On ‘panther’ by Ania Walwicz

‘i become what i see what i am i become what i dream’

A big black SUV storms past us. My daughter tackles me, her eyes bulge, I pick her up, stroke her forehead. Big cats have been on my mind. I’ve been thinking of caged animals and in particular lion tamers placing their heads into the lion’s jaw. Humans tend to make spectacle of our domination over nature. It’s tormented us over the last century. First scientists coaxed and corralled into making the atomic bomb and then Ginsberg’s Howl, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ Our exploitation of the physical world – including our own labour – has turned inwards and we now feel impotent to change it. Ania shows us that we can flip the situation, hold our nerve, escape and trick our masters. Poetry helps dream the world anew.

Ania was my teacher and friend. We would catch up and always begin by lamenting the latest news but after a while we’d try to find hope, ways to go on. As poets we work the page, we experiment on that terrain, we transform ourselves… It’s where, she writes, ‘i become what i’m meant to be’.

Ania said of her poetry, ‘I am reworking language and taking it apart, slicing the top layer off… It appears that I am producing this dismembered language, but in fact I am producing language which is closer to the actual process of feeling and thinking.’ Prior to literacy, before self-consciousness and repression sets in at age five or so, I’m a thrilled witness to my kids’ entry into language as they get on a roll and talk like Ania…a kind of pure state marked by repetition, stutters and sudden flows.

Ania was knowledgeable about surrealism and psychoanalysis and ‘panther’ attempts to reconnect us with this joyous state of expression. When we meet the poem’s energy, it transforms our sense of what’s possible. A black panther can symbolise many things but above all it means pure potency. In this poem and in this world, we desire a panther pet, a panther comrade, to become a panther ourselves. Some of us have big vehicles and some of us have poetry.

‘i turn to war cry i become somebody’

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.