ref.
this must be my day of birth
eyes wide open nanny get gone
no more suckling at any breast
no chance for taking backwards steps
and so I snatch at my pen so fragile
the one always needs tying down with chains
else it’ll tear it’ll kick and it’ll howl
though I am a poet please live and let live
for God for me for you
why muddy the self struggle in the dirt
why hike cross town on a bus in the freezing cold
when a friendly hand will help you just write
ref.
this must be my day of birth
a wild cur chasing me through town
no more clutching at stones
my fault in it somewhere too
I see Cerberus approaching
his mouth watering gnawing consuming
he who guards the border between men and beasts
the Styx runs with water, the world just full of itself
a cover and a title and a font
we play chess though you know nothing of the throne
you wanted to dance, and have danced, and now need to shut your mouth
this train rides on, its wheels blazing, smoke and sparks
ref.
this must be my day of birth
a cricket playing his fiddle for an age now
the shadow of melody swaying slow
hanging as if it were a stolen verse
weaving and cutting and pasting
after all, even a toy can be the form in question
all we have in anthologies every single friend and foe
we’re in charge while you only have your God
you only have silence on your side
so don’t dither round yourself up in unions
and pay dues and clap hands emigrate form a club
it wasn’t poetry the poet married today
and so to live and labour and lounge
yet all I have to do – is write
you can take rob hide or simply burn to the ground
though no one can strip the poet’s taste in rhymes.
check out the video in our MULTIMEDIA section
translated by Marek Kazmierski
download the text in English and Polish original pdf here
| Paweł Gawroński Born in 1982. Following a quiet childhood, in a village near Włocławek, the capital of the Kujawy region, Pawel has always been busy writing, both poetry and prose. First published in May 2005, though in June of same year unfortunately had to leave Poland. His current residence is in the UK, where he struggles to continue his literary existence. |
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| Paweł Gawroński Urodziłem się 5 października 1982 roku. Dzieciństwo spędzałem spokojnie, na wsi polskiej położonej niedaleko stolicy Kujaw-Włocławka. Od najmłodszych lat wiązałem swoje życie z pisaniem, czy to prozy, czy poezji. Zaowocowało to debiutem w maju 2005 roku. W czerwcu tej samej wiosny musiałem musiałem niestety opuścić kraj, stąd moja obecność na wyspie, gdzie staram się kontynuować zamiłowania literackie. |
36,6oC
I am lost. Now, I have to start believing in the one, common and holy pass which will lead me out of these lands. I stop at each and every crossing. I look to the left, look to the right, no cars, move along.
I avoid people whose hands are as dry as leaflets. Passing little girls dolled up for their First Communion, I smell the hairspray fixing plastic lilies in their hair.
Saps dissolve in the sinews of polished benches, the heatwave stretching pavements to braking point. I’m getting closer. Neighborhood women returning from afternoon mass. They do not sweat, because each summer water blooms in their blood, heavy with eternity.
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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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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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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…
marek kazmierski & aga kucharko
So, after months of micro-hype, OFF_ served its first meal to the public on Thursday. Considering literary diners in London today are spoilt for choice when it comes to spoken word events, how did it all taste?
The ingredients (books, films, projector, screen, posters, etcrrrrra) which should have been ready weeks ago only arrived at the Bedroom Bar with hours to spare. The first guests were already sitting down when head chef Bartek Dziadosz got busy with his Mac pots’n'pans. Maitre d’ Marek Kazmierski, as is typical of catering staff, had had one too many by the time serving time came up. But at least the main dishes of the evening, Lilian Tietjen and Sam Taradash, were fresh and in plentiful supply.
Owner of the Deconstruction Project chain of art eateries, Aga Kucharko, flew in late to have all the furniture shoved around, posters put up and guests charmed.
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First was the word (review of ZERO, a film by Paweł Borowski)
ZERO, the début film by Pawel Borowski, is another example of the ongoing crisis in Polish screenwriting. What good is excellent direction, cinematography, acting or sound production – even if it is the best of its kind – if the most important organ in the body of the film – the script – is poorly thought through?
