Tadeusz Pióro

(b. 1960) – a poet, prose writer, columnist and translator from the English language.

In 1993, he defended his PhD with a dissertation on the work of James Joyce and Ezra Pound (University of California, Berkeley). In 2015, he became full professor. Until 1997, he lectured at the Southern Methodist University w Dallas, and at present is a lecturer at the North American Cultures and Literatures Institute of the University of Warsaw. His interests mainly focus on modernism and the avant-garde in English literatures.

In 2002–3, he served as editor-in-chief of the arts and literature journal Dwukropek; he was also a long-time contributor to Literatura na Świecie, Przekrój and Pani magazines. In the latter two periodicals he published culinary columns.

Pióro’s literary debut was a volume of poetry, ‘Dom bez kantów’ (A House with No Corners), which, alongside Andrzej Sosnowski and Kuba Kozioł, he published in Chicago in 1992. The author’s first independent book of poetry was the Okęcie collection, considered an essential counterpoint to the O’Harism that held sway at the time. Pióro also wrote the acclaimed short story ‘Wyjaśnienie’ (‘An Explanation’), the fictional monologue of Michel Foucault’s Polish lover, who was investigating the philosopher for the secret police.

Pióro’s work is erudite, sharp, emotionally tempered, anti-biographical and, for the most part, apolitical. It shows a notable fascination for the poetry of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. He also draws from the Polish classics, sampling bits of famed works (Cyprian Norwid, Maria Dąbrowska or Henryk Sienkiewicz) and making them into literary collages, supplemented with abstract, sometimes even absurd content. He freely plays with unusual genres, using the pantun, villanelle or sestina. He is also the creator of a new form, ‘Kurpiów cut-outs’, which are perfectly symmetrical poems. His Powązki (2015) was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award (2016).

Pióro is also the translator of numerous English-language authors, including John Ashbery, Harry Mathews and James Schuyler (many of his translations or fragments thereof have been printed in Literatura na Świecie). He is also the editor and translator of an American selection of poems by Tadeusz Borowski (1990) and, with Rod Mengham and Piotr Szymor, the editor of Polish poetry anthology called Altered State (2003).