Writes Tomasz Rozycki of this week’s Little Star Weekly poet Tadeuz Dabrowski:
“Tadeusz Dabrowski’s poetry is a child of its times, born of the two prevailing trends in recent Polish poetry, of two wonderful parents, who are nevertheless very different, often antagonistic, and occasionally at war. It is no accident that I use the word ‘child,’ and I will try to justify this risky comparison. The first of these parents is a rebellious and highly ironic poetry that, having developed in the counterculture of the 1990s and in dialogue with pop culture, manifested itself in … a group with connections to American models from the 1940s and 1950s, to O’Hara and Schuyler… The other parent to Dabrowki’s poetry is the so-called ‘Polish School,’ a trend that is defined by what is strongest and most unique in Polish poetry—the individual testimony to our times… This is a poetry that smelts its inheritance into something new, modern, and original, something dynamic, paradoxical, constantly in motion, a poetry that is engaged with today’s world in so many of its manifestations, leaping from theme to theme—art, travel, sex, love (presented in all its succulence, no doubt, and with complete candor, as if this most fragile of human affairs was the only constant in life, computers, camera lenses, Europe, America, questions from philosophers, and rock lyrics—in its ambitious gambit to comprehend a world that remains elusive and undescribed.”
Dabrowski arrives on these shores for a tour sponsored by the Polish Cultural Center and the famous city of Gdansk, now sponsoring liberty of the literary kind, among other entities.
Read him this week in Little Star Weekly.
See him in one of these many places in the coming weeks:
New York City
Fri, Sep 27, 2013, 4 pm
Columbia University
Harriman Institute
420 W 118th Street, 12th Floor
Dublin, NH
Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 3 pm
Del Rossi’s Trattoria
73 Brush Brook Rd (Rt 137)
Cambridge, MA
Tue, Oct 1, 2013, 7 pm
With Tom Christensen
Grolier Poetry Bookshop
6 Plympton St., Harvard Square
Amherst, MA
Wed, Oct 2, 2013, 7:30 pm
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Herter Hall, room 301
Baltimore, MD
Fri, Oct 4, 2013, 7 pm
With Mary Jo Salter, John Hennessy and Joshua Weiner
Atomic Books
3620 Falls Rd.
Washington, DC
Sat, Oct 5, 2013, 2:30 pm
With Joshua Weiner and Daisy Fried
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave.
College Park, MD
Mon, Oct 7, 2013, 12:30 pm
The University of Maryland
Department of English
2119 Tawes Hall, Room 3250
Philadelphia, PA
Tue, Oct 8, 2013, 7 pm
With Martin Woodside and Joshua Weiner
Moonstone Arts Center
110A S. 13th Street
New York City
Wed, Oct 9, 2013, 6 pm
With Andrey Gritsman and Vasyl Makhno
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street
Ghent, NY
Residency: Oct 11-Nov 5, 2013
Omi International Arts Center
Ledig House
1405 County Route 22
Public events TBA
Brooklyn, NY
Fri, Oct 18, 2013, 7 pm
With Timothy Donnelly
Location TBA
New York City
Sun, Nov 3, 2013, 7 pm
With Ledig House residents
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
Tadeusz Dabrowski was born in northern Poland in 1979. He is the author of six books of poems and has received Koscielski Prize (2009) and the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006) among other awards. He is the editor of the literary bi-monthly Topos. A book of his poems Black Square, appeared in 2011 in the English translation of Antonia Lloyd-Jones, including an introduction, quoted above, by Tomasz Rozycki (translated by W. Martin). (Speaking of Polish fusions of the traditional and the contemporary: We published an extended selection from Rozycki’s own hilarious mock epic, Twelve Stations, in Little Star #4 (2013)).