It’s not possible, thanks to its unusual narrative construction, to compress the plot of “Zero” down to a few lines. It seems the hub of this multi-layered story is the figure of the director of an unnamed company, who hires two rather wacky, down-at-heel detectives to follow his wife who, as we later learn, has rented a small apartment to host meetings with her lover. To spice up this narrative thread, Borowski dissects it with other plot lines: lingering shots direct our attention towards other characters – a taxi driver, newspaper seller, a nurse, a go-go dancer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Initially, we follow these with interest, expecting something we haven’t yet seen before. The scope of this strategy brings to mind Anderson’s “Magnolia”, in the distance accentuated with echoes of Iñárritu and Arriaga. We are curious as to how this wildly varied group of individuals will be brought together by the all-powerful screenwriter’s pen.
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Kinoteka Film Festival, 2010, triple film review
Let’s start this piece of vicious writing on a positive note. Nothing screened this year could be anywhere near as dire as Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 “Katyn”. I saw it in London last year, rooted to my cinema seat by the sheer awfulness of what I was witnessing – the dead-icon imagery, the sub-soap opera dialogue, the giant waste of the best acting talent Poland has to offer, the paper thin characters, the plot schisms, the editing mess… a few said it was good for Polish school kids to go see some of the history which communists had hidden for several generations, but school kids want their history strong and vital, not dumbed down and deathly dull.
It’s interesting to note none of the delighted reviews in the Guardian or Times or other high-brow publications actually talked about the film – they all focused on Wajda’s losing his own father in Katyn and about the moving theme of the story. Think I’m being insensitive and wickedly arrogant? Be honest, which is more important to you: what’s on at your local cinema today or what battles are being fought in the name of freedom, even as we speak? I sympathise with Wajda’s loss (both of my grandfathers had spent time in Nazi camps, though both survived), but films must be judged on merit and not personal feelings – if you are going to tackle big themes in your work, especially if it is reaching millions of impressionable hearts and minds, serve them well.
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…
Piotr Siwecki talks with Marek Kazmierski about OFF_PRESS, new books, old stories and more;
PIOTR SIWECKI: OFF_PRESS origins…
MAREK KAŹMIERSKI: Like so many memorable things in the world, OFF_ was born of bad blood. Marcin Piniak and myself (Marcin writing in Polish, I in English) met writing for Nowy Czas, a newspaper printed in London which had ambitions of being the highbrow choice for the emigre Polish community in the UK. Too bad it didn’t happen. We both quit the paper and kept on drinking, moaning, dreaming. But that gets tiresome after a while, so this time last year Marcin, Kinga Pilich (a young publishing student) and myself set up OFF_Magazine, an on-line bilingual literary journal. It was meant to tell as many stories in as many languages (literal, visual, multi-sensory) as we could find, but such big nets are hard to handle. We got submissions from all over the world, some great stuff, some worse than woeful. Then we decided to run an international writing competition, then publish an anthology of the short-listed writers, then make a film to go with it, then run some literary events to publicise the whole shebang… Read the rest of this entry »
Interview with Piotr Czerwinski – Justyna Daniluk
They say you are the voice of the most recent wave of Polish migration…
That voice means over two million desperados, if I correctly recall the latest statistics. They speak for themselves, with their own voices. In fact it’s more than speech, they shout, though no one seems to want to listen or is pretending not to. I only speak for some, perhaps unwittingly for others, but certainly not in the name of them all. In fact, I’m pretty sure I only speak for myself! But thank you for the compliment. Without reverting to metaphor, I think it’s quite a responsibility, to speak on behalf of others, especially in the name of a vast group of others. Also, belonging to such a group is a challenge. All my life I’ve avoided being “part” of anything like the plague. I’ve never identified with anyone and anything else, refused to make declarations, display emblems, wear ideals on my sleeve. I was afraid my independence would be lost, which is after all not to be surrendered. But it’s only since I emigrated that I finally realised that I do identify with some kind of “crowd”, that I belong to it, and that I’m actually proud of the fact, that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It happened when I was watching the news on British television and heard a newsreader say something about Poles, maybe even “the Polish problem” in this part of the world, as it seems a few people are fans of this phrase. And then I understood that I am one of these Poles. One of them, one of US. This was hard, trust me, it cut me in half. Being cut in half is another thing which I’ve avoided like the plague, for as long as a I could.
In “Przebiegum Życiae” I pose the question: “Are we different? No, hell, not at all. Only our surnames are spelt different, but this means nothing, no one can pronounce them anyway, no one apart from us. We are the union of many in one, one person who’s received a collective kick up the arse…”
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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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