One of Poland’s most dynamic and inventive poets minces language(s) from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene to both interrogate and celebrate the gristle of existence
Medusa-cutletusa
One editor wanted every title font in bold.
One mathematician invented zero from nothingness
& this zero’s behind a lot of misery.
Before being printed,
poetry is a dance of thoughts –
combine divine,
comb divine,
co-divine,
co-decline.
Oh so very online – some nutjob.
Poetry is a dance of thoughts.
Injoy yourself.
Where Is the Hair
by the Pixies, you know it,
even you. Hair is my mind,
apparently he’s way more fucked up
than you’d think possible;
gdzie jest mój self,
my buddy’s mind?
Thalassotherapy
Send breath into the soak
in the jazzy shadow
a wiggly-worm jacuzzi in a deluge,
to cleave the strange from the stupid;
while across the street, shrooms.
This poet
won’t be forgotten,
cuz he won’t even get to
be remembered.
Does anybody remember this?
Does the one who was
supposed to remember remember?
Remind me of what I was saying.
– I don’t remember.
A Wave of Squatters
… so imagine
a wave of squatters
storming the Sejm.
The television records them from behind.
The cameraman runs excitedly among them:
a wave of grey, more holes than coats,
with coarse, stringy hair & stiff, grubby beards
pours in like a mudslide,
breaking through the line of law enforcement
breaking through the parliamentarians
& fumigating the benches with farts
from the void.
Introducing
a new state of air
instead of a state of emergency.
They, as a state,
a stratum –
the squatting class.
Translated by Mark Tardi
One of Poland’s most dynamic and inventive poets minces language(s) from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene to both interrogate and celebrate the gristle of existence
Translation rights: Dawid Borucki, dawid.borucki@wbp.poznan.pl
Over the past three decades, Robert ‘Ryba’ Rybicki has inhabited poetry as a state of being, giving voice to the often unseen, unhoused or unimagined. He offers radical and acrobatic shifts in style and register, on a macro- and micro-scale, while working at the intersection of performance and confrontation. His work provocatively puts figures as varied as the American post-punk band The Pixies, his contemporaries in Polish poetry, or even Charles Martel, Karl Marx and the Marx Brothers in conversation with Greek mythology, acts of conscience and implosive neologisms.
Rybicki can effortlessly slide between vocabularies and formal gestures that are neoclassical, romantic, realist, or works that are highly conceptualised and discomfiting. In Minced Worlds, the poet expands on some themes from his award-winning The Squatters’ Gift, and the speakers direct and misdirect the reader through the frictions of language(s) and circumstance evolving from Homo naledi to the humans of late-stage capitalism. The point of view can pivot from ‘the jazzy shadow / [of] a wiggly-worm jacuzzi in a deluge’ to following a ‘cameraman [who] runs excitedly among’ an imagined wave of squatters storming the Polish parliament. Rybicki’s poems migrate from the prehistoric to the post-historic, from ‘a state of air’ to a state of mind that performs psycho-social and linguistic somersaults. For Rybicki, ‘Poetry is a dance of thoughts’.
Mark Tardi
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
