Off the Beaten Track: Poetry in Prague

Paul Deblinger

By Paul Deblinger

Our guest today is Paul Deblinger. He is an American writer who, in addition to poetry, also creates comedy and encaustic paintings. He has lived in the Czech Republic and has traveled widely in Europe.

One of the first things I learned on my adventure in Prague is that the word "ano" means yes. You have to listen very carefully--even though Czechs accent the first syllable, it still sounds like "no."

At first I wondered why everyone was so negative--I heard “no,” after “no” as the answer to the most obvious questions. Then, I learned what “ano“ meant. I had to listen carefully. This influenced my writing, my thinking and my daily life as an ex-pat. Listen, listen, think!

I arrived in Prague in June 2003, to take part in a four-week creative writing program sponsored by Western Michigan University. I was 51...and was one year removed from a minor heart attack that left me with severe anxiety...so much so...that after one year I could basically leave my home only for work. Panic attacks in grocery stores, farmers' markets, restaurants, had driven me back home.

Then I found myself scanning writer's web pages and ran across an ad for the Prague program. To make a long story short....somehow though the fog of anxiety I signed up for the Prague program, quit my job, and packed for a four-week stint away from my couch and my home.

Prague Castle. Photo by DC Pelka

Arriving in Prague, a city I had visited once before in 1991, I was assigned a room in a rather official-looking building (turns out it was Gestapo headquarters during WWII) that was now a dormitory for foreign students. It was a warren-like building with long halls that made you want to drop breadcrumbs to find your way back to your room. I often felt myself wandering in endless circles, passing the same door many times. Like my new-found expertise in listening, I needed to force myself to remember the most mundane details.

I was up early the first morning in Prague. I had arrived on a Friday and classes didn't start until Monday. In the early morning light, Prague looked handsome and inviting. As a hilly, river city Prague has unusual, wonderful urban light, light that has been twisted and turned down narrow streets for a thousand years, has bounced off facades of almost every imaginable type of architecture rolling across the many green parts of the city.

After just a few blocks I noticed something about my body: I could breathe. After my heart attack each breath seemed labored as if it was a signal for bad things to come. The mysterious weight of anxiety had removed itself from my chest and I felt as light and free as...well, I couldn't even remember.

Prague Jewish Quarter. Photo by Beth Green

I continued my walk through Prague, crossing the Vltava River, entering Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter. When I say old, I mean old--the Old-New Synagogue dates to the 12th century. The graves in the Old Jewish Cemetery are piled 12 deep and the grave of Rabbi Lowe, the 15th century mystic who gave the Jewish community its mythical superman, the Golem, is packed with folded-up prayers from moderns Jews asking for eternal favors.

On the wall of the Pinchas Synagogue are the inscribed names of Czech Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I scanned the wall for names, searching for Deblinger, the way I would search for my name in a phone book in a distant city. To my astonishment my name was on the wall: Yitchak (my Hebrew name) Deblinger from Prague, one of the 80,000 names crammed on the walls of the 600-year-old synagogue.

When I was a kid I imagined there was a me in every country of the world. I could sit for hours and daydream about the "me" in Ghana, France, Japan, Burma. Now I was confronted with a "me" who lived before me and had perished in a horrible way.

As the poetry seminars began I already had a plethora of things to write about....breathing this newly liberating Czech air, discovering “me” from a different era, the wonderful light in this old city. And to compound these visions, my teacher for the first two weeks, Barbara Cully, a writing professor from Arizona, introduced me to lyric poetry, specifically, the motets of the 20th century Italian poet Eugenio Montale:

You know this. I must lose you again and cannot

I am like an old wound every moment,

every cry re-opens, even the salt spray

rising from the piers darkening the Spring

at Sottoripa.

Montale had written the motets, short lyrical poems in a lover's voice addressing a mysterious love interest, in the 30s. They are replete with images from Dante, the Italian Renaissance and even the satiric barbs of T.S. Eliot.

By the time I had encountered Montale (and the lovely motets of Barbara Cully) I had noticed the countdown clock ticking. I would only be in Prague...25 more days, 20 more days, 18 more days. It was a looming sentence.

Prague Old Town Square. Photo by DC Pelka

Then the ignition of an idea. What if I beat the rap...stayed beyond my four-week term. What would happen?

Well, for one thing, my marriage was unlikely to survive, said my wife. And there were many other things to consider, or were there?

