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The Impossibility of Shrugging One's Shoulders: O'Harists, O'Hara, and Post-1989 PolishPoetryAuthor(s): Joanna NiżyńskaSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 463-483Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20060297 .

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The Impossibility of Shrugging One's Shoulders:

O'Harists, O'Hara, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry

Joanna Nizy?ska

The July 1986 issue of the journal Literatura na swiecie was bound in a

blue cover featuring the image of a ticket stub for admission to New

York's Museum of Modern Art. The "Blue Issue," as this volume came to

be called, was the first encounter many Poles had with the New York

School of Poetry and, especially, with the work of Frank O'Hara. In ad

dition to translations of O'Hara's poetry and his artistic manifesto "Per

sonism," the issue included translations of poems by John Ashbery and

Kenneth Koch as well as interviews with the poets, reproductions of ab

stract expressionist paintings, and essays on abstract expressionism writ ten by the poets.1 The Blue Issue quickly sold out and, even years later,

photocopies of it were still being read.2

The Blue Issue has been credited with?or blamed for?inspiring a

group of poets called the "O'Harists," who emerged onto the literary scene in the late 1980s. These writers belonged to the "bruLion genera tion" and developed a poetics that critics believed was akin to or derived

from the poetics of O'Hara. Born after 1960, the bruLion writers were

named after bruLion, the title of one of the first zines to be published in

Poland (it was founded in 1986). This generation of writers reached

maturity during the drastic political and cultural transitions that accom

panied the fall of communism in eastern and central Europe. Wonder

ing how this generation would address Poland's postcommunist reality, critics awaited the debuts of the new writers with both excitement and

anxiety, frequently evaluating their literary characters on the basis of

only a handful of published works.3 Especially in the first half of the

I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for their financial support of

this project. 1. The issue also included fragments of reminiscences by O'Hara's friends and ex

cerpts from Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (New York, 1977). 2. These were the first but not the last translations of O'Hara into Polish. Following

the success of the Blue Issue, Piotr Sommer, the editor-in-chief and a leading translator

of American poetry into Polish, published an

anthology of O'Hara's poems with his

own translations and afterword: Frank O'Hara: Twojapojedynczosc (Warsaw, 1987). The an

thology also included several portraits of O'Hara by his friends as well as examples of ab

stract expressionist art. In 1994, a Polish translation of O'Hara's early poems as well as se

lected poems by Ashbery, Koch, and James Schuyler, appeared in the third issue of

Literatura na swiecie together with Ashbery's dramatic works and additional essays on the

work of Ashbery and Schulyer; clearly, this issue was meant to complement the Blue

Issue of 1986. These later publications, however, were the result, not the cause, of the ini

tial fascination with O'Hara and his status as a cultural signifier at a moment of great

political transformation. Indeed, part of O'Hara's appeal was that, though scarcely known in Poland in the late 1980s, he was nonetheless recognized as an American poetic

phenomenon. 3. For a brilliant treatment of the bruLion's generation in the context of the poetry

of the 1990s, see Piotr Sliwi?ski, Przygody z wolnoscia: Uwagi

o poezji wsp?lczesnej (Krakow,

Slavic Review m, no. 3 (Fall 2007)



464 Slavic Review

1990s, when the status of contemporary poetry was hotly debated, critics

reveled in categorizing the young poets into new, often antagonistic, formations.4 Although the label "O'Harists" originated in this occasion

ally careless tendency to categorize, the poets eagerly embraced it, whether as a sign of poetic cross-fertilization with the foreign or as a per formative gesture of removal from the native. This eagerness is all the

more striking as the initial impact of O'Hara's poetics in Poland oc

curred via the translation of just seventeen poems in the Blue Issue. In

this essay, I explore this impulsive turn to O'Hara, asking what it signified for these writers whose poetic births coincided with the birth of a new

cultural reality.5 By what mode was O'Hara's poetics imported into

Poland's literary soil? More important, what intergenerational impulses were manifested in O'Harism and what was its relation to Poland's poetic tradition?

The O'Harists wrote in the first years after Poland regained her inde

pendence, when the sense of impending transformations filled the coun

try. These transformations would affect the political, economic, and

cultural factors that had conditioned Polish life for decades, if not cen

turies. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Poles set out to radically

reconfigure all spheres of their societal life: in politics, a democratic system was instituted, while in economics a capitalist mode of production and a

free market based on consumerism were established. During the decades

of communism, only limited travel had been possible, but following 1989, the borders were opened to encourage both entrepreneurial and cultural

exchanges. Almost immediately, a process of societal diversification devel

oped from these changes. On the one hand, this process led to the rise of a

middle class and a financial elite and, on the other, to the marginalization of those who were unable to "reinvent" themselves in the new system (for

example, retired as well as displaced agricultural and factory workers) .6

Alongside the post-1989 economic and political changes, cultural crit

ics sensed the potential for a przetom komunikacyjny (breakthrough in com

munication), that is, the opportunity to revise Poland's deepest cultural

paradigms. In some sense, 1989 marks Poland's entrance into both a post

2002). See also,Jaroslaw Klejnocki andjerzy Sosnowski, Chwilowe zawieszenie broni: O tw?r

czosci tzw. Pokolenia "bruLionu" (1986-1996) (Warsaw, 1996); Rafal Grupi?ski and Izolda

Kiec, Niebawem spadnie Moto czyli kilka uwag o literaturze nieprzyjemnej (Poznan, 1997); Karol

Maliszewski, Nasi klasycysci, nasi barbarzyncy: Szkice o nowej poezji (Bydgoszcz, 1999); Marcin

Wieczorek, bruLion: Instrukcja obslugi (Krakow, 2005). 4. One of the most popular binary oppositions was to divide the poets into classicists

and O'Harists (also known as "barbarians" and "personists"). The typical contrasting qual ities attached to classicists and O'Harists were, respectively: "convention?authenticity,

classicism?avant-garde (focus on the past versus turning to the present and future), a

sense of being rooted?sense of alienation (outsiderism), objectivism?individuation,

description?expression, condensation?dispersion, mannered?straightforward dic

tion." Andrzej Niewiadomski, "Inna twarz niezaleznosci," Kresy, no. 6 (1991): 91.

5. My understanding of "turn"?in this context a contesting gesture of replacing the native with the foreign?is informed by Harold Bloom's theory of transgenerational

poetic anxieties. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1997). 6. For a

sociological treatment of this shock in the period of transition, see, for in

stance, Piotr Sztompka, The Trauma of Post-Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).



O 'Harists, O 'Har?, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry 465

communist political and economic life as well as into the postmodern "in

credulity towards metanarratives."7 Prior to 1989, Poles regarded the dominant metanarrative in their lit

erature and culture as the paradygmat romantyczny (Romantic paradigm) or, as it was sometimes called, the paradygmat romantyczno-symboliczny (the

Romantico-symbolic paradigm). The question of whether the influence of the Romantic heritage was on the wane in the new reality became a fo cal point of cultural discussions in the 1990s.8 In these discussions, the term Romantic was clearly associated with beliefs originating in the

nineteenth-century period of high Romanticism in Poland. Literature at

this time was tied to the fate of the community that produced it and was

invested with the power to create an alternative ("spiritual") community in the face of external political oppression. Literature was also charged

with the ethical responsibility of witnessing the community's misfortunes and working toward its survival (to mention only its most popular and,

probably, most simplistic manifestation in Henryk Sienkiewicz's postulate of "fortification of hearts") .9 The Romantic perception of literature as the fusion of word and deed, as a force capable of shaping history and moral

ity, privileged the writer as the spokesperson for the community. The word Wieszcz (seer) became Adam Mickiewicz's epithet (?^legislator of the Ro mantic imagination in Poland) and left an indelible imprint on the com mon understanding of the poetic profession.

