Roses

Program Notes

Roses is the second song cycle I wrote for my good friend, Alexandra Nowakowski, and my introduction to the poetry of the amazing twentieth-century Polish poet, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska.

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s poetry, like her trailblazing contemporaries (poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath,) took on the assumptive gender roles codified into poetry and turned them on their head, rejecting the idea that women should only write blithe, lilting poetry about beauty or nature. When they did include these images or themes, they often utilized them to reconfigure the metaphor in a way that reflected their lived experiences. For instance, Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska approaches the titular image of the rose in this cycle to play with the essentialized, misogynistic concept of the rose as a symbol for virtue or virginity. The rose references sexual desire in the first poem (“dip me in him / like the rose in the vase”) and then returns in the final poem (Roses, or Róże,) wilting in its vase as a metaphor for the narrator’s tattered happiness; however, this second instance subverts its own decay and reaffirms its value: “ah, but no rose was half so beautiful / and roses often blossom more than once.” (“Ach, lecz róże na świe­cie za­kwi­ta­ją czę­ściej! / I ono było prze­cież pięk­niej­sze od róży!”)

I’m grateful to Barbara Bogoczek and Anthony Howard for their fabulous translations of these poems and for their support in making this cycle a reality.