The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry


Book Description

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What’s in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer’s is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments—from poetic “sound postcards,” to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.




Postwar Polish Poetry


Book Description

"This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland. The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry." From Amazon.




A Fugitive from Utopia


Book Description

Baranczak--a poet, critic, translator, and Polish émigré--supplies politico-cultural context for Herbert while analyzing the texts and themes of his poems. Herbert's poetry, he shows, is based on permanent confrontation--of Western tradition with the experience of an Eastern European, of classicism with modernity, of cultural myth with empiricism.




Peregrinary


Book Description

The first English collection of the prize-winning contemporary Polish poet.




Sobbing Superpower


Book Description

An anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be.--Edward Hirsch




Nonrequired Reading


Book Description

"Unquestionably one of the great living European poets. She's accessible and deeply human and a joy--though it is a dark kind of joy--to read. . . . She is a poet to live with." —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading." As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.




Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays


Book Description

In essays on issues from censorship to underground poetry, Baranczak explores the role that culture--and particularly literature--has played in keeping the spirit of intellectual independence alive in Eastern and Central Europe.




Twelve Stations


Book Description

Celebrated mock heroic poem now available in English translation.




The Foundations of Aesthetics


Book Description

This translation was made from the third edition of The Foundations of Aesthetics as prepared by the author (I ed. 1933. II ed. 1949. III ed. 1957. IV ed. in Works 1966). Some parts of the text were deleted from this translation such as references to examples which could not be understood by non-Polish readers (e.g. reminiscences about famous theatrical interpretations. theatrical productions dating back many years or references to literary characters which serve as specific examples in the consciousness of readers of Polish literature). Names and works of Polish authors cited in the text have been supplemented by brief information notes (the numbers referring to these footnotes have been differentiated by block parentheses). In the block parentheses in the author's footnotes the latest editions are given. Illustrations at the end of the book have been placed according to the order in which they would best serve to analyze the various topics. IX STANISLAW OSSOWSKI'S CONCEPTION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES The Foundation of Aesthetics is the first major work by Stanislaw Ossowski. Ossowski is well known to the English reader for his socio logical works, and especially for his book Class Structure in Social Consciousness and the majority of his works deal with various theoretical and methodological problems of sociology. It should be stressed here, that the book in the field of aesthetics constitutes a turning point in his biography. in the process of changing his focus of interest from logic to sociology.




The Forgotten Keys


Book Description

First English collection of celebrated contemporary Polish poet.




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