In their self-reflexive practices, Poles did not understand the Ro mantic paradigm to be synonymous with the complexities and the rich ness of Polish Romanticism, its often conflicting modes and impulses, its contradictions and ironies, its distinct native and ?migr? formations,

or its fusion of the local and foreign influences; rather, the term came to designate Romanticism's formative impact on the communal imagi

nation and cultural practices, what Maria Janion called in the title of her famous book, its "posthumous life" in its various cultural and po litical manifestations.10 In this sense, the "Romantic paradigm" signifies textless readings of Romanticism that focus, among other things, on Ro

manticism's impact on Poland's political life, especially in moments of social effervescence (for example, the rhetoric of sacrifice that perme ates the myth and memory of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the re volt of 1968 sparked by a staging of Mickiewicz's Dziady in Warsaw); the recurrence of Romantic imagery and leitmotifs in Polish poetry and

7. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff

Bennigton and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), xxiv.

8. The debate was stirred by Maria Janion's famous 1991 declaration, "farewell to Ro

manticism." Janion is Poland's leading authority on the Romantic formation. Janion,

"Pozegnanie z

romantyzmem: Z Maria Janion rozmawia A. Bern?t," Nowe ksiazki, no. 6

(1991); for a more recent example, see, for instance, Marcin Kr?l's discussion of the mis

interpretation of the Romantic message in its mass-cultural interpretation in Poland. Kr?l,

Romantyzm: Pieklo i niebo Polak?w (Warsaw, 1998). 9. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Pan Wolodyjowski (Warsaw, 1969), 547.

10. Janion analyzes the influence of Mickiewicz's poem Konrad Wallenrod on Poland's

nineteenth-century struggles for independence. Maria Janion, Zycie posmiertne Konrada

Wallenroda (Warsaw, 1990).



466 Slavic Review

culture;11 and straightforward "post-Romantic trivialization" (to use

Marcin Kr?l's apt phrase) manifested in self-congratulatory patriotism and in the public fetishization of martyrology.12

The term Rom?ntico-symbolic paradigm probably better conveys Ro manticism's broad influence. This term expresses a "high" view of Polish

poetry (not necessarily in diction but in message) that stresses its engage ment with the individual's fate vis-?-vis history and the universality of the

human condition?its will to be abstract and to engage in larger philo

sophical questions. Often such a view of poetry was identified with the

concept of "values" (wartosci) and the broadly understood fusion of ethics

and poetics.13 Piotr Sommer, the editor-in-chief of Literatura na swiecie

and a poet in his own right, ironically comments on the totalizing power of "Value" by identifying it with the "poetry of the holiday" as opposed to

the much-needed (in his view) "poetry of the everyday":

The thing is that holiday in Poland or, rather, in the Polish language is

immediately associated with something regarded as Value, that is, with

something dictated from the altar or general

statements from the sofa.

And such Value, with a capital V (either by the nature of things or by di vine order), is something holiday-ish. That is, if it were not holiday-ish, it would not have any Value. Nobody has ever heard about Value wanting

to convert something,

excuse my expression, value-less to itself, that is to

Value. So these Values, with all the tolerance that characterizes them?

how could it be otherwise?according to their own

opinion?are not

overly fond of difference. The Values, as we know them in Poland, have

constantly led the crusade and proven their own superiority. This re

asserts their uniqueness. Could they be the real Values if they were not

unique?14

The "high" poetry was written by "those magnificent men with their

fundamental values," including Stanislaw Bara?czak, Adam Zagajewski, Ju lian Kornhauser, and Ryszard Krynicki.15 These poets were members of the

New Wave, or Generation '68, the last major poetic movement that pre ceded the O'Harists. The writers of the NewWave employed low diction, a

colloquial idiom, and everyday realia, but they used these as a means to re

claim ethical and poetic authenticity, to revitalize a language worn out by

11. The patriotic poetry written by the O'Harists' immediate predecessors under

martial law in the early 1980s can serve as the most obvious and (in many ways) unfortu

nate example of this tendency. 12. See Kr?l, Romantyzm, 6. It was also the Romantic paradigm that made Poles cre

ate a self-image in which moments of rupture were privileged

over quotidian routine; for

instance, in the extolling of such events as the nineteenth-century uprisings regardless of

their political failure. The recent public debates over how to remember the communist

period also tend to privilege the active opposition to the communist system over the ac

commodation a large portion of society reached with it.

13. To refer to Stanislaw Bara?czak's influential book, Etyka ipoetyka: Szkice 1970-78

(Paryz, 1979). 14. Piotr Sommer, "Poezja 'odswietna' i poezja 'codziennosci,'" Kresy, no. 21 (1995):

47-48 (the translation is my own). 15. This appellation

was applied by Rafal Grupi?ski, a bruLion critic, in "Ci wspaniali

mezczyzni od podstawowych wartosci," Kultura, no. 9 (1988): 13-23.



O'Harists, O'Hara, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry 467

the official communist idiom of nowomowa (new-speak), and, to quote Bara?czak, "to look truth straight in the eye."16 While employing many of

the same poetic techniques as the poets of the New Wave, the O'Harists

rejected their poetic aims as well as the ethical consciousness of their more

immediate predecessors, the writers of the New Privacy (poets who re

treated from the political into the private during and after the period of

Martial Law in the 1980s).17The O'Harists reserved special opprobrium for

Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, writers of a philosophically driven,

metaphysical, and moralistic poetry, and launched a number of ad

hominem attacks against them.

The scope of this article does not allow me to trace the fluctuations in

the cultural transmission of the Romantic tradition and its value in Polish

culture. It is important to note, however, that these fluctuations manifested

themselves through the alternation of modes of symbolic continuity from

the heritage of high Romanticism (as in the republication in 1946 of Mic

kiewicz's Ksiggi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego by the Parisian ?migr? Instytut Literacki Kultura) to acts of self-proclaimed liberation from this tradition

(as in the interwar poetry of Antoni Slonimski and Jan Lecho?) and such

iconoclastic mocking of Romanticism and its culture as Witold Gombrow

icz's Ferdydurke; the fact that every Polish high school student now knows

these passages of Gombrowicz by heart ironically proves the point.18 Thus, whether the Romantic paradigm was sustained, questioned, or rejected, whether it was treated as sublime or as kitsch, it has constituted an ever

present reference point as the grand narrative in the formation of Poland's

self-identity. This protean view of the Romantic (or Romantico-symbolic) paradigm

became the organizing concept and point of reference for discussions of

the bruLion generation's relationship to tradition and their search for a

new identity.19 Whether this paradigm was (or is) an essential constituent

of Polish poetry or whether it is at all meaningful or productive to engage in a taxonomical discussion is less important than to remember that, for the

O'Harists, the presence of these categories was sociologically indisputable. In other words, the O'Harists were aware that the Polish audience was used

16. Stanislaw Bara?czak, "Sp?jrzmy prawdzie w

oczy," Dziennik poranny: Wiersze

1967-1971 (Poznan, 1972). 17. Needless to say, the O'Harists' showed little interest in the poetry written under

martial law, which is likely the weakest if the most "engaged" post-World War II poetry. 18. Though these are

twentieth-century examples of the struggle with Romanticism, the debate started in the mid-nineteeth century with Roman Klaczko, a

prominent Ro

mantic critic, who proclaimed in the late 1840s (while criticizing realism) that the model

of high Romantic literature enabled Poland's cultural survival. By contrast, Klaczko's con

temporary, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, used irony to distance himself from the prophetic mode of high Romanticism. Even the very creators of Polish Romanticism, like Mickiewicz, became victims of this reductive understanding,

as can be seen in some of the criticism of

Mickiewicz's epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) for its focus on the quotidian and domestic in the life

of the Polish-Lithuanian gentry rather than on the messianic messages associated with his

earlier works.

