Czas kompost

Kacper Bartczak is a poet, translator, Americanist, literary scholar and critic. These broad interests also influence his work, which can undoubtedly be described as intellectual, ambitious poetry that dialogues with tradition. Time Compost is another book in the author’s oeuvre in which two important objects of his interest appear. On the one hand, it is a fascination with the ways in which contemporary verse can refer to artificiality (hence the presence of plastic in Bartczak’s poems, connecting him with many contemporary poets of the English language, such as Adam Dickinson), and on the other, attention devoted to the concept of organicity and the criteria of what is considered natural.

In Time Compost, the author enters into a polemic with the tradition of American Confessional poetry (including the recent Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück). Through acts of self-creation balancing on the border of confession, he takes part in the debate on the role and function of a poem. Although Bartczak is an author who takes poetry very seriously, seeing it as a laboratory for the most complicated problems of the world and language, his latest volume, broken up by prose poems, is not as dense as his earlier books. In Time Compost, the poet navigates the boundary between confession and self-creation, tests the buoyancy of autobiographical language, which adds linearity to his diction and makes the work more accessible. At the same time, Bartczak engages in fundamental disputes unconstrained by locality, exploring at turns both the discreet lyricism and the unnaturalness of poetic language.