POLISH POETRY NOW

A Reading and Discussion

with poets

Tadeusz Dabrowski, Bozena Keff,

Marzanna Kielar, and Tomasz Rozycki

and translators

Bill Johnston and Benjamin Paloff

at

Poets House, New York City

November 3–4, 2009

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York, Poets House, and Zephyr Press, in cooperation with Boston Review and Poetry Society of America, present POLISH POETRY NOW – a reading and discussion with four contemporary Polish poets, Tadeusz Dabrowski, Bozena Keff, Marzanna Kielar, and Tomasz Rozycki, together with acclaimed translators Bill Johnston and Benjamin Paloff. A discussion of contemporary Polish poetry will take place on Tuesday, November 3, 7-9 PM, and a bilingual reading on Wednesday, November 4, 7-9 PM. Both reading and discussion will be hosted at the new Battery Park City home of the esteemed New York literary institution Poets House, at 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282.

Coming from varied generations and backgrounds, Tadeusz Dabrowski, Bozena Keff, Marzanna Kielar, and Tomasz Rozycki represent a rich spectrum of poetic goings-on in contemporary Poland, and advance, in their quite different ways, the twentieth-century Polish tradition of the intellectually engaged lyric. All four poets will be reading their work in New York City for the first time; and while two of them – Kielar and Rozycki – have read in other American metropolises (Chicago and Boston, respectively), Keff and Dabrowski will be making their North American debuts. The two New York events will be followed by a reading and discussion with the four poets, together with translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, at Harvard University.

In addition to the occasion to hear these poets read, this two-city tour also presents a rare opportunity for an American public to hear them – together with two of the foremost contemporary translators from Polish into English, Bill Johnston and Benjamin Paloff – discuss not only their work and poetics, but the state of Polish poetry today and its prospects in the future. Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wislawa Szymborska have long been household names in America (and not only in the households of poets); but where does Polish poetry stand now, thirteen years after Szymborska’s Nobel Prize and five years after Milosz’s death? What poetic, philosophical, and historical concerns fuel the work of contemporary Polish poets? And what do they have to say to – and how will they be heard by – American readers?

Three of the poets have books published or forthcoming in English with Zephyr Press: Marzanna Kielar’s Salt Monody (2006) launched Zephyr’s Polish Poetry Series and was quickly followed by Tomasz Rozycki’s The Forgotten Keys (2007), while Tadeusz Dabrowski’s first book in English is forthcoming in spring 2010. An excerpt from Bozena Keff’s acclaimed book-length poem On Mother and the Fatherland can be found in the new PEN America Journal 11: Make-Believe.

Tomasz Rozycki will be the first writer in residence sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute through its Poland-U.S. Artists-in-Residence Exchange Program. From October 25 to November 21 he will be hosted by the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, www.vermontstudiocenter.org.

Detailed participant bios follow.

For more information about the poetry reading and discussion, images, and interviews, or about Mr. Rozycki’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center, contact Bill Martin by phone at 212-239-7300, ext. 3006 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

LISTINGS:

What:            Polish Poetry Now

Who:             Poets: Tadeusz Dabrowski, Bozena Keff, Marzanna Kielar, Tomasz Rozycki

                     Translators: Bill Johnston and Benjamin Paloff

When:           Tuesday, November 3

                     7:00 PM: Discussion with the poets and translators Johnston and Paloff

                     Wednesday, November 4

                     7:00 PM: Reading with the poets: Dabrowski, Keff, Kielar, Rozycki

Where:          Poets House, 10 River Terrace (Battery Park City), New York, NY 10282.

Directions:    By subway: 1,2,3,A,C to Chambers St.; by bus: M20, M22 to North End Ave.