19. For an interesting discussion of the references to Mickiewicz in the rhetoric of

"breakthrough," see Sliwi?ski, "Albo Mickiewicz," Przygody

z wolnoscia, 208-27.



468 Slavic Review

to interacting with Romantico-symbolic poetry and, thus, expected of their

poets not only a certain type of language "but also ideas, ethics, meta

physics, and, God forbid, politics."20 The O'Harists' project was to elimi nate ideas, ethics, metaphysics, and politics from their poetry, and they seized upon O'Hara's poetics to realize this goal.

The first time O'Harism was applied to a Polish poem occurred with

reference to "Dia Jana Polkowskiego," a poem written in 1988 by the

Krakow poet Marcin Swietlicki. The poem provoked a heated debate

among both critics and Swietlicki's fellow poets and became a manifesto

of generational rebellion against the issues that had organized Poland's

poetic tradition:21

"For jan Polkowski" It's time to shut the little cardboard doors and open a window, to open a window and get some air in this room.

Before, there was always luck to fall back on, now

the luck's run out. With one exception:

when poems go and leave their stench behind them.

The poetry of slaves lives on ideas, and ideas are a watery substitute for blood.

The heroes remain imprisoned, and the worker is ugly but touchingly useful?in the poetry of slaves.

In the poetry of slaves the trees have crosses

inside them?under the bark?made of barbed wire.

How easy then for the slave to travel the monstrously

long and practically impossible road from the alphabet

to God, it lasts only a moment,

like spitting?in the poetry of slaves.

Instead of saying: I have a toothache, I'm

hungry, I'm lonely, both of us, four of

us, our whole street?they say quietly: Wanda

Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid,

J?zef Pilsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Thomas Mann, the Bible, and at the end a little something in Yiddish.

20. Sliwi?ski, Przygody z wolnoscia, 20.

21. Dariusz Pawelec believes that the fact that the poem was written in 1988 before

the change of the political system, first performed orally in 1989, and only published in

1990 (in the first issue of the weekly Tygodnik Literacki) proves that reading it as a genera tional manifesto is inadequate. Pawelec argues that in 1988, the end of the communist re

gime was only wishful thinking and, thus, the poem cannot be read as a response to a new

cultural configuration. I prefer to read "DiaJana Polkowskiego" anachronistically (that is,

with an awareness of its reception) rather than as an archeological remnant of a specific

historical consciousness, especially since Pawelec ultimately reads the poem as a rejection

of Herbert's ethical mission of poetry and, thus, like myself locates it against the larger

"Romantico-symbolic" tradition of Polish poetry. See Dariusz Pawelec, "Oko smoka: O

wierszu Marcina Swietlickiego 'Dia Jana Polkowskiego,'" in Aleksander Nawarecki, ed.,

Kanonada: Interpretare wierszy polskich (1939-1989) (Katowice, 1999).



OHarists, O Har?, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry 469

If the dragon still lived in this city, they'd flatter the dragon to death?or hole up instead in some corner to write a poem

?little fists for threatening the dragon with.

(Even love poems would be written in a

dragon alphabet. . .

)

I look the dragon straight in the eye and shrug my shoulders. It's June. That's obvious.

There was a thunderstorm here this afternoon. Dusk will fall first into the

perfectly square city squares.22

From its opening lines, "Dia Jana Polkowskiego" expresses the need for

change. As the poem continues, Swietlicki contrasts "the poetry of slaves

[which] lives on ideas" with "I-have-a-toothache poetry." By the end of the

poem, Swietlicki looks the dragon of poetic tradition straight in the eye and shrugs his shoulders at everything that does not bear the concrete

ness of direct, empirical, bodily experience. No hierarchy or historical chronology governs the speaker's sarcastic

enumeration of the poetry of slaves; he places, for instance, the poetry of

politically engaged dissident poets ("the heroes remain imprisoned")

alongside metaphysical poetry (which quickly travels "from the alphabet to God"); he juxtaposes the universality of biblical tradition ("the Bible")

with a specific foreign influence ("Thomas Mann"). Martyrological poetry ("trees have crosses inside them") as well as poetry written under various

political systems ("Wanda Wasilewska" or "J?zef Pilsudski") are both forms of "enslaved poetry." The speaker does not even spare Cyprian Kamil Nor

wid, whose poetry enjoyed wide popularity in the 1980s, when it was widely

performed as part of the cultural resistance to the suppression of the Sol

idarity movement.

In this enumeration of signifiers, which stands for the multiplicity of

values and intellectual movements, the "dragon alphabet" homogenizes everything that does not concern the immediate and the individual.

Whether these values and thoughts serve to sustain the existing status

quo (whether they "flatter the dragon") or whether they call for dissent

(to "hole up in some corner to write a poem"), they are a source of en

slavement. The simultaneous presentation of the dragon as a communal

illusion ("/?fthe dragon still lived in this city") and as a real presence that the speaker must confront and "look straight in the eye" constitutes the

poem's relationship to tradition. On the performative level, this rela

tionship deserves no more than a nonchalant shrug of one's shoulders, but on the meta-level the poem is itself organized around the various

faces of tradition. Thus, in this poem, Swietlicki reveals both a desire to

shrug his shoulders at tradition as well as his inability to do so (as a grad uate in Polish literature from Jagiellonian University, Swietlicki is well aware of the mysterious ways in which tradition moves).

22. Translation quoted from William Martin, ed., "New Polish Writing," Chicago Re

view^, special issue (Fall 2000): 278-79.



470 Slavic Review

The richness of the critical response to this poem indicates that

Swietlicki touched a nerve in Polish culture.23 Krzysztof Koehler, a poet

belonging to the "neoclassical" wing of the new generation, published a

short article in bruLion entitled "O'Harism" (from which the name of the movement originates) in response to "Dia Jana Polkowskiego." In his ar

ticle, Koehler disparages what he considers Swietlicki's naive view of po etic authenticity:

What he [Swietlicki] desires is to perform a kind of conjurer's trick.

