john guzlowski
- Location
- Danville, Virginia, USA
- Birthday
- June 22
- Bio
- I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my Polish Catholic parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany.
Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. I write about these people.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Stacy Szymaszek
May 23, 2012 11:19AM - Give Peace a Chance--It's
cheaper
May 20, 2012 01:00PM - Call for Translators
May 08, 2012 08:43AM - Time Between Trains by Anthony
Bukoski
April 19, 2012 03:31PM - Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012
April 18, 2012 11:07AM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Nobody wants to take
responsibility for the war but
finally
it's my war and
yours…”
May 20, 2012 03:32PM - “Thanks for telling me
about visiting buchenwald. My
dad was
there, a prisoner.
Ye…”
April 18, 2012 04:38PM - “good daughter, martha's
book blue positive it
terrific--lots
of poems about
pregn…”
March 17, 2012 01:45AM - “Thanks, John. You sound
like you have a good
soul.”
March 10, 2012 05:18PM - “Daisy, yes, it's Walden
Pond on a hot early
September
Saturday.”
February 12, 2012 10:33PM
John guzlowski's Links
MAY 20, 2012 1:00PM
Give Peace a Chance--It's cheaper
How much have we put into the war in Afghanistan?
$530212045634!
I mean I can't even read that number.
Is that 500 billion?
50 billion? 500 million?
Give me a number I can understand!… Read full post »
MAY 8, 2012 8:43AM
Call for Translators
Poet/Translator Leonard Kress is putting together an anthology of Polish poetry in translation. Here's the call he put out for translators and translations:
Translators! I would like to put together an anthology of Polish poetry (from the Middle Ages through contemporary poetry) with an emphasi/…
APRIL 19, 2012 3:31PM
Time Between Trains by Anthony Bukoski
Anthony Bukoski's Time Between Trains: Stories, a collection of stories about working-class life in Superior, Wisconsin, was recently republished by Holy Cow Press. The following is a review of this fine book by Pamela Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
It would be
interestin… Read full post »
APRIL 18, 2012 11:07AM
Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012
Holocaust
Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) begins in the evening of Wednesday,
April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19,
2012
I wrote the
following blog a couple of years ago to commemorate Holocaust
Remembrance Day
I can remember the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagi/…
APRIL 13, 2012 9:56PM
67th Anniversary of the Liberation of Buchenwald
April 11 was the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
My dad spent four and a half years there.
He was a farm kid living in Poland when he was captured by the
Germans. In
the camp my father learned a lot of things, but one lesson
stayed… Read full post »
APRIL 13, 2012 11:51AM
Sarmatian Review
One of my favorite periodicals focusing on Polish and Polish Disapora issues is The Sarmatian Review edited by Professor Ewa Thompson of Rice University. Each issue contains information about Poland, its culture and history, and its traditions. There are other journals that promise the sa/…
APRIL 12, 2012 6:07PM
Some Notes on a Photo from 1968
I got a question a while ago about a photo I used in an Open Salon blog I wrote a while ago, and I thought I would just tell a little about the photo.
I'm 23 in the picture here, and it was taken in Chicago’s Grant Park. We're
… Read full post »
MARCH 22, 2012 2:37PM
Polish American Writers and Artists Update
Karina
Borowicz’s The Bees are Waiting has been
selected by Franz Wright
as winner of the 2011 Marick
Press Prize. The
book will be published this April. Until then,
here’s a poem of hers recently published inthe
journal Contrary.
Carving
He
comes to understand
the spirit abi/… Read full post »
the spirit abi/… Read full post »
MARCH 16, 2012 9:50PM
Little Office of the Immaculate Conception by Martha Silano
Polish American poet
MarthaSilano’s newest book
The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia
Books) has been chosen a Noted Book for2011 by
Poets.Org.
Here’swhat
the blurb at Poets.Org says about the collection:
Silano'sthird book
contains poems that explore motherhood, casting… Read full post »
MARCH 13, 2012 2:19PM
Thad Rutkowski in the New York Times
Thad Rutkowski's short story "The Mountain Man" is featured today in the New York Times.
Here's the opening of the story. The entire piece is available by clicking here:
THE MOUNTAIN MAN
I walkedto the post office to pick up
my family’s mail. When I opened the
swingingdoors, I saw that th… Read full post »
MARCH 8, 2012 11:59AM
Suzanne Strempek Shea: Award-winning author rooted in faith, Polish heritage, experience
One of my favorite Polish-American novelists is Suzanne Strempek Shea, the
author of the wonderful
Selling the Lite of Heaven and
Hoopi Shoopi Donna.
