- Prace prosimy nadsyłać w terminie od 1 kwietnia do 1 maja 2010.
- Każdy uczestnik może zgłaszać nie mniej niż trzy, nie więcej niż pięc utwórów.
- Udział w konkursie nie wymaga opłat.
- Zgłoszenia, zawierające informacje kontaktowe uczestników (adres, email lub telefon), powinny być nadsyłane na adres: konkursOFF@zeszytypoetyckie.pl
- Informacje osobowe uczestników chronione będą ustawą o ochronie danych osobowych.
- W konkursie nie mogą brać udziału osoby bezpośrednio związane z OFF_PRESS, Apart Arts ani Zeszyty Poetyckie, oceniający ani osoby z nimi spokrewnione.
- Nadesłane zestawy wierszy oceni jury w składzie: Dawid Jung i Marcin Orliński.
- Poszczególne teksty mogą być publikowane w OFF_PRESS/Zeszytach Poetyckich przy zachowaniu pełnych praw autorskich twórców.
- Spośród poetów wyróżnionych w pierwszym etapie konkursu, przyznamy nagrodę główną jednej osobie.
- Nagrodą główną jest publikacja zbioru wierszy w jednym tomie, również w obu wersjach językowych.
- Wyróżnionych autorów opublikujemy w antologii, każdego po przetłumaczeniu w obu wersjach językowych.
- Autorzy tekstów otrzymają po dwa egzemplarze antologii/filmu.
- Zgłoszenie tekstu w konkursie oznacza całkowite przyjęcie powyższych warunków.
Kontakt
Konkurs OFF_ZP ’10
ul. Gdańska 77,
62-200,
Gniezno
Polska
A step or two east, or west, and all you see changes…
Lawrence Durrell
Who can, resting, slowly turn their confusion to clarity?
Tao-Te-King
2006 -10 -01
Slowly, I am learning the streets of Ryde by heart. The nooks and the crannies of this town creep beneath my skin and into my irises. Some days, I wake at midnight and could swear voices speaking Polish are floating up from the street.
I was joking when I said that, in my altered state, I feel like Emanuel Swedenborg. I feel closer to ghosts than to the living. Daily thoughts escape me of late, same as my breasts evade my bra: engorged and pregnant with possibility. My dreams peopled with the dead. They come in the form of sedum shrubs, flower-people in stiff suits speckled with wax, wearing linen robes. Hanging above, trying to enter me, root by root. I recall other fragments of dream: indigo light from a gas lamp, a wooden tub filled with suds.
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WEAVER
Twin layers on the edge of pattern
past and present.
Empties, fulls, fulls, empties
Granny Sania whispers.
Granny Sania lost her senses
last year.
Recalling Granny Sania
I feel my own senses loosening, or
my senses losing me
(the order is inconsequential).
The air turning thick
enters the mouth like a gag, one
you want to light and hear explode.
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FAREWELL TO POETRY
Here I am. Seeking love and peace.
For many years, I have been wandering dug up streets
and that which I see as the world probably is my world,
that which I feel as life – life is
though that’s nothing certain.
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In a world where ugly, soulless e-readers are looking to displace books, I’m taking more and more interest in books as physical objects. Over at Caustic Cover Critic, they have ten upcoming covers for Penguin’s “Central European Classics” series. All of the covers were designed by gray318, a rad cover designer with the name of a robot. I love when books are designed to sit beautifully together on your shelf. The series looks great, both in covers and content. It includes two of my favorites, depressing philosopher E.M. Cioran (who has some of the best titles ever) and depressing novelist Thomas Bernard. See all the covers here…
courtesy of The Faster Times
Germany greeted me with chewing gum. I found it, right under my feet, on the floor of the central station in Dresden, changing trains. Likely dropped by a teenage girl or some suited sort, who’d eaten something a little too greasy in the buffet. The shop was empty and the packet of gum was lying there, next to my shoe. I picked it up and stuffed it into my coat pocket with a thickly gloved hand. I didn’t want any nosey shopkeeper to think I was a thief. The gum was divine. It tasted of delicate mint and reminded me of all the gums I’d had when little. They too had been delicate and soft. No lost fillings. You could mould them with your tongue and toy with their shape in your mouth. I thought, since Germans are this welcoming this early on, that I would feel at home here. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is the 21st of April. One month until the opening of the FESTA FATUORUM festival in Gniezno. Over 140 poets have already sent in work for the competition which closes on the 1st of May. More is to come.
The jurors from Zeszyty Poetyckie will then then have seven days in which to choose the list of finalists. On the 7th of May, they will send me the best 20-30 entries. They will also invite the short-listed poets to be at the FESTA FATUORUM festival in Gniezno, opening on the 21st of May, where the ultimate winner will be announced.
On the 8th of May, I will set off on a two week journey around Poland (plane tickets already booked). Just me, my video camera and a bag of poems. As I travel around, I will film everything I see and translate the poems. I will also try and visit as many Polish poets as I can.
Muses willing, I will arrive in Gniezno for the opening of FESTA FATUORUM, where I will film the festival, interview the poets I will have been translating, then head back to London to edit the film and finalise the translations.
The translations will then appear in two separate volumes of poetry – the collected anthology of 20-30 poets (3-5 poems each) and the winning poet’s own individual collection. The film of my trip of discovery will then be given away free on DVD with every copy of the two books (which will be available separately or as a twin set).
marek kazmierski, OFF_PRESS londyn
September is a delightful month. Summer is slowly bowing out, with autumn yet to make an entrance. Jesianą dni są ciepłe I ładne – autumn days are warm and nice. In towns and cities, the change is marked by the slow ebb of pavement tables and chairs and the return of the leafleteer to every street corner, while in the country the transformation is more subtle. Gradually leaves lose their sheen and slowly, as the trees start to shut down for the winter, they turn yellow, then orange and russet and finally brown before giving up entirely and drifting slowly earthwards, to collect in drifts and piles wherever they may lie undisturbed, homes for insects and rodents, hiding dead dogs and patches of mud.