Swinging his watch back and forth, he assures us that he's free, authen

tic, above conventionality; but it's because of us, the readers, that he

thrashes about as if caught in a net of verses, and what should have been authentic and free turns out to be?after all, it's poetry?artificial and

forced [literally "enslaved"]. Marcin Swietlicki is clearly under the impression that within the

confines of convention and by virtue of convention he can actually smash

convention to bits and stand naked before us in the light of truth. But, then, why bother wasting all that ink and paper? It's enough to go hang

out with your friends.24

In his retort, "Koehlerism," in the following issue of bruLion, Swietlicki

identified the source of Koehler's critique in his uneasiness with the lack of

"costumes and ethoi" in Swietlicki's poetry: "But aren't we allowed, are we

REALLY not allowed, to struggle, to try something new, to make mistakes, to thrash about? Do one's first poetic steps immediately have to turn into a

topic for a seminar room and the donning of a laurel wreath?"25 Swietlicki

recognized that the first steps of his literary generation were, indeed, "turned into a topic for the seminar room" and were treated diagnostically in critical discussions about the new trajectories of Polish literature in the

post-1989 reality. Subjecting the new poets and their literary project to such

intense scrutiny as soon as they emerged did both a disservice: instead of

being allowed to find their own voice, they were placed in a programmatic

position that ultimately contributed to their failure to construct more than a rebellious gesture toward the language of their predecessors. In the spirit of this rebelliousness, the O'Harists eagerly adopted this name coined by their poetic opponents and, soon after Koehler published his condemna

tion of Swietlicki's poetry, Milosz Biedrzycki boasted in a poem that he was

"the first in Poland to write like O'Hara."26 The speed with which the term

23. For an early response, see, for instance, Marian Stala's criticism of the aggressive tone of Swietlicki's "programmatic pamphlet" and the poet's "refusal to participate in the

world that goes beyond individual and interpersonal experience. Ideas, communities, pol

itics, ethics, and metaphysics do not matter. What really matters is one's own, individual,

separate world." Marian Stala, "Polkowski, Machej, Swietlicki, Tekieli . . ." Teksty drugie, no. 1 (1990): 46-62. See also, Julian Kornhauser, "O wierszach Marcina Swietlickiego,"

NaGlos, no. 2 (1990): 115-18.

24. Krzysztof Koehler, "Oharyzm," bruLion, no. 14-15 (1990), translated as

"O'Harism," by W. Martin in Martin, ed., "New Polish Writing," 280-81.

25. Marcin Swietlicki, "Koehleryzm," bruLion, no. 16 (1991), translated as

"Koehlerism," by W Martin in Martin ed., "New Polish Writing," 282-84.

26. See Pawel Dunin-Wasowicz, Jaroslaw Klejnocki, and Krzysztof Varga, eds., Made

swoich poet?w: Lirykapolska urodzonapo 1960r, 2d ed. (Warsaw, 1997), 19.



O Harists, O Har?, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry 471

was adopted only emphasizes the O'Harists' readiness to seek and claim a

poetic stimulus, or, at least, association, from beyond their native ground.27

Having embraced the name, the O'Harists started to circulate as rep resentatives of a mode of poetry that shunned the abstract and focused on

the concrete. In their playfully exaggerated account of what constitutes an

O'Harist poem, Pawel Dunin-W^sowicz and Krzysztof Varga, publishers, critics, and members of the bruLion generation, display the characteris

tics of what became a typical approach to the term OHarism among Pol

ish critics: "According to the conventions of American pop poetry, the

O'Harist poem can be recognized visually by the very broad line, the

obligatory piling up of referents to time and place (sometimes to a

specific date and hour), the requisites of popular and consumer culture, and the insertion of dialogue in colloquial language."28 Such an approach to O'Harism typifies its use as an umbrella term for what were understood

as the general qualities of American poetry (a phenomenon modified

only by the adjective "pop"; playfulness aside, what was meant by this

"pop" poetry?). The term O'Harismwas rarely questioned or unpacked, let

alone placed within the tradition of American poetry.29 In fact, O'Harism

served as a homogenizing term for such anti-Eliot tendencies of Ameri

can poetry as personism, situationism, and confessionalism. In critical

writing, O'Harism was treated as a self-explanatory term and as a virtual

synonym for such terms as "projective verse" and "talking ? la Beat [Gen

eration]." As Andrzej Niewiadomski points out, by placing them under

the rubric of O'Harism, critics looked "condescendingly upon the au

thenticity of the poetic declarations of Swietlicki or questioned their very

authenticity."30 The widespread use of this reductive understanding of "O'Harism"

as a shortcut to describe or evaluate the young poets prevented a closer

look at the term and the phenomenon it signified, both of which con

27. The poets themselves talk about O'Hara as an important influence. Swietlicki

calls the 1987 publication of Frank O'Hara: Twoja pojedynczosc, an anthology of O'Hara's

poems translated by Piotr Sommer, "an extremely important event in Polish literature," see Nados, no. 2 (1990): 112. Several younger writers (born in the 1970s) point to the

influence of foreign, particularly American, writers, see Kresy, no. 2 (1997). My thanks to

Artur Placzkiewicz for reminding me that the label O'Harism originated among the move

ment's opponents. 28. Pawel Dunin Wasowicz and Krzysztof Varga, Pamas Bis: Slownik literatury polskiej

urodzonej po 1960 roku (Warsaw, 1995), 142. This dictionary of Polish literature since 1960

is written in the spirit of bruLion's performative mockery. Although the dictionary may not have been designed as a "serious" critical tool, its popularity makes it an important source for understanding how such cultural notions as O'Harism were understood and

transmitted.

29. One of the few critical analyses of the term O'Harism appears in Joanna Orska's

article "Co to jest o'haryzm?" Kresy, no. 3 (1998): 44-57. Orska seeks to contextualize

the term by discussing O'Hara's and the New York School's poetry in the larger American

tradition and sees the employment of O'Hara's name as an intellectual shortcut rather

than as a stimulus to explore the interpretative potential of a Polish-American juxtaposi tion. She blames this shortcut for the homogenization of the plurality of poetic voices

emerging at this time. I fully agree with Orska's position and her attempt to fill in the crit

ical gap in the exploration of Polish-American juxtaposition. 30. Niewiadomski, "Inna twarz niezaleznosci," 91.



472 Slavic Review

tain a critical potential for exploring modes of cultural translation and

point to a fascinating moment in Polish literature in which we catch the

young poets of the early 1990s in flagrante in their affair with the for

eign.31 The O'Harists' betrayal of their domestic partners symptomati

cally reveals their frustration with the modes of practicing Polish poetry that they considered available to them. The O'Harists' treatment of their

native models as impotent and unattractive?their programmatic indif

ference, aggressiveness, and mockery of the ethical and political entan

glements of the "values-driven" Polish poetry?disclose such a high level

of "anxiety of influence" that it problematizes the very possibility of

poetic individuation. All of this makes "O'Harism" a paradigmatic case

of idiosyncratically Polish modes of blindness and insight into the inter

action of the foreign with the country's cultural and transgenerational tensions.

