Tomasz Różycki, photo: Elżbieta Lempp
The Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, has invited acclaimed poet Adam Zagajewski to curate the 2011 edition of The Tenth Muse, a longstanding Unterberg Center tradition in which a well-known writer introduces poets less familiar to the 92nd Street Y audience
For his Tenth Muse presentation
Zagajewski, widely known in the U.S.A. for his poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World, which offered consolation to Americans in the 9/11 issue of The New Yorker, chose two European poets:
Tomasz Różycki (Poland) and Marie Lundquist (Sweden).
"Persona" for Różycki is also the transpersonal - the persona of his poetry holds the memory of an entire family or tribe, or perhaps even of society in general. And there's no mockery here. Rozycki's poetry is serious, a private response to the historic moment. Without a doubt, a vital new poet has emerged from the Polish language.
- Adam Zagajewski
Rozycki will be joined by Mira Rosenthal, who translated his collection The Forgotten Keys (Zephyr 2007) and is currently working on his sonnet cycle, Colonies , and by Found in Translation award winner, Bill Johnston, who is presently rendering Różycki's cycle, The Twelve Stations, into English.
Tomasz Różycki (b. 1970) is a poet, critic, and translator living in Opole, in southwestern Poland. His family shared the fate of Adam Zagajewski in having been forcibly expelled from Poland's eastern territories after World War II when they were annexed to USSR; and although he grew up in western Poland, his work is similarly informed by the moral and historical imagination of that upheaval, and by the vagaries of personal and collective memory. Critic Piotr Sliwinski describes Różycki's poetry as occupying "a tension between speech, which is kept on a tight rein and removes the threat of reality, and experience, which would like to break free of language..." He has published seven books since the mid-1990s, including the Koscielski Prize-winning epic poem Dwanascie Stacji (The Twelve Stations, 2004) and the sonnet cycle Kolonie (Colonies, 2006), both of which were