Pure Makeshift
This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. ... Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know." ... Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a big paper clip by literary historians and called their "oeuvres complètes."
, The Poet and the World (Nobel Lecture) (1996) · Read the full text
In this excerpt from her Nobel lecture, Szymborska stands before an audience gathered to honor her life’s work and declares the supremacy of “I don’t know.” She doesn’t treat not-knowing as a temporary condition that gets resolved through effort. She calls it the continuous source, the place where inspiration is born and reborn. The word “continuous” is doing real work in that sentence. Not-knowing isn’t the blank page before the writing starts. It is the weather the writing lives in, before, during, and after.
Then comes the image that stays with me: the big paper clip. Literary historians bind a poet’s accumulated efforts into an “oeuvre,” as though each poem were a deliberate brick in a planned cathedral. But Szymborska sees something far messier from the inside. Each poem was a “makeshift,” an answer that started to dissolve the moment it was finished. What looks from the outside like a coherent body of work was, to the person making it, a long sequence of necessary insufficiencies. Not failures exactly, but genuine attempts that revealed their own limits only upon completion.
We find ourselves in a moment when fluent, confident answers arrive faster than ever before. You can pose a question and receive a polished reply in seconds, one that never hesitates or doubles back on itself. The value of such speed is real. But Szymborska’s lecture illuminates something worth sitting with: the poet’s dissatisfaction after each finished poem, that stubborn sense that the real thing was narrowly missed, turns out to be the engine of the next attempt, and the next. It is the feeling of inadequacy that generates the body of work, not the adequacy. What becomes of that engine when sufficient answers are always within reach, when the pull is toward accepting a competent reply rather than lingering with the question? Perhaps the willingness to keep saying “I don’t know,” to remain genuinely unsatisfied with what has been produced so far, is itself a kind of creative fidelity that no amount of fluency can provide.