Admission:    General Admission: $10; Students/Seniors: $7; Poets House and

                     Poetry Society of America Members: Free

More information: www.PolishCulture-NYC.org, www.PoetsHouse.org

PARTICIPANT BIOS:

Tadeusz Dabrowski [tah-dáy-oosh dome-bróff-ski] (b. 1979) has published five books of poetry, including Czarny Kwadrat (Black Square, 2009), for which he has just been awarded, on October 10th this year, the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize (the oldest independent Polish literary award, granted by the Geneva-based Koscielski Foundation. Both as poet and as editor of the literary bimonthly Topos, Dabrowski is an active interlocutor in the often passionate discourse of contemporary Polish poetry, but his intellectually and formally playful poetry is no less an inheritor of the laconic, reflective tradition of Herbert, Szymborska, and Rozewicz. “For Dabrowski,” writes critic Tadeusz Nyczek, “our world is made up of countless inducements to take a look at ‘the other side’ – under the shoe sole, under the skin, behind the curtain… and what he finds there is truly astonishing.” Previously he has received the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and the Foundation for Polish Culture Award (2006). His work has been translated into thirteen languages, and has appeared in English in Boston Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, AGNI Online, and Poetry Wales. His first book in English, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, will be released in spring 2010 with Zephyr Press. He is the editor of the and lives in Gdansk.

Bozena Keff [bo-zhéna keff] (b. 1948) has been well known in Poland (under the name Bozena Uminska) as a feminist literary scholar and critic, and is author of the acclaimed Figure with Shadow: Depictions of Jewish Women in Polish Literature (2001). While Keff has written poetry since the 1960s, her first book of verse appeared only in 2000. Her second volume, the hybrid, book-length poem On Mother and the Fatherland, took the Polish literary world by storm when it appeared in 2008, and was nominated for the prestigious NIKE Award this year. The book deals with antisemitism and a daughter’s fraught relationship with her Holocaust-survivor mother; and though it is quite different, it has been compared for its content, innovativeness, and devastating affect to American works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Ariana Reines’s The Cow. An excerpt from it, “Lara Croft,” translated by Alissa Valles, will be published in English in Pen America Journal 11 (Make-Believe).

Marzanna Kielar [mar-zhán-nah kyéll-ar] (b. 1963) has published four collections of verse: Sacra conversazione (1992), Materia prima (1999), Umbra (2002), and Monodia (2006). Salt Monody, a selection of her work in English translation by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, appeared with Zephyr Press in 2006. Her densely lyrical, slow-moving, and private poems would seem to coalesce, like diamonds, under tremendous phenomenological pressure. She herself describes her poetics thus: “it is as if I stood face to face with what cannot be named. For me, poetry is an attempt to familiarize myself with what strikes me as final. I try to give it a name – for myself.” Kielar’s awards include the Koscielski Foundation Prize (1993), the Vilenica Crystal (1995), the Hubert Burda Prize (2000), and she was short-listed for the prestigious Nike Award in 2000. She took part in the International Writing Program in Iowa in 2002 and in the International Writers Workshop in Hong Kong in 2007. She lives in Warsaw.

Tomasz Rozycki [tóh-mahsh roo-zhít-ski] (b. 1970) is a poet, critic, and translator living in the Silesian city of Opole, in southwestern Poland. He has published seven books since the mid-1990s, including the Koscielski Prize-winning epic poem Dwanascie Stacji (Twelve Stations, 2004) and the sonnet cycle Kolonie (Colonies, 2006), which was nominated for a NIKE Award. The Forgotten Keys, a selection from his first five books translated into English by Mira Rosenthal, was published by Zephyr Press in 2007. Rozycki’s family shared the fate of Adam Zagajewski in having been forcibly expelled from Poland’s eastern territories when they were annexed to the Soviet Union after World War II; although he was born in 1970 and grew up in western Poland, his work is similarly informed by the moral and historical imagination of that upheaval, by an understanding of borders as simultaneously abridging and enforcing distance, and by the vagaries of personal and collective memory. He is the first poet to take part in the Polish Cultural Institute’s Poland-U.S. Artists-in-Residency Exchange Program, and will be hosted this autumn by the Vermont Studio Center.

Bill Johnston (b. 1960) is Associate Professor of Linguistics and of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Born in England and educated at Oxford, he lived in Poland for most of the 1980s before moving to the United States. His numerous translations from Polish include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay (2004), three books by Magdalena Tulli, and Tadeusz Rozewicz’s New Poems (2007) (all of which were published by Archipelago Press; New Poems furthermore was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize, and for it Mr. Johnston received the first Found in Translation Award from the Polish Cultural Institutes in New York and London and the Polish Book Institute). His translation of Peregrinary, a selection of poetry by this year’s Nike Award winner Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, was published by Zephyr in 2008.