I happened to mention to the director of the program my quest for temporary lodging in Prague, and he said he would be sub-letting his family's flat for the 9-month academic term. Voila! Or, perhaps, "Zde!" in Czech.

Deal done.

The transformation started....from tourist...to foreign student...to full-time ex-pat.

Due to the four-week poetry workshops I had amassed dozens of new poems or at least partially written ones, and the program itself gave me a kick in the pants to writing: poems, short stories, essays.

Of course, life doesn't stop because you decide to, at least temporarily, reside in a foreign place: marriage must be dealt with, parents get sick, money starts trickling away, then cascading and your new ex-pat life begins to be fully-formed. A new city and culture and language, new friends, new lovers, new problems: source material for a sheath of poems, a memoir, stories, films or as someone once wrote: "Life is what happens when you're making other plans."

But my heart, which had momentarily failed me, and my writing, which had been on an extended furlough returned: new strong beats, a new voice...a new way of looking at the world...the Old World, at that.

Blood-Red Moon

by Paul Deblinger

On the overnight train to Prague we argue

about the color of the moon.

At the stop at Auschwitz

the moon slips between two buildings on the platform

Photo by Ricardo Wang

and exposes its metaphoric blood-red hue.

Standing in the corridor,

head and neck out the window I call

you to come look at the moon.

You sit twisted, pretzel-like in the compartment,

hand holding a cigarette out the window.

It’s not blood-red, it’s amber, you say—the color of the little ring

you bought in the market in Krakow, the amber stone,

a dome nestled in a swirl of silver.

You hold the ring up to the moon.

Blood-red, I say.

The train pulls out from the station,

passes just meters from the Birkenau killing

fields. The blood-red moon hovers over the camp,

half-lopped off by the earth’s shadow. People

really live here, you ask?

Yet we ride these rails of horror from Prague

to Krakow and back for a hedonistic weekend

while history-jabbing body punches

sway me to numbness.

In the old Jewish Quarter in Krakow I imagined an ancestor,

perhaps a great-grandfather, traveling from Eastern Galicia

for business, for pleasure, or maybe to meet a mistress of his own

to toast the moon with Polish vodka. With the thrill of earthly

pleasures coursing through his veins, he momentarily forgets

the daily miseries, can’t even comprehend the racial future.

And I can’t comprehend my aching

bones; my mundane pain clouding history. In the train’s

cozy compartment I turn to you for comfort

and touch. You don’t touch.

You don’t comfort. I stare again

at the blood-red moon, trying to find

a way to navigate this tortured history around your skin.

The smoke from your cigarette plumes

up and out the window. We stare at each other

with hollow, uncertain eyes. The blood-red moon

rises above the plain.

Icy Days

by Paul Deblinger

This morning, the purple-turning

pink smoke drifts,

gathers across rooftops,

crystallizes the abstract

expression grafted to the panes.

Later, walking to Sinku tears flow again.

In the kavarna I try to talk Czech

but it comes out French. Wine

Photo by Eva McDermott

finally loosens my tongue.

Owl-earred knit hats,

puffy marshmallow coats,

hands jammed way down

in pockets, people stiffly exit the tram.

I’m at ease with high pressure

days, flat smoke, leaden skies sending

icy tears down all the Czech faces.

What in the World

by Paul Deblinger

When I was a kid

I thought there was another me

In every country in the world.

I dreamt about the me in France,

In China, Ghana and Ceylon.

Tonight walking down the narrow

Cobbled streets, I saw you gliding

Down the hill, bouncing, laughing,

With a curly-haired boy half my age.

I followed you down the hill,

Photo by LifeInMegapixels

As you headed into the cinema,

Curly-haired boy in tow.

I ducked into the casino next door,

Tried my luck at 21, lost

Each hand.

Dashed back to the cinema,

Just as the doors flung open

To you and the curly-haired boy.

With the bright city lights smacking you

In the face, I could clearly see it wasn’t you.

And it wasn’t me

Or even the other me

Walking down the cobbled slope

Wondering what in the world

I was doing there thinking of you.

History of a Beer Snob

By Beth Green

I have a confession to make. I’ll eat anything. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll try most things if they won’t put me in the hospital or in prison.

But I won’t drink bad beer.

In a pinch I’ll sleep in an airport or a train station—even (at least that one time) on a park bench. I’m not choosy about what I wear or the company I keep.

But I am a beer snob.

Beer is my particular snobbery.