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SCREW POET
what is it you do that they gnaw their own veins
cut wrists with fingernails in toilets too shallowly to kill
(though some wish they could)
smearing shoe polish on their hands faces crotches
letting it all go to hell and burn no good to anyone now
prison games last
(outside of greenery outside of the poet sipping his beer)
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1. Alexander
Alexander von Kler, son of Austrian émigrés. Born in Belitor at the start of 1958. In all fairness, a man whose life sort of passed him by. Never good at anything in particular. Not even petty crime. Which is what he was – a small time crook. Always caught in the act, most often thieving, pickpocketing or pilfering from supermarket shelves. Then spending most of his life behind bars. First in a borstal, then a proper jail. This son of Austrian émigrés.
He did try his luck with an Elizabeth Moorey, but it didn’t pan out. Unsurprisingly. Again, the fault of his ill-starred nature. In 1994, while serving time in Penstyle, one of his usual retreats, Alexander was told of the tumour. He was not surprised, having been a habitual smoker since his earliest days, going through up to four packs a day. Which is probably why news of the illness didn’t make any particular sort of impression on him. Some two year later, doing time following the theft of a Volvo automobile, an unexpected visitor brought him a proposition from the Institute of Development for the Good of Humankind. Its representatives had selected him as a potential candidate for their research. Following his impending demise, Alexander’s body would be divided into three parts and then placed in three separate departments of the Institute, located in three distant parts of the globe. Without pausing to ponder for long, von Kler accepted the offer. What other disaster could fate throw his way? And so, a few days after his death, on the 17th of June 1998, Alexander’s body was carved threefold with laser beams and packed off to three separate ends of the earth. The flesh of this son of Austrian émigrés.
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OF OWN ACCORD
Only for a moment did I forget
that it’s now. My station of honest memory.
Hiatus of moments worn like satin.
Mistaken leads followed. Of own accord. You can
miss scabs, the grazing of cuticles.
The patina of silvery blood. Let’s revisit those
Conversations. The stucco of dried branches, leaves
of flint. These etchings, left over from childhood.
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In the spring of ’89, I had long hair and a mere seventeen years under my belt. Poland was readying itself for the now infamous June elections, set to kill off communism, though my father suspected that instead of freedom they would bring a swarm of Soviet tanks into our streets, not unlike previous such attempts had done in other parts of Central Europe, where they had tried to win their democratic freedoms the peaceful way. My father was a freedom fighter by trade, this of course before he learnt other, less confrontational forms of employ. He’d spent the last great War firing his home-made machine gun and blowing up trains. Unfortunately, the freedom fighting movement he had signed his life up to was supported by the Polish Government in Exile, then based in London. When the War ended and Red Rule begun, it was replaced by a government which did not look kindly on the likes of my father and his fellow partisans, all because they liked their freedom so much they were willing to fight for it.
And so, that fateful spring of ’89, my father took my seventeen year old self aside and said: Son, we are sending you on a little trip to London. When the tanks get here, you will stay over there, in exile, just like those lads who recently escaped in a long-distance lorry, and all will be well. Don’t worry about us, we’ll manage somehow.
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“The information I had about Sopot was really limited: I resisted buying a travel guide, researching the area, or following a predetermined route. The journey had to be a meander, a ‘wandering walk’, that is, a ‘psycho-geographic’ journey and not a tourist trip, I wanted to provide more than just a recorded journey but actually feel like I had taken people there. I wanted to get the idea across of the delights and insights into visiting somewhere for the first time that is seen afresh with new eyes, and I hope to have captured that spontaneity in my images.”
38 year old Fine Art student, Katrina Burtles, set out with a simple intention. To travel from Southend library to Sopot library and document everything in between for an exhibition… read more by clicking on the foto on the right
i laze
in fly-like sticky tango of sweet trickles
I sieve chitinous light through the slits of hundreds of eyes
lightly ever so lightly I am taken by persistent buzzing
is it only with me after all ah all right I will bring you breakfast
(not that I would go blindly into the fire. but his
ratio of muscle to hair is quite so so) I think
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OK, Nige has finally gone mad;
Zakopower at Queen Elizabeth Hall?
In the style of silent movie accompaniment, Nigel Kennedy and selected musicians perform a soundtrack to accompany a screening of the legendary 1973 World Cup qualifying match between England and Poland?
Chopin Super Group?
Proper OFF_… to book tickets, click Nige to your right!
Kiedy Polska weszła do Unii, wszyscy, zdawałoby się, myśleli tylko o tym ile rąk do pracy wyemigrowało m.in. na Wyspy Brytyjskie. Dzisiaj okazuje się, że ci, którzy wyjechali, to nie tylko bezwolni „fizyczni” do pracy na budowach, ale także tacy, którzy w warunkach emigracyjnych chcą stworzyć, ba, tworzą nową literaturę. Czy Polska to widzi? Niech Polska popatrzy.
OFF_Wywiad by Justyna Daniluk, dzis opublikowany w Zeszytach Poetyckich – kliknij na foto by czytac do konca…
National Self-Harming
Sometimes, when writing about Poland, I find myself crying. When the tears come, my first reaction is to check myself for self-pity. Am I getting sentimental? Is it automatic need? Everyone needs a good sob now and then. Or is it the overwhelming power of my own prose that has me crying with joy?
Ignoring the comedy value of that last sentence, the answer is far from funny. Poland, it seems to me, has been raped by history. I know this is a dangerous, discomforting statement, and I’ll be contradicting it soon enough, but first let me elaborate.
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