This article presents a new reading of the spoof poetic manifesto ‘Chamuły poezji’ [‘The Cads of Poetry’] written by Julian Przyboś in 1926. His use of the apocalyptic tones of early modernist poetry to lampoon a trio of acclaimed poets associated with Young Poland (especially Jan Kasprowicz) suggests a complex nature of Przyboś’s rejection and dependence on that movement. In general, the influence of Young Poland, though quite conspicuous in is juvenilia and early publications, tends to fade away. ‘Chamuły’ is a pejorative nonce word which alludes to the Biblical Ham as well as a Polish word for a cad or ill-bred bumpkin. This article adds to it another layer of meaning, based on Derrida’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, with allusions to sexual and genital imagery. And more generally, it reframes the whole Przyboś’s poetic work (not just his early poems) using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Seen in a broader historical perspective, Przyboś’s struggles to break with Young Poland are not unlike the predicament of many eighteenth-century writers caught in the dispute between the Moderns and the Ancients, satirized in Swift’s Battle of the Books. The overall conclusion of this study is that at all times the avant-garde and the arrière-garde remain in a continuous dialogue and the innovators never lose sight of those left behind. Poetry is, after all, metamorphic and cannot be contained within within the bounds of manifestoes and artistic programmes.

A study was undertaken to investigate the effects of crumb rubber on the strength and mechanical behaviour of Rubberized cement soil (RCS). In the present investigation, 26 groups of soil samples were prepared at five different percentages of crumb rubber content, four different percentages of cement content and two different finenesses of crumb rubber particle. Compressive strength tests were carried out at the curing age of 7 days, 14 days, 28 days and 90 days. The test results indicated that the inclusion of crumb rubber within cement soil leads to a decrease in the compressive strength and stiffness and improves the cement soil’s brittle behaviour to a more ductile one. A reduction of up to 31% in the compressive strength happened in the 20% crumb content group. The compressive strength increases with the increase in the cement content. And the enlargement of cement content is more efficient at low cement content.

This article brings together two authors/two poems and makes them enter into an intertextual dialogue that involves the discourses of the new materialism (Catherine Malabou), postphenomenology (Natalie Depraz and Marc Richir) and Delphic maxims. Concepts like plasticity, transformation masks, alterations in the passage of time (chronos, kairos, aeon), subjectivity, emotional excess, and the living body are used to establish the foundations a poetic conversation, which, for all one knows, may be fortuitous or in a way preordained.

Steel Mesh-Reinforced Cementitious Composites (SMRCC) (traditionally known as ferrocement) have been in existence for few decades, but have some limitations set on element thickness and number of reinforcing mesh layers and the resulting deflection ductility. Therefore, the author has made an attempt to explore whether deflection ductility will improve in mesh-reinforced cementitious composites (25 mm thick) if discontinuous fibres are added to slab elements. For this purpose, thin slab elements of dimensions 700 mm (length) × 200 mm (width) × 25 mm (thickness) were cast and subjected to four point bending tests. Based on the flexural tests conducted on SMRCC (Control Slab Elements, cast with Steel Mesh Volume of reinforcement, MVr = 0.78, 0.94, and 1.23%) and Hybrid Mesh-and-Fibre-Reinforced Cement Based Composite (HMFRCBC) (Test Slab Elements, combining MVr = 0.78, 0.94 and 1.23% and Polyolefin Fibre Volume fraction, PO-FVf = 0.5‒2.5% of volume of specimens, with 0.5% interval), load-deflection and the deflection ductility index were analyzed. From the flexural load-deflection curves it has been observed that HMFRCBC slabs demonstrate higher flexural load-carrying capacity and deflection ductility when compared to SMRCC slabs. This study shows that higher the polyolefin fibre volume fraction (PO-FVf) from 0.5 to 2.5% (with a 0.5% interval) in HMFRCBC slabs, the higher the flexural deflection ductility. The Deflection Ductility Index (DDI) of HMFRCBC (with 5 layers of mesh and PO-FVf = 2.5%) is 4.5 times that of SMRCC. This study recommends that HMFRCBC can be used as an innovative construction material due to its higher flexural ductility characteristics.