'Make it hurt': Jacket2 Features Polish Poetry Under the Influence of Tadeusz Różewicz

If you haven't had time to make your way over to Jacket2 to read up on Polish poetry after Tadeusz Różewicz, now is your chance! Marit MacArthur and Kacper Bartczak have curated a series of reflections on Różewicz's poetry, written by a slew of Polish poets who have incorporated lessons of Różewicz's poetics into their own work, along with a selection of poetry by the contributors. MacArthur and Bartczak introduce the portfolio:

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.

I am motivated by a conviction that Różewicz, and the poetry that follows the paths he marked out, should be far better known among American poets — and that as long as we are ignorant of him, we lose something needful for our contemporary poetry. To get acquainted with Różewicz, rush out and buy Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2011), translated by Joanna Trzeciak. To begin to grasp his legacy for Polish poetry — for the world — read on.

I knew Różewicz’s name first as a mysterious force that was mentioned often among poets in Poland in 2008 (when I worked on collaborative translation there as a Fulbright research scholar, with Jerzy Jarniewicz as my excellent guide). It operated throughout the contentious, various, vital world of contemporary poetry in Poland. And when his name went unmentioned, it felt like an unspoken presence, an authority taken for granted. The idea of tracing his influence — especially for a foreigner — is unusually difficult, even preposterous. His work has affected the poetic tradition in Poland at its core. In a class in 2011 at Warren Wilson College’s MFA program, Jennifer Grotz explained Różewicz’s desire to kill poetry — his mistrust of the figurative and of the felicities of rhyme, rhythm, and pleasing sounds. She suggested that his motto might be (contra Pound’s “Make it new”): “Make it hurt.”

His poems offer merciless scrutiny in a way that might be essential to great poetry now — toward the poet himself, toward the world, toward language first and foremost — not towards conventional grammar and syntax per se, but in the Nietzschean sense that Kacper Bartczak identifies. In his poem “To the Dead,” from Anxiety (1947), he writes of his everyday life as a survivor of WWII with a keen sense of the banality of his activities, their relative value, and his obvious grief, with cold acuity and without a single note of false piety [...]

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