Ruch Literacki

Julian Tuwim’s Słopiewnie (1921), a cycle of poems characterized by their blurred semantics, spawned a number of transpositions in the art of the Polish avant-garde, most notably Karol Szymanowski’s Songs (Słopiewnie, Op. 46 bis ego, 1921) and their visual interpretation in The Eye and the Ear (1945), a short film by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Szymanowski transposed Tuwim’s euphonic evocation of rural and primitive archaic moods into a series of musical compositions, which caught the attention of the Themersons, who had a great interest in Szymanowski’s modernist pursuits. They created a striking visual representation of the Songs, a distant echo of the notational experiments of the medieval eye music (ars subtilior). The three works are linked not only by their avant-garde poetics, but also by personal filiations that can be traced in Stefan Themerson’s diaries and in the correspondence of Julian Tuwim and Karol Szymanowski.

This article is an attempt to examine the format of spoken-word poetry accompanied by improvised music. The analysis is focused on two albums, Tutaj / Here: New Poems, a recording of a poetry reading event with Wisława Szymborska and jazz musician Tomasz Stańko, and Awaria świata / World Failure, a recording of vocal performances of Ewa Lipska’s poems with flute accompaniment composed and performed by the multi-instrumentalist Leszek „HeFi” Wiśniowski. The voices of the poets not only enhance the reception of their messages (as readers become listeners) but also reveal the personal interpretations of their work. Each album has a different kind of musical accompaniment. While Stańko’s improvisations ‘echo’ the poetic text, Wiśniowski’s compositions are free transpositions of some motifs from the poems. Nonetheless in each case the language is successfully orchestrated with its musical complement on all levels, from the structural patterns down to singular rhythmic and melodic mimetic schemes.

This article discusses the issues of voice, talking and silence in the poetry and the poetics of Krystyna Miłobędzka. It presents a reading of her work, both texts and vocal performances, in the context of her lifelong autocreative and performative project. The focus is on two intermedia productions which combine Miłobędzka’s texts and music. Taking note of the aesthetic of the deliberately faltering delivery (vox defectiva), the article analyzes the complex relationship between the poet and her unique voice. In line with the approach of Peter Middleton and Adriana Cavarero, the sound of her voice (delivery) is regarded as a constituent element of the intermedia poem. The article argues that it is not just the author’s reading voice but also the full acoustic range of the performance with its sound effects and silences should be given as much attention as the text (i.e. words on the page). Similarly, the scope of criticism should be broadened to include intermedia projects and the metapoetic discourse about voices and sounds. We would thus come to better understanding of the multi-sensory nature of literature and its workings as an interpersonal, reciprocal communication of individual speakers regardless of what they have to say (i.e. its semantic or pragmatic content).

The article is concerned with the expansion of poetry recordings in the audio sphere of contemporary culture, and in particular the emergence, within the poetry-reading audio segment, of new poems read/performed by their authors. While previously poetry would usually get to their readers first in print, nowadays it is increasingly common for poems to reach their audience via the digital media, with the (illusory) direct presence of the poet-performer. However, it is that very presence that reduces the reader’s interpretative freedom. Moreover, it radically redefines the traditional model of poetic communication based on the printed word and language as a system of discrete signs. With the mediatization of communication by the new digital media we are faced with a number of fundamental problems concerning the ontology of the intermedia artwork, its effect on the listener and the way it tends to shape the listener’s interpretation. That interpretation will always be different from the semantically oriented understanding of the written/printed text. The challenges posed by this new format and ways of addressing it are discussed in connection with two poetic intermedia projects, Marcin Świetlicki’s Wiersze (autor, lektor i przypadkowe lafiryndy) [Poems (author, reader and casual hussies] (book and 2 CDs, 2022) and Krystyna Miłobędzka and Hanna “Rani” Raniszewska’s ciebie ode mnie [(For) you from me] (book and CD, 2022).

This article outlines and discusses the main problems in the analysis of score-poems – experimental poetic texts incorporating or imitating musical notation – on the basis of a handful of hitherto unexamined score-poems collected form the archives and niche arts publications. The score-poems of Janusz Skarżyński (who also wrote under the pen name Anonim Cybernetysta), Bogusław Michnik and Piotr Rypson are examined on two levels, literary history and theory of literature. A comparative analysis of the score-poems produced in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s reveals a shift from text-dependent linearity towards polylinearity and innovatory graphics. Moreover, subsuming the score-poems under the rubric of intermedia (home to multiple voices with a problematic function and status) opens them up for the appropriate research probes.

Marcin Świetlicki is a poet who keeps publishing his poems in traditional book form and, more recently, a performance artist busy recording and marketing their audio/ musical versions. Clearly, he operates in two separate cultural spheres and has to play two rather different character roles. Similarly, his works come in two variants – the visual and the acoustic, or the written and the voiced – which are by no means isomorphic. This article looks at the functioning of the latter element, and in particular the reception of the audio poetic work by way of listening experience. It involves a psychosomatic balance is occasionally disturbed by deliberate shifts from one narrative order to the other, the world of which one tells to the world in which one tells. To explain the functioning of such transgressions this article draws on the notion of metalepsis in the sense which it has acquired in modern narratology.

This article presents a contextual analysis of ‘Chopin without a piano’, an ambitious intermedia performance scripted and produced in 2013 by Michał Zadara and Barbara Wysocka in collaboration with the conductor Jacek Kaspszyk. Here it is discussed within the framework of some selected legacy practices and literalizations of Chopin’s music, chief among them the arrangement conventions (including Peter Szendy’s idea of arrangement as a projection of a personal, idiosyncratic musical history). What makes the ‘Chopin without a piano’ project unique is the substitution of the actual piano parts with the spoken word, i.e. a string of descriptions, emotional reactions and expert comments carefully orchestrated to bring out the full range of the phonic, performative and semantic potential of the human voice. In its essence it is an interesting attempt to roll out an amplitude of voices enacting an intermedia version and equivalent of the musical narrative.

The aim of this article is to present the personal files contained in the Archives of the University of Lviv, examined during a query in Lviv in 2016. A quick look at these archives contributes to the biography of Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński and his employment in 1939 as a university professor. Since these are probably one of the last documents signed by Boy-Żeleński, it is interesting to focus on the biography written by Żeleński, called in the article his last self-creation.