The O'Harists adapted some of the most striking features of O'Hara's

foreign poetics. Charles Altieri identifies "the domestic and the quotidian" as the quintessential components of O'Hara's work through which he

makes immediate experience fresh not by imposing meaning on it but by

making visible that which is so familiar that it usually goes unnoticed.32 By

finding a mode to present the individual living his day-to-day existence, O'Hara transcended Maurice Blanchot's claim that the everyday's essential

trait is its imperceptibility and Ludwig Wittgenstein's statement that one is

unable to notice something that is always before one's eyes."33 O'Hara's

writing thrives on the particulars and surfaces of daily experience without

resorting either to a poetics of organic unity (that is, the details do not

necessarily contribute to an overall lyrical effect) or to a postmodern self

referentiality. What imbues O'Hara's poetic strategies with exuberance and stimu

lates his poetic followers is his discovery of poetic value in modes of living that escape philosophical reflection. "O'Hara," said Altieri, "like city life ... has only the unity of mad process trying to make up in motion what

it lacks in meaning."34 O'Hara's trademark was what he himself called the

"I do this, I do that" poems in which he conveys the randomness of urban

experience simply by recording it anecdotally. "The Day Lady Died," the

oft-anthologized poem from Lunch Poems (1964), exemplifies O'Hara's

realization of "occasional poetry," that is, "poetry imbued with a sense of

31. The fact that the alternative terms for O'Harism, "banalism" (banalizm) and even

the O'Hara-related "personism" (personizm) (neither of which connote something

specifically foreign) were less popular highlights the Poles' desire to see the literary scene

during the period of transformation in terms of opposition between the foreign and the

local. An important factor in this foreign-local optics was Poland's fascination with

American culture (and the concomitant anxieties about the Americanization of Polish

culture), which had begun even before the post-1989 spread of American pop culture.

32. Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the

1960's (Lewisburg, 1979), 119. 33. See Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis,

1993), 239; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe

(Oxford, 2001), par. 129.

34. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 113.




its occasion."35 In this case, the poem was occasioned by the news of Billie

Holiday's death and plays upon her nickname, "Lady Day."

"The Day Lady Died" It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les N?gres Of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing36

By overlapping the temporal planes of the speaker's activities and his de

scription of them, O'Hara involves his reader as a witness to the poem's creation, whose "occasion" (connected, in this case, with the title of the

poem) unfolds with each stanza. The process of this unfolding is driven by postponing to the end of the poem the clarification of the references

made in its title. The poem opens with the city's noises and preparations for a Friday evening out, but it closes with the whisper of the last two lines, the only ones in the past tense. With these lines, O'Hara releases the ten

sion of urban rush he has built up through the use of the present tense and verbs of motion. These final lines about the memory of Holiday per

forming, quiet the poem and conflate, in the words "stopped breathing," enchantment with Holiday's performance with the mark of death itself.

35. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

(New York, 1998), 180. 36. Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco, 1964).



474 Slavic Review

Although death closes this poem filled with the bustling activities of

living, it is explicitly mentioned only in the alliterative title. O'Hara's dic

tion, tone, and speed all work to avoid the sense of death as rupture; rather, the phrase "stopped breathing" refers not to death but to an aes

thetic rupture emanating from the erotic power of Billie Holiday's art. In

this way, O'Hara incorporates death into the poem so smoothly that, with out the title to guide the reading, there would have been no reason to

speculate about the news in the New York Post. The silence about what the

speaker reads?all we know is that he asks for "a NEW YORK POST with

her face on it"?is typical of O'Hara's conflation of the moment of writing with the time of the events he describes. This conflation also contributes to his fusion of the quotidian and the existential, the practice of living and

the experience of death.

The use of proper names also contributes to O'Hara's "domestic and

quotidian" aspect. O'Hara rarely reveals who or what these names signify (he says, for instance, "I run to Norman," but is Norman a person or a

caf??). This use of proper names was perhaps the most readily adapted feature of O'Hara's poetics and one that made a particularly strong im

pression on Polish critics of O'Harist poems (Dunin-Wcisowicz and Varga refer to the "piling up of referents to time and place [sometimes to a

specific date and hour] ") ,37 Less readily adaptable was the tone of an

O'Hara poem. In O'Hara's work, the tone does not limit the poem to cul

tural realism or a quasi-biographical "personism" but opens a peephole into the Zeitgeist of New York in 1959 via the idiosyncrasies of the

speaker's physical and mental peregrinations. A train schedule, the names

of a bookstore and cigarette brand, and the passing mention of a bank

teller map out these peregrinations and aim at embracing the phenome

nology and rush of urban life rather than the establishment of a hierar

chical organization. It is perhaps the concreteness of the names coupled with the sense of synchronized motion?a certain paradoxical harmony between the city's everyday cacophony, the speaker's physical rush, and

the movement of his thoughts?that gives O'Hara's quotidian its unique ness and visibility. As David Lehman aptly puts it, "to borrow a hyperbole from O'Hara's beloved Mayakovsky, it could be said that if all that survived

of 1959 was The Day Lady Died,' then historians a century hence could

piece together the New York of that moment in the same way that ar

chaeologists can reconstruct a whole extinct species of dinosaur from a

single fossil bone."38

Even those Polish poems that exhibit the characteristic linguistic traits

of O'Hara's poetic mode leave the reader with a sense of a literary project different from that of the charismatic New York poet. The aggressive, pam

phleteering character of Swietlicki's "Dojana Polkowskiego" has little to do

with the nonchalant lightness of O'Hara's poems. But Jacek Podsiadlo's

"Olsztyn. Zakupy" (Olsztyn. Shopping, 1988) seems at face value to be a

successful realization of O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" poems that appear

37. Dunin-Wasowicz and Varga, Pamas Bis, 142.

38. Lehman, Last Avant-Garde, 202.




simply to record life as it occurs.39 Seemingly imbued with a sense of its own

occasion (shopping in the town of Olsztyn), "Olsztyn. Zakupy" is also per meated with the realia of the quotidian, the proper names, and the topo

graphical concreteness typical of O'Hara's own poetry:

"Olsztyn. Shopping" Two heads of cabbage. Four refills for a "Zenith" pen. The Cummings' volume, Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat," "Encounters with Utopia" by Szacki and "New Ways in Psychoanalysis" by Karen Horney.

A thick, ruled notepad. Thirteen packs of cigarettes. "Jacobs." Granulated, instant coffee.

Vodka "Polonaise." A ruler and a triangle

with a multiplication table and three-dimensional pictures. Twenty stamps. A few magazines. Done. Time to go get

some beer at Santos

by the station. Drink two mugs. Leave.

Sit on a bench. Light a cigarette.

A commonly pretty girl passes pointing at me with her breasts. Three policemen follow her their hands carefully held behind their backs.

Desperately slow, waving in the air with a purple light and sadly honking, an ambulance waddles along through the streets. A colorful bus with a big sign CEBU full of sleepy Danish tourists gives it the right of Way. In the parking lot before the hotel Cormorant

among the shiny limousines stands a small Fiat, red from exhaustion, a tiny phallus of communism. (27.06.88)40

In a common O'Harist move, Podsiadlo addresses the present moment in

colloquial, prosaic language. Despite his narrow autobiographical per

spective, he does not use a single first-person verb, but, rather, sentence

equivalents ("Twenty stamps. A few magazines. Done"). The tone, however, is dramatically different from O'Hara's in "The Day Lady Died." While

O'Hara's speaker surrounds himself with objects acquired while shopping (a typical sign of consumerist culture for both poets), his activities person

alize these objects and contribute to a sense of the everyday urban rush.

