Kotlet frazy

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’.