High Connectability: Sketches on Contemporary Poetry

Paweł Kaczmarski

"High Connectivity. Sketches on Contemporary Poetry" is the long-awaited debut literary critical book by Paweł Kaczmarski, which is a selection of texts published between 2010 and 2018.

– The vast majority of these are texts on Polish poetry criticism. I have also included a small selection of meta-critical texts (or perhaps better: polemical and para-critical texts), concerning the condition and function of literary criticism today. Thus, this book is a story about what happened in Polish poetry in, let's say, roughly the second decade of the 21st century – the author announces.

Let us add: to a large extent, it is a story about what happened in Polish poetry in terms of its so-called engagement. In "High Connectivity," there are texts devoid of a distinctly academic character. Thanks to this, sketches on the work of, among others, Konrad Góra, Kira Pietrek, Tomasz Bąk, Julia Szychowiak, Szczepan Kopyt, Tomasz Pułka, have a chance to reach a much wider audience than just the hermetic circle of specialists. The publication includes both shorter texts, more accessible to readers who do not regularly interact with contemporary poetry, as well as in-depth, longer essays, which can already be said to have had a significant impact on the reception of recognized, award-winning authors. "High Connectivity" contains a discussion of the poetry of over 20 authors, as well as programmatic and polemical texts supplementing these discussions.

Paweł Kaczmarski writes:

Behind the slogans "poems are good" because they are engaged, poetry is good when it is political, lies a very simple desire that should be recognized as close and alive by every poetry reader (even if they disagree with the slogans themselves) – the desire for daily life, today dismembered, torn, and incomplete, to become a whole. A good poem does not tolerate optional choices, premium packages, membership levels – a good poem, even the shortest, quietest, most withdrawn, wants to be a kind of totality. Often despite its author's declarations. Perhaps not since Igor Stokfiszewski's fiery texts almost a decade ago has contemporary Polish literary criticism been so dedicated to the cause of so-called engagement.