food Refinery Station
was trying to digest another catastrophe
the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous
technology of recycling the wastes of past —
memories mostly.

The pictures of the employees of the year
were placed on the Wall of Tears.

I’m a recipient of workers comp from the heroic Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I’m happy with what I have.