I blame most of the reason for this on my parents, who in my formative years took an interest in home brewing when we visited New Zealand on our sailboat. I was 12, and years away from drinking beer myself (obviously), but I was intrigued by the whole madcap science of it—the strange giant tins of strong-smelling hops, the crazy jerry-can and tube set-up my dad tinkered with.

My parents got progressively involved and sophisticated with their brewing once we returned to the USA (Mom even took home a prize a few years ago for her Blonde Beaver Pale Ale at the Great Alaskan CraftBeer and Homebrew Festival in Haines, AK.). But I was still a few years away from being a beer snob. In college, perhaps making up for my nontraditional upbringing, I made sure I embraced the all-American university culture of drinking copious amounts of the cheapest beer available, occasionally utilizing household objects, such as funnels, for the consumption thereof.

But everything changed when, during my junior year of university, I went on academic exchange to Spain. I spent months beforehand reading up on wine, assuming in my naivete that that was pretty much all sophisticated Europeans drank.

So it was a complete surprise when I realized all that information I’d been absorbing about wines had actually made me appreciate beer more. I started noticing the metallic taste of canned brews, the nuances in flavor between the stouts, the hefeweizens, the lagers. One weekend trip to Madrid my friends and I ran into two Irish people in town for a rugby match—they introduced me to Guinness while my other friends chose cider or wine spritzers.

The author and her mother in the Czech Republic in 2004.

But even with this newly defined interest, I wouldn’t have called myself a snob of anything. Until, a few years later I moved to the Czech Republic, which, (at least in the

biased opinion of 10.5 million Czechs) is the world’s best place to live if you like beer.

And, boy, the Czechs like it. In 2010, they drank 132 liters per capita, according to the Kirin Institute Food and Lifestyle Report. Think that’s a lot? Well, that amount is down 21 bottles per person from the year before, in part to improved public awareness about the dangers of alcoholism and the creeping realization that too much of a good thing gives you liver problems.

If you ask a Czech, they invented the stuff—pilsner (a type of pale lager) is named, after all, after the city of Pilsen. Now, while their neighbors to the west, the Germans, have their own firm opinions about who truly invented the drink, the Germans haven’t put their money where their mouth is, only consuming a piddling 107 liters per capita per year. Does that give the Czechs the right to call themselves the inventors of modern beer? After a few glasses, I’d say so.

Fresh beer.

In the Czech Republic, beer has a cultural significance I’ve found no other beverage to hold in any other part of the world. In China, tea still reigns—but Chinese people don’t love their 茶 the way Czechs cherish a pivo. The French, Spanish, and Italians bicker over who has the best wine—but their pride in viticulture is shadowed by the Czech mania for beer.

Within the Czech Republic, I soon learned, there are factions of beer lovers. You choose a beer brand to support like in other countries you’d choose a football team. In fact, for Czechs, choosing a beer brand may influence your later choice of brew-sponsored soccer club.

Budvar, the brew from České Budjějovicky which has been involved in convoluted tradmark disputes with American Budweiser beer and is sold in the US as Czechvar, has a certain crowd. Pilsner Urquell, the most famous of Czech beers internationally, is drunk by tourists and certain Pilsen-loyal Czechs. Staropramen is a favorite among native Praguers. The list is long, and the tasting and choosing a laborious, though delightful, process. At long last, I chose Gambrinus.

Image from www.gambrinus.cz.

Gambrinus, made by the Pilsner Urquell brewery and owned by SAB Miller, is a clean, light-colored beer that a non-beer snob could probably quaff as easily as they would drink any other Czech beer. It’s sold in brown bottles to keep the flavor from turning skunky, but tastes best from the tap of a busy pub. After three years of trying the various brews around the country, I realized I could do a blind taste-test and always name Gambrinus as the superior drink. The SAB Miller web page describes it as having a “distinct and refreshing ‘bite’ which does not compromise its soft beer flavour.”

Watching Czech films or reading Czech literature will provide a small insight into the importance of the beverage in daily Czech life. One of the country’s most celebrated and respected authors, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), was a famous beer lover. The brewery Hrabal’s stepfather managed, Pivovaru Nymburk, has Hrabal’s portrait on their Postřižinské beer label. The beer is named after his novel Postřižiny, translated into English as Cutting it Short.

Image from www.postriziny.cz.

Beer is a happy pleasure, a luxury in China (where I now live). Of course China has its own beers, not all of them bad, but none of them as good as a wet, frothy glass of Gambrinus.

So, what’s your secret snobbery?