“My name is the first name in Polish literature,” says Adam Lizakowski. “Not only in Chicago but in the whole United States.”
I found your feather, America, gold-feathered bird
you are truth
Lizakowski’s broad, sturdy head lifts and his light eyes open wide when he talks about his days in San Francisco. He says there were poetry readings “on every corner” in the Bay Area. “I had the experience of going to these readings, from one place to another, from Berkeley to Oakland, from Oakland to San Francisco–seeing all the stuff, being part of the stuff.”
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Lizakowski discovered American poetry on his own, reading masters such as Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and began concentrating on writing his own poems. In 1984 he went to a reading by Milosz and introduced himself after following the poet into a rest room. A year later Lizakowski enrolled in courses in the Slavic studies department at the University of California at Berkeley, where Milosz was a professor. “He was very friendly to me, very nice to me and wishing me well,” he says. “He was the first one to start sending my poems to Polish magazines.”
A few years after arriving, he fell in love with an American from a middle-class family who was flirting with a bohemian lifestyle. Perhaps Lizakowski seemed exotic to her. But after over a year together she told him she was pregnant, she didn’t want to have the baby, and she was leaving him.