She recently gave an interview to the online journal MASSLIVE. Here's the piece:
Award-winning local author Suzanne Strempek Shea can easily/… Read full post »
She recently gave an interview to the online journal MASSLIVE. Here's the piece:
Award-winning local author Suzanne Strempek Shea can easily/… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 28, 2012 9:37AM
Two Public Poetry Readings in Chicago
Chicago Readings: I'm doing two free public poetry readings in Chicago this week.
On Thursday, March 1, between 1 and 3pm, I'm reading at Loyola University with 3 other Polish American poets (Ewa Chrusciel, Karen Kovacik, and John Minczeski). This session will take place at th… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 21, 2012 10:17AM
Talking about Home at the AWP 2012
One of the things that immigrant poets are always writing about is
home. We write about the homes we left behind, imagine what
they were like back then and dream about what they're like now.
You see this in all the writers who left their home countries
to come to America.… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 13, 2012 10:40PM
Valentine's Day: A World War II Love Story
My parents met in a
concentration camp in Germany toward the end of World War II.
My mom had been brought to
Germany by the Nazis to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was
captured she saw her mom and her sister and her sister's baby
killed by German… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 13, 2012 1:38PM
Valentine's Day: A Holocaust Love Story
My parents met in a concentration camp in Germany toward the end of World War II.
My mom had been brought to Germany by the Nazis to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was captured she saw her mom and her sister and her sister's baby… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 12, 2012 9:02PM
Solitude
Solitude?
Someone should write a history of it.
Think about it. Probably for the first million plus years we were here on earth, we were up to our ears in solitude. We'd watched the sky and the horizon for a bit of smoke, listen for the turning of a clumsy wheel or a… Read full post »
Someone should write a history of it.
Think about it. Probably for the first million plus years we were here on earth, we were up to our ears in solitude. We'd watched the sky and the horizon for a bit of smoke, listen for the turning of a clumsy wheel or a… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 7, 2012 9:58AM
Who Would Jesus Vote For?
I was reading an article at Salon.com called "Jesus vs.
the GOP."
The article talks about which of the GOP candidates Jesus
would back.
It got me thinking.
Who would Jesus support?
Last time I looked He wasn't an American.
The question itself, however, reveal… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 6, 2012 11:33AM
An Interview with Michal Rusinek, Wislawa Szymborska's Personal Secretary
This is an interview
with Michal
Rusinek, poet and translator,
Assistant Professor at the Department of Polish Language and
Literature of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and a
personal secretary to the distinguished Polish poet and the
laureate of the 1996 Nobel
Prize in… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 1, 2012 4:38PM
Wislawa Szymborska Died Today
Wislawa Szymborska died
today in Poland. There was nothing about it in the
New York Times, but there probably will be.
She was a great poet and won the Nobel Prize in Poetry back
in 1996.
She is one of my
favorite poets. She has the kind of… Read full post »
My mother died six years ago, January 27, 2006. She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona. It was a beautiful place, out in the desert, cactus and sage and rocks and reddish sand all around. She would have liked it. Before she got too sick, she used to like/…
JANUARY 5, 2012 1:47PM
Photographs by German Soldiers
JANUARY 3, 2012 11:39AM
What We Sign Up For: Poems by Lisa Siedlarz
For years, I've been teaching Lisa
Siedlarz' first book of poems (I
Dream My Brother Plays Baseball) in my War Stories class.
The book deals with her brother's tour of duty in the
Afghanistan War and how his time there has shaped her. It's
an excellent book and always one of/… Read full post »
DECEMBER 21, 2011 2:15PM
The Polish Review seeks Editor-in-Chief
I received the following
notice:
The Polish Review: The
Polish Review is a peer-reviewed, international, English
language, interdisciplinary academic journal published by the
Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences in America with the mission
of disseminating scholarly materials in the/… Read full post »
DECEMBER 21, 2011 2:09PM
Show Up, Look Good: A New Novel by Mark Wisniewski
Mark Wisniewski, author of
Confessionsof a Polish Used Car Salesmen, has recently
published his second novel,
Show Up, Look Good. The novel relates theadventures of a
young Midwestern woman who hopes to get over a failed
relationshipby moving to Manhattan.
Here’s what Kelly Cherry, the… Read full post »
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