Even as the end of the poem invites us to return to its beginning and trace

how the everyday deferred the "something else" (the death of Billie Holi

day), it does so with a sense of individualized intimacy developed through the speaker's relation to the world through which he moves. In "Olsztyn.

Zakupy," the speaker's relatively static gaze objectifies the inanimate, that

39. Both Swietlicki's "Do Jana Polkowskiego" and Podsiadlo's "Olsztyn: Zakupy" come

from the same period: after O'Hara had become known in Poland but prior both to the

fall of communism and the adoption of the term O'Harism. This makes them all the more

interesting examples of O'Harism in statu nascendi, not of reaction to but in anticipation of the cultural revolution. Their self-conscious stance and their awareness of their position in the critical spotlight

are striking features of later works produced by poets associated

with this formation.

40. For the original, see Jacek Podsiadlo, Wierszezebrane (Warsaw, 2003), 35 (the trans

lation is my own).



476 Slavic Review

is, the enumeration of objects does not lead to their internalization as it does in O'Hara, where objects are charged with the energy of the speaker's

motion in space and are externalizations of his mental predilections. Moreover, while O'Hara uses cultural trappings to map out the city as

a space for endless aesthetic consumption, this consumption is interior ized as an organic part of the body's movement in space, thus privatizing the "content" of the space. O'Hara's speaker does not appropriate space

but inhabits it via his movement, in an almost affectionate manner. He even inhabits memories in this way?Billie Holiday is remembered in a

spatial-somatic way?"leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT / while she

whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing." The somatic concreteness of this memory domesti cates the life (and death) of Billie Holiday, making her life an integral part of the speaker's physical, mental, and somatic experience without redi

recting it toward any abstract notion.

One cannot talk about interiorization and domestication of experi ence in Podsiadlo's poem, where the concreteness of setting?expressed in the title and proper names?is, actually, used to evaluate "something else."41 The center of gravity in this poem lies in its three final lines and their identification of the small Fiat with the "tiny phallus of communism red from exhaustion." Everything else in the poem?the three police

men (busy chasing skirt), the woman (who, though the object of the

speaker's gaze, actually reverses their roles by pointing her breasts at the

poet, like a gun), the slow ambulance, the bus with sleepy tourists and the limousines in front of the hotel (both the attributes of the ap

proaching new reality)?bring to the foreground the small Fiat, a sym bol of the regime's velvet glove, which might otherwise be overlooked in the multiplicity of things (the production of this samoch?d dla kazdego

Polaka, "a car for every Pole," helped create the illusion of economic sta

bility in the 1970s). Thus, even though the poem seems to focus on the

narrowly autobiographical, it does not convey a sense of inhabiting the

space it so concretely describes; rather it reads like a detached observa tion on the triviality of a failing system that is castrated by the very in

significance of the final image.

"Olsztyn. Zakupy" dates to the very beginnings of O'Harism. An unfi

tted poem beginning "Day like a monkey" by Podsiadlo from 1995 dates to the last moments in the circulation of the label "O'Harists:"

41. Sommer addresses the inadequacy of concreteness for creating the poetry of the

everyday, "When I think about the concrete in poetry and about the poetry of the every

day ... I'm not concerned with how many times Oolong tea, for instance, or Krucza Street,

Broadway, or citizen Malicki from Swidro near Warsaw comes up in the poem; rather, I am

concerned about a specific flavor in the language. Stuffing the poem with a concrete

topography does not guarantee its credibility. ... If topography were everything, there

would be successful imitations of Frank O'Hara circulating by the thousands in the States, but actually there are none. And hundreds of poets in Poland would imitate Miron

Bialoszewski while this fate?the fate of being calqued?happened to Tadeusz R?zewicz

and?to a lesser degree?to Herbert and Milosz. So, perhaps this by itself questions the

truth that to be the poet of the everyday is the easiest thing under the sun." See Sommer,

"Poezja 'odswietna' i poezja 'codziennosci,'" 47.



O'Harists, O Har?, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry 477

Day like a monkey shinnying up the trunk for its daily fruit

again ascended over the country we have outside our window

in a Fauvist "landschaft." Bitter yellow, green as sour

as pickled cucumbers, here and there sprinkled dried coconut: snow.

Lidka is back from shopping, when she stands next to me, I turn and kiss her swelling belly, she knew this would happen, under her sweater

stuck into the back of her pants, she has chocolate with mango and guava:

laughter. I eat the whole bar and now I have to go to the bathroom; under the tub scurries this bug that lives off particles of peeled skin and sugar; I make a

rapid decision: death. (95.03.15)42

The lyrical opening and the playful closure of this poem juxtapose the

"big" themes of poetry?new life and death?and create a different tone

from Podsiadlo's rendering of O'Harism in "Olsztyn. Zakupy." The open

ing of the earlier poem lists things by brand name, but there is no name

dropping of products in "Day like a monkey," even though Lidka is

returning from shopping?we do not know where she shopped or what

brand of chocolate she brought home. Rather than offering cultural

specificity, "Day like a monkey" turns to the autobiographical and private (traits characteristic of Podsiadlo's later poems) through an ekphrastic

opening that associates the quotidian with a Fauvist landscape. If the O'Harists were unable to create a tone similar to that of their

namesake, what, then, were their modes of adopting and adapting O'Hara's poetics? In discussing the O'Harists, it is helpful to think of

Harold Bloom's claim that every poet is "perverse" in the etymological sense of the Latin per-vertere?"turning the wrong way" or "turning aside."43

Thus, the question of why Polish writers turned to O'Hara in the first place also arises. The significance of this particular case of poetic perversion? the O'Harists' turn away from their native poetic predecessors?lies less in

their poetic output than in the fact that this act of perversion took place during one of those rare historical moments that expose the inner dialec

tics of the formation of a national literature. What intentionality, conscious or not, lay behind this turn? What did the bruLion generation see in

O'Hara that it did not see in the native tradition and what did the turn to

O'Hara signify? In turning to O'Hara, the bruLion generation engaged in two dialecti

cally related modes of revisionary reading, involving both their domestic

tradition and a foreign tradition. The elevation of O'Hara resembles what

Bloom describes in The Anxiety of Influence as the mode of Daemonization

in which "the later poet [in this case, the group of O'Harists] opens him

self to what he believes to be a power of the parent-poem [in this case, the

work of Frank O'Hara] that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a

range of beingjust beyond that precursor. He does it, in his poem, by so sta

tioning its relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the unique

42. In Martin, ed., "New Polish Writing," 274; for the original, see Podsiadlo, Wiersze

zebrane, 208.

43. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1997), 85.



478 Slavic Review

ness of the earlier work."44 Indeed, the O'Harists' reading of O'Hara gen eralizes the uniqueness of O'Hara's work; it erases the cultural contextual ization of his representation of the "domestic and quotidian" and betrays

no awareness that O'Hara's nonchalant "lunch poems" (as he titled his 1964 volume of poems) contest the public language of the 1950s in Amer

ica, when the idiom of the day supported poems with mushroom clouds.

Nor, for that matter, do the O'Harists seem to realize that O'Hara, however much his readers within and without the United States longed for it, was not an impoverished bohemian outsider but a curator at the Museum of Mod ern Art and a well-established figure in New York's artistic circles who en

joyed a privileged position among the cultural elite. Indeed, the private and the institutional merge in O'Hara's everyday, and the cultural is priva tized in a version of a nonhierarchical all-inclusiveness?Patsy on Friday,

Prokofiev on Saturday, de Kooning at work.

