There are no good people

Ewa Jarocka

Ewa Jarocka's "There are no good people" is a surprising new voice in Polish poetry. It detaches poetry from the discourse on politics at a general, communal, diluted level and directs it towards politics in the individual dimension. This debut collection is a record of rage experienced from what is close. The story is familial, love is concrete, absence is embodied. And yet, our present, not just the author's present, is clearly outlined here. For example, abortion ceases to be a tool for political games and becomes what it truly is, moreover, in a transcendent and practical dimension.A great advantage of this debut collection is its language, simple and sometimes even slogan-like, precisely tailored to intention rather than "beauty" (whatever that still means). Ewa Jarocka embarked on writing poems in a way we had longed for. The basic category for her is "sincerity," to the bone, to the limits of decency, which gives this book considerable uniqueness.The book was awarded in the 2nd National Tymoteusz Karpowicz Competition for an author's poetry book.

Ewa Jarocka - she was certainly conceived during the summer of 1979. It is unknown where. Whether in the back seat of a Syrenka car or in a deserted park. She was certainly conceived quickly and in the dark. She was born in 1980 in Wrocław in a hospital on 1st May Square, where all her blood was transfused. Perhaps that is why, at first, she had no literary inclinations. She didn't feel the need to put her thoughts on paper. She was tiny and drew with poop on the walls of her crib. Perhaps this is where her passion, which she later pursued at university, came from. Art. Ewa drew still lifes beautifully. She didn't like nudes. Initially, she was too young for nudes, and when she did try to draw some at university, the model moved, and that annoyed her. Very much. She tore her hair out by the roots! Maybe because she had to draw people at university and didn't want to get annoyed, she rebelled against God and started writing? No! That happened much earlier, somewhere in elementary school! And it was just as improbable as her coming into the world and doctors saving her life. In 1993, she started a diary, the obscene fragments of which she blurred out in 1994 with a pitch-black marker. That's why in 1995 she decided to make up for lost time and start a journal. She wrote about everything in it. About how bad she felt in the world, how poorly she saw everything, that she'd most like to just jump off. Or at least with her guardians and school. However, she didn't realize it was the result of puberty. She didn't understand herself. No one else understood her either, even when she went to high school, which her parents believed should be her happiest time. For them, it was. They didn't work; they could only learn and have fun, have fun and learn. And Ewa had fun too. She drank and smoked everything she could. And in her journals, she even described her first time! That is, the first poem she wrote under a sudden impulse, made up of a verb and a few nouns and a whole flock of... adjectives.

Unfortunately, her diaries from puberty did not survive; in 2000, before moving to another city, she threw them in the trash. Back then, it was among rotten tomatoes and used sanitary pads, meaning they would be beyond salvage today. She vaguely remembers that her first poem was about a fish that jumped out of an aquarium and helplessly moved its gills. It was suffocating. Dying. And that she always felt like that aquarium fish. Her awakening occurred during her studies. Specifically, in her third year. She drew and drew until she realized that her journals and diaries were something important, most important, that form in art is finite and the idea itself matters. And that ideas are inexhaustible. Hence, in 2003, she turned to what happens exclusively in the imagination. But she had to occupy her hands with something! And she wanted to finish her studies! To accurately express her current thoughts, she wrote in newly established journals, which at that time were not yet in the trash: Only that which is not, is. Perhaps she borrowed this sentence from someone. And she pretended to be a conceptual artist. However, it had little to do with conceptual art, much less other fields of visual arts. But thanks to old drawings and lips like an anteater's, she finished university. This is how her first prose texts came about. From then on, she thought her future lay in epic. Moral tales. Everything concerning everyday life, but not what's out on the street. She didn't care for poetry. She didn't fight it; it just wasn't there for her. There was no Szymborska, no Różewicz. It was like that for a long time, until 2012, at another university, she met a poet whose name she won't reveal, because no. He turned her world upside down. He infected her with a love for poetry! He taught her everything that "hurts." But then she cried so much that she had lost her first poem! In 2014, she decided to make up for the losses again and publish a collection of poems titled "there are no good people." She even managed to publish it.