Grzegorz Wróblewski

Zero Visibility, by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Al Filreis

Grzegorz Wróblewski’s new book, Zero Visibility, translated by Piotr Gwiazda*, has reached me — and I’m thrilled to have it. Wróblewski is constantly fascinating; he is often precise and whacky both. Many modes are here in this new book. One — perhaps my own favorite — is surrealist post-Soviet consciousness:

Cosmonauts

What was going through his mind when for the first time in his life
my dog saw a horse? He frozen like a statue, erect, hypnotized.

It was as if he had encountered a space alien.
He didn’t move until the horse disappeared over the horizon …

(Polish) Poetry after Różewicz

Marit MacArthur

Kacper Bartczak

I proselytize for Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) and his poetic legacy as a new convert, not with unique insight into his importance or his poetics. That I leave to the eleven Polish poets sampled here (and several translators), who can testify better than I can.

November 24, 2015

Grzegorz Wróblewski and Różewicz

Piotr Gwiazda

In the interview published last year in this magazine, Polish poet, writer, and dramatist Grzegorz Wróblewski refers to Różewicz as a “great poet” and “genuine innovator.” It would be accurate to say that much of his own poetry, which he has been writing since the early 1980s, builds on Różewicz’s example. In many of his poems Wróblewski adopts an austere and straightforward style.

November 24, 2015

Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski (b. 1962)

Grzegorz Wróblewski

Piotr Gwiazda

Decline

YOU LIVE WITHOUT GOD FOR THERE IS NO GOD

THEY TOOK GOD FROM US GOD’S BLOOD IS FLOWING

YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD BECAUSE OF GOD

FOR THERE IS NO GOD HAS ANYONE SEEN GOD?

PRAY TO OUR GOD THE TERRIBLE GOD

THEY MURDERED OUR GOD YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD

BRING BACK OUR GOD! WE WANT OUR GOD!

November 24, 2015

'The passenger syndrome'

An interview with Grzegorz Wróblewski

Grzegorz Wróblewski

Piotr Gwiazda

Note: In early April 2014, Polish writer and painter Grzegorz Wróblewski gave readings from his book Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013) at Columbia University, Cambridge Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

August 28, 2014

Grzegorz Wroblewski’s poems performed in English, to music

Al Filreis

Marcus Slease, a native of Portadown, N. Ireland, moved to Las Vegas at the age of twelve and now lives in London. Recently he recorded English translations of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s poems. Wróblewski has appeared in Jacket and Jacket2 previously, e.g. here and here.

A world according to G.W.

On Grzegorz Wróblewski

Anna Kałuża

Translated from the Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

January 9, 2012

Recently in Jacket2

Pitch of Poetry

Charles Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, Spring 2016 (352 pages | 6 x 9)

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

A quiver of chapbooks

A review of 'New-Generation African Poets'

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma

This chapbook box set is the third in an annual series, first published in 2014 by Slapering Hol Press and taken on by Akashic Books as of 2015. The box sets are a project of the African Book Poetry Fund, which also supports an impressive constellation of poetry prizes, poetry libraries in African cities, and book publishing — full-length collections by new poets, as well as collected or new and selected works by such major African poets as Ama Ata Aidoo, the late Kofi Awoonor, and Gabriel Okara. Having titled the first two sets Seven New Generation African Poets and Eight New-Generation African Poets, coeditors Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani were forced by the fact that this third iteration also features eight poets to settle the issue of naming. As Dawes puts it, “By tagging on to our new title the word tatu, a Swahili word denoting the number three, we are codifying our faith and confidence that this is truly a series.”[1] Indeed, the most recent set — Nne or four — was released this past April with ten more chapbooks, although they will have to await a future review. Each chapbook in the Tatu set bears a preface by an established poet, and each bears cover art by Victor Ehikhamenor, a Nigerian artist and writer who is currently exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and is increasingly in demand as a cover artist. While the box set is thus a quiver of gorgeous physical objects, the poetry itself is just as arresting as Ehikhamenor’s designs.

Music for the ecoelegaic

Cecily Nicholson's 'Wayside Sang'

Stephen Collis

Cecily Nicholson’s poetry expresses a deep solidarity extended across time and space, and across divisions between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. As I try to prise apart what the term “biotariat” might be made to mean, I find poetry instructive because of its willingness to attend to just such “crossings” and movements amongst and between language’s subjects and objects — to, literally, lay them out on the paratactic page. For a diasporic poet like Nicholson this has something to do with “blackness” — I have in mind Fred Moten’s comment (from In the Break) that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” Everywhere in her poetry Nicholson is concerned with the resistance of “objects” — of those who have been rendered (reduced to) “objects” through regimes of racialized violence and colonization, and the fluid affinities the variously objectified find and found.