Benjamin Paloff (b. 1976) is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and poetry co-editor for Boston Review. His translations include Dorota Maslowska’s acclaimed novel Snow White and Russian Red (Grove 2005) and play A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, as well as Marek Bienczyk’s novel Tworki (Northwestern UP, 2007). Mr. Paloff has published other translations, essays, reviews, and his own poetry in periodicals such as The Nation, The Paris Review, A Public Space, Words without Borders, and Jacket. He is the recipient of a 2008 NEA Fellowship for Poetry.

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York (www.PolishCulture-NYC.org), established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United States and Poland, both through American exposure to Poland’s cultural achievements, and through exposure of Polish artists and scholars to American trends, institutions, and professional counterparts. The Institute initiates, organizes, promotes, and produces a broad range of cultural events in theater, music, film, literature, and the fine arts. It has collaborated with Film Society of Lincoln Center; The Museum of Modern Art; Jewish Museum; PEN World Voices Festival; Poetry Society of America; Yale University; Lincoln Center Festival (Kalkwerk in 2009); BAM (Krum by TR Warszawa in BAM’s 2007 Next Wave Festival, which received a Village Voice Obie Award); Art at St. Ann’s (TR Warszawa’s Macbeth, 2008); Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center; and many more. PCI co-produced the off-Broadway run of Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, which ran on Broadway in 2009.

Poets House (www.PoetsHouse.org), founded in 1985 by Stanley Kunitz (U.S. Poet Laureate) and Elizabeth Kray, is a national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. With over 50,000 volumes of poetry—including books, journals, chapbooks, audio and video tapes, and digital media—its collection is among the most comprehensive, open-access collections of poetry in the United States and is the foundation for all its programs and services. Each year Poets House presents over 200 public programs, including panels, lectures, readings, writing workshops and walking tours in New York City and nationwide. From 1990 to 2007, Poets House was located in an intimate loft in Soho. In September 2009, it moved to its new home at Ten River Terrace in Battery Park City, a rent-free tenant of the Battery Park City Authority, where it enjoys sweeping views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty.

Zephyr Press (www.ZephyrPress.org), a non-profit arts and education 501(c)(3) organization, publishes literary titles that foster deeper understanding of cultures and languages. Since its first forays into American poetry and prose in 1980, Zephyr has expanded its list to include a series of Russian and Slavic literature, and an East Asian line of books. Zephyr has also initiated the series of contemporary writing Adventures in Poetry and a new series of contemporary Polish poetry, which began with its publication in 2002 of Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird, an anthology of the youngest generation of Polish poets, and has continued with three books to-date – by Marzanna Kielar, Tomasz Rozycki, and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki – and three more forthcoming in the next year – including books by Tadeusz Dabrowski and Milosz Biedrzycki. To further its commitment to cross-cultural exchange, Zephyr Press also organizes bilingual readings, translation workshops in schools, and other educational and cultural events.

Boston Review (www.BostonReview.net) is a nonpartisan magazine of ideas: animated by hope, committed to equality and reason, convinced that the imagination eludes political categories. It sees each issue as a public space where people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions and bring this openness to bear on today’s most pressing issues. Boston Review’s mission requires that its editors shun polemic and partisanship, uphold the highest standards of argument and evidence, value ambition and originality, seek widely diverse perspectives, and make complex ideas accessible. It has a national readership of men and women who are engaged in the challenge of today’s world; who want deeper coverage of current affairs than the mainstream media offers; and who see the arts as an essential part of the human enterprise. Founded in 1975, Boston Review has always been an independent, nonprofit institution with support from individual donors and grants.

Poetry Society of America (www.PoetrySociety.org), the nation's oldest poetry organization, was founded in 1910 for the purpose of creating a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry. W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens were among the early members who envisioned a society that would not only be a local meeting place for poets, but a center from which a national poetry renaissance would emerge. Current members, such as John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich, carry on their great tradition. Through a diverse array of programs, initiatives, contests, and twelve different awards, the Poetry Society of America works to build a larger audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the art, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.