The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206.

press release: Dr. Aleksandra Kremer will present material from her recent book, The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II (Harvard University Press, 2021). The book studies the rising importance of authorial sound recordings of Polish poetry and documents how key Polish poets tested the possibilities of their physical voices and introduced new poetic practices and genres to Polish culture after the war. The book examines poetic performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur. This talk will reconstruct the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed the recordings of such Polish poets as Czesław Miłosz, Miron Białoszewski, Aleksander Wat, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds.

About the Speaker: Aleksandra Kremer is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she teaches Polish literature and culture. Before joining Harvard in 2016, she taught at the University of Warsaw, where she had earned her Ph.D. in 2013. She is the author of two books: The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II (Harvard University Press, 2021) and Przypadki poezji konkretnej: Studia pięciu książek (The Twists and Turns of Concrete Poetry: Case Studies of Five Books) (IBL PAN, 2015). Her current book project examines Polish and Polish-Jewish poetry written in the 1940s in response to the Holocaust and World War II.