Al Filreis

Basil King has shared with us at Jacket2 several of his remarkable new Tablets. We are delighted to present Tablet #3 — the paired poem and panel. The visual was made with chalk, charcoal, and soft moulding paste on prepared birch panel. Its dimensions are 30 x 22”. King's plan is to finish this series, at least for now, as nine poems and panels. The images of the panels, produced by Martha King with her phone, are meant to be part of this preview of the work. Those interested in knowing more, or seeing more (and finer reproductions), of the project, are invited to reach out directly: Bazink3@gmail.com. For now, we present the visual tablet above, and the verse tablet below.

Grzegorz Wróblewski has written a new series of poems. "From January to May 2023," he tells me, "I was intensively dealing with asemic writing and an unexpected, very unusual project for myself. During this time I wrote 33 poems directly in English. It was the first time in my life that I made such a linguistic experiment. They have no Polish equivalents. I made a volume of poetry out of it and gave it a title I Really Like Lovers of Poetry. Writing poems in English turned out to be a completely different internal issue for me, a mysterious and at the same time fascinating psychological journey. So far, my poems have been translated from Polish by excellent people, such as Piotr Gwiazda or Adam Zdrodowski. I asked for proofreading by Marcus Silcock Slease. He sent the poems back to me very quickly and made no major changes to them. I didn't know how to define this process."

Over the years, Grzegorz Wróblewski has appeared in Jacket2 in various forms and genres. In 2015 we published five of his poems. My commentary series featured his book Zero Visibility in 2017. In 2014 we transcribed an interview conducted by Piotr Gwiazda. The late John Tranter, in Jacket issue 29, April 2006, published three poems, including “I put off the knife from my hand till tomorrow” (“Blood can wait / Blood will cool yet / From January till the month called December”). One can find more appearances here.