Katarzyna Ciemiera

The article reviews of Aleksandra Kremer’s book The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry. Performance and Recording after World War II (2021), which is the first to describe and scrutinise the phenomenon related to the formation of the modern culture of poetry audio realisations in Poland during the second half of the twentieth century. This phenomenon relates to the growing interest of poets in authorial audio realisations of their poetry that crosses the boundaries of the text by harnessing new technologies to distribute, manipulate and reproduce sound. This review aims to situate the book in a context of studies on the relationship between literature and sound in the age of secondary orality and to present its potential influence on the discussion regarding the function of the latest literature in the contemporary audio-visual culture.

This article sheds new light on Konrad Góra’s Nie (2016) in a sound studies’ perspective. It opposes putting the poetic volume as minorities’ voice of representation under the poetry of political involvement. Instead of allowing this, it proposes an interpretation of this book through the voice par excellence, which does not subordinate to speech and exists in his bodily, phonic shape. The point of departure is, firstly; a recognition that Nie subsists in intermedia realizations, which emphasize the significance of phonetic voice comprehension, secondly; an underline that starting this poetic volume by JiříKolář’s tale, make possible to perceive this one in the oral context. The proposal for interpretation exposes the new understanding of the notion of involvement in poetry. It means that the involvement is not the representation of the Other but his embodiment as the independent voice in the text.