What mattered to the O'Harists was that O'Hara created a vector in

literature that pointed toward the possibility of writing a "poetry of the

everyday" free from the obligation of expressing values, concepts, abstract

terms, communal responsibilities, and ethical dilemmas. This vector was

constituted by O'Hara's own disregard for the precepts of the "strong fa

ther" of American poetry, T. S. Eliot, and his poetics based on the associ

ation of sensibility, objective correlative, and the emphasis on the formal over the personal. By choosing O'Hara as their model, the O'Harists

claimed not only their own source from the American tradition but also an alternative source to what had already been culturally ennobled by Czeslaw Milosz, one of the "strong fathers" of Polish poetry, whose trans

lations and criticism basically transplanted Eliot onto Polish soil.

Thus, the turn to the "daimon" of the foreign tradition signifies not only a "turn away" from the native tradition?in this case the burdens associated

with the Romantic "poetry of the holiday"?but also from the native tradi

tion's earlier foreign importations. With the exaltation of an alternative for

eign tradition, the O'Harists engaged in a liberating gesture of discontinu

ity known, in the Bloomian vocabulary, as "kenosis," a Greek term meaning "exhaustion, deprivation, emptying out" by which they emptied out the

gestalt of the domestic tradition.45 In this form of kenosis, the young poet

rejects the older poets' "godhood" and "[humbles] himself as though he

were ceasing to be a poet."46 In the case of the O'Harists, the rejection of

the older poets often takes the form of personal attacks on their poetic pre decessors (frequently through parodies of Herbert and Milosz) and per formative infantilism (to mention only their use of a vulgar vocabulary) ,47

The purpose of these gestures is not so much their shock-value per se but

44. Ibid., 15.

45. Ibid. In the theological sense, as Bloom reminds us, kenosis goes back to the

Pauline description of Christ's willing acceptance of the reduction of his status from the

divine to the human.

46. Ibid.

47. See, for instance, Milosz Biedrzycki's self-consciously immature report: "my father

tells me to stop writing when I'm thirty / otherwise I'll become 'like that jerk Herbert' "; or

a deflation of a predecessor's poetry as in Slawomir Matusz's reference to Milosz's "Piosenka



OHarists, OHara, and Post-1989Polish Poetry 479

the humiliation of the poetic profession as such. By mocking their own sta

tus as poets, the O'Harists "empty themselves out of their own afflatus,"

hoping that eo ipso they will empty out the power of their native predeces sors and escape from the prison of their Romantic heritage.48

This generation, however, did not succeed in draining their prede cessors precisely because this group bore the burden of being the new

poets of the newly independent Poland. In his poem "Polska 2," Swie

tlicki acknowledges this irony and the inescapability of the situation

when he declares "in spite of everything, they took me for their / poet I

instead of waiting out the ironic bitter moment / to triumphantly deny it?stood / in this vulgar spotlight, blinking my eyes."49 The O'Harists' awareness of their own position prevented them both from developing a

more stimulating reading of their foreign paradigm and from turning to

domestic a-Romantic writers such as Miron Bialoszewski, Edward

Stachura, and, in a very different way, Wislawa Szymborska.50 In a sense, what the O'Harists did in importing O'Hara's poetics onto Polish soil was

to empty out its uniqueness (that is, the complexities of the American

metropolis of the late 1950s, O'Hara's artistic circles, and homosexual

ity) and reduce it to a generic everyday. The removal of O'Hara from

O'Hara in the process of cultural transmission structurally resembles the

emptying of complexities from Polish Romanticism in the transmission

of the tradition.

Ironically, in their self-conscious determination to empty out their

predecessors and pit their own poetic agenda of the "everyday" against the

involvement of their poetic fathers in the "holiday," the O'Harists merely

repeated the paradigm of rebellion performed at the beginning of the

nineteenth century by the Young (the Romantics) and the Old (the clas

sicists). In this rebellion, the O'Harists placed themselves in the always al

ready position of opposition, a position which deprived them of the flex

ibility that could have allowed them to transform and grow.

o ko?cu swiata" (The song for the end of the world) in "Zaklinanie Miloszem" (Casting a

spell with Milosz) : "Every time during sex / closing your eyes you say: / 'I'm falling'?repeat after Milosz: / 'there will be no other end of the world / there will be no other end of the

world.' / Your children will become / optimistic from birth." The rewritings of the prede cessor's poems have a similar function (i.e., as

deflating); for example, Marcin Baran's

"Biedny chrzescijanin traci wyczucie proporcji i zwraca sic bezposrednio do Boga w sprawie

raczej blahej" (A poor Christian loses a sense of proportion and turns directly to God in a

rather trivial matter), which plays upon Milosz's "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto." For

the original texts of these poems, see Dunin-Wasowicz, Klejnocki, and Varga, eds., Made

swoichpoet?w, 21,117,15 (all translations are my own). 48. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 14.

49. Swietlicki, "Polska 2," in Dunin-Wasowicz, Klejnocki, and Varga, eds., Made swoich

poet?w, 204 (the translation is my own). 50. Szymborska employs the everyday in her poetry as

consistently as she avoids the

Romantic. Notwithstanding the philosophical dimension of her poetry, Szymborska's pop

ularity as the "people's poet"

seems to result from her dislike of "costumes and ethoi." De

spite her penchant for finding surprises in the banal, she rarely "personalizes" her poems. One wonders whether this resistance to the personal and her reluctance to create a

"louder" media image cloaked Szymborska from the radar of the 1990s rebels with a cause.

Gender issues may also have been a factor?the O'Harists favored male cult writers.



480 Slavic Review

Ultimately, the O'Harists' problem with their poetic fathers is a prob lem with their own poetic identity. In Swietlicki's words, "I can't get who I am. No banners, no initials and no symbolic pictures / cover me and this is why I absolutely / can't get who I am.... I'm holding on to my cigarette,

not to get lost."51 The O'Harists' inability to see themselves as more than an oppositional voice to their predecessors and their need to constantly affirm this antagonistic stance prevented them from fully exploring how to represent the subjects emerging in the period of the "great transfor

mation," including its new "domestic and quotidian."52 Their sense of dis tance from the domestic tradition and ambivalence toward participation in the new reality can be seen in the poem "Asklop" (1993) by Biedrzycki, the same poet who had boasted of being "the first in Poland to write like

O'Hara." The title of this poem is an anagram of the word "Polska," which I translate as "Danlop," an anagram for "Poland."

"Danlop"

Danlop, perhaps it's some Danish town I'm here in transit, well, perhaps a bit

longer because the ministers of agriculture are sitting on milk cans blocking all the roads, they managed

to soften me up a bit

with their local curiosities like Diwron or Cziwez?r. I loved local girls police chased me a few times on the sidewalks, people

are really nice,

they try to convince me to stay longer. I promise

you, whenever I go, I will remember always Danlop.53

In the poem, Biedrzycki looks at Poland as a tourist who regards current

political events (like the roadblocks) put up by striking farmers as noth

ing more than a hindrance to travel. This outsider's indifference to life in

Asklop is clear not only from his ignorance of its location ("some Danish

town") but also from his inability to distinguish between the ministers of

agriculture and the protesters, the farmers "sitting on milk cans." To the

tourist, the creators of Asklop's literary tradition are no more than "local

curiosities," whose names are mirror-spellings of Polish writers?Diwron

for Norwid and Cziwez?r for Tadeusz R?zewicz. The tourist's stock

experiences?a bit of romance, some run-ins with the police?are all

that will shape the speaker's memory of this imaginary place of uncertain

location (an interesting sign of the new reality is that tourism has replaced

emigration).

