Piotr Gwiazda

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

Standstill moments

A review of Piotr Gwiazda's 'Messages'

Robert Manaster

In his first book, Gargarin Street (2005), Piotr Gwiazda, after “meandering slowly from nowhere to nowhere”[1] in a self-deprecating manner, after revealing his motto “Give Chance a chance” (36), and after postulating,

What if the script of human life is full of typos,

missteps, mishaps, false starts, false alarms,
wrong turns, dead ends, distractions, digressions —[2]

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook
(audibook available from the press and soon to be avaialbe from Amazon/Audible)

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
•
••Jeremy Sigler, "The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein," Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, "Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy," Altered States
••Paul Bove on "Echologs" at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: "Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in."

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

Rochelle Owens

'Patterns of Animus,' Part Three, 'The Ludwig Skulls'

Jerome Rothenberg

[A continuation from earlier postings on Poems and Poetics of Rochelle Owens’s new masterwork, Patterns of Animus. (J.R.)]

In 1863 Beethoven’s body was exhumed for autopsy, the head

removed and the skull studied for medical research.

Radical reclamations

Queer feminist collaborative acts by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo

Margaret Rhee

Photos courtesy of Sophie Seita.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “reclamation” in the past few days.