Paweł Kaczmarski

The article examines the idea of year 2008 – the beginning of the so-called Great Recession – as a potential turning point in contemporary Polish poetry. Most of the authors commonly associated with the so-called “new Polish political poetry” have published their first books around 2008, and it was also around that year that the work of certain important young authors seems to have shifted from a relatively traditional form to a more experimental one, allowing them to accurately grasp the anxiety and precariousness inherently tied to the social experience of the young generation. I link these shifts to the issue of reference and dereferentialisation of sign/language under financial capitalism. Whereas pre-2008, the dereferentialisation of language might have seemed like an ongoing and somewhat ambivalent process, for the young generation it constitutes the very foundation of their everyday existence.

This essay aims to describe the difference between ‘barbarism’ and ‘anarchism’ in contemporary Polish poetry. Analysing the critical voices in the wake of a well-known essay by Karol Maliszewski, in which he coined the term ‘barbarism’ to refer to certain contemporary Polish poets, we come to the conclusion that the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ poetry after 1989 has been based solely on the literary personae of the various authors. Thus we claim that the generational shift between the poets of brulion and the younger ‘anarchist’ poets may be seen as leading to a certain new kind of persona, which is, at the same time, more coherent (due partly to their clear political statements) and more independent of the poem (due to their non-literary sociopolitical activities).

The article offers a re-reading of an influential series of critical essays and commentaries published by Igor Stokfiszewski and various authors in 2007, as part of a debate on the role and importance of zaangażowanie (roughly “political commitment”) in contemporary poetry and criticism in Poland. In reconstructing the underlying logic of the debate, it aims to emphasise certain details and complexities that were so far largely ignored by critics, in order to point out indirect and often unexpected methodological, philosophical and political implications of some of the views put forward in the course of the exchange.