51. Swietlicki, "Noca z sierpnia

na wrzesie?," in Dunin-Wasowicz, Klejnocki, and

Varga, eds., Made swoich poet?w, 204 (the translation is my own).

52. It is important to add, however, that the O'Harists' perennial opposition to Pol

ish tradition can be read as much in aesthetic as in sociological terms. The O'Harists' ten

dency to "offend" the old was a clever gesture of self-promotion regardless of whether it

truly responded to the reality of a new literary market or whether it was more a projected

anticipation of what this market would look like.

53. Biedrzycki, "Asklop," in Dunin-Wasowicz, Klejnocki, and Varga, eds., Made swoich

poet?w, 19 (the translation is my own).




"Asklop" manifests a desire to look at Poland through the fresh gaze of an outsider, to demystify the tradition (the names of its poetic "seers"

are rendered as they appear to an outsider?a meaningless cluster of

strange sounds that can be shifted about and displaced). "Asklop" also

shows a longing among Biedrzycki's generation to travel beyond Polish af

fairs and to look at them with a detached eye. The O'Harists felt this long

ing as a necessity, but their very awareness of this necessity prevented them from creating convincing "occasional poems" comparable to those

of O'Hara. While O'Hara brings into being "the domestic and quotidian," the O'Harists constantly bring into being only themselves as poets?their

programmatic quest for a new poetic identity leaves no room for anything but itself.

In Sliwi?ski's opinion, the entire poetic project of the bruLion genera tion, including the O'Harists, failed simply because it was "more sociologi cal than aesthetic . . . more a gesture than a real decision."54 Certainly, the

O'Harists did not produce a poetic idiom that would allow their poetry to

accommodate social changes and cultural transformations. Beyond a vo

cabulary of contestation, the O'Harists lacked a vocabulary of their own

and this limited the depth of their poetic explorations to a manifestation of

the confused self-identity that followed freedom.

The "failure" of the O'Harists has more to do with their view of liter

ature than with their view of reality. Their adoption of an external model

only highlights their determination to find a new poetic authenticity and

to liberate themselves from the strong fathers of their native tradition.

Their turn to a foreign poetics around 1989 signals a turn away from local

politics that points to the exhaustion of the native paradigm of literature.

Yet, the turn to O'Hara was not simply the search for the normal under

stood as the quotidian living of life without concern for politics or ex

tended ruminations on ethical issues; if the O'Harists had merely sought models for representing the domestic and quotidian, they could have

looked to Polish writers such as Bialoszewski, whose unique model for rep

resenting the everyday avoided the project of disclaiming Romantic oblig ations by simply disregarding them, or, in a different mode, to Stachura

and Andrzej Bursa, both of whom wrote their own versions of the

everyday.55 By the end of the 1990s, Polish poets were able to turn to

Bialoszewski and other contemporary a-Romantic poets (including Som

mer) , but in the first years after communism, the impulse to look for a dif

ferent literary paradigm was conflated with the desire to explore the

opening up of Polish political and social life and what lay beyond Poland's

borders now that those borders could easily be crossed.

One aspect of this exploration, however, was its belatedness. Instead of

looking for foreign models among living American poets (which would

happen later?John Ashbery is currently quite popular in Poland), the

young poets took as their emblem a poet who died in 1966. O'Hara's

54. Sliwi?ski, Przygody z wolnoscia, 9 (the translation is my own).

55. Although Bursa's everyday simultaneously contests both the Romantic paradigm and the official rhetoric of social realism during the 1950s in Poland.



482 Slavic Review

oeuvre, once potentially rebellious and part of an ever-evolving present, has already been incorporated into the respected tradition of American

poetry. Was the choice of O'Hara purely a product of the easy availability of

this foreign material, solely a matter o? Literatura na swiecies editorial deci sion and thus not a choice at all? Is it not possible that this belatedness was

also an attempt to fill in a historical lacuna and feel a part of a great up heaval in western culture (as opposed to political protests in eastern

Europe)? Did it arise from an almost nostalgic desire to share in the rebel lious culture of 1960s America where O

' Har? belongs to the same group of

icons of popular culture (icons that have been popular for decades in

Poland) as Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or The Doors? In turn, this belat

edness may also have signified?through the fascination with the everyday of the old New York whose political dimensions were unreadable to its Pol

ish readers?another form of disengagement from the political dimension

of the Polish everyday. In seeking a model in poetry written some thirty years earlier and in a

different cultural context, the O'Harists sought a means to make a fresh

poetic start by removing themselves from the complications involved in

representing their own backyard in the period of transition. To fully ad

dress the social and cultural specificity of the Polish everyday in a period of traumatic change would have risked making it into "something more," for instance, a type of social critique that would have constituted a return

to the tradition of socially engaged poetry. It would have made the project of de-Polonization (de-Value-ation) too difficult. It is hard to say whether

this was indeed the case, but it is interesting to observe that a similar fas

cination with American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s developed in other

Slavic countries, such as Ukraine.56

O'Harism, thus, was a sign of a multifaceted cultural morphogenesis that was simultaneously an act of compensation for Romantic "Polish

complexes," the self-exploration by a new poetic generation in the face of a new political and cultural reality, and a (mis) reading of a foreign source.

As an aspect of what is regarded as the Americanization of Polish litera

ture, O'Harism involves not only cultural responses to the brave new

world of the free market and globalization but also this new world's rela

tion to the formative, most vital parts of Poland's traditions.57 In a sense, O'Harism was a deictic gesture that points more to the O'Harists than to

O'Hara and that allows us access into the mechanisms of how one cultural

specificity is converted into another.

By 1996, critics had ceased talking about O'Harism and O'Hara's pres ence in Polish poetry. Perhaps, then, O'Hara served as a vanishing medi

ator, a catalytic agent that facilitated an exchange of energies in Polish lit

erature. For the bruLion generation, O'Hara's poetry had "open[ed] a

56. The Ukrainian magazine Krytyka, which targets an audience similar to that of the

New York Review of Books in the United States, reviews and advertises two anthologies of

American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s in a recent issue?one in Ukrainian (Den' Smerti

PaniDen [The day lady died]) and one in Russian {Beat); see, Krytyka, nos. 1-2 (2007): 39.

57. Dariusz Pawelec, u'Szyk' i 'skowyt': O poezji debiutant?w drugiej polowy lat

osiemdziesiatych," Kresy, no. 6 (1991): 90-91.




window and [gotten] some air," to use the opening lines from Swietlicki's

poem, that is, for a generation of young writers who were intensely aware

of their positionality and the opportunities that the new reality offered

them, it had provided a short-lived illusion of radical rupture with the

past. Once the continuity with the Romantico-symbolic tradition had

been disrupted, it was once again possible to see the complexities of the

past and to find in them the material for creating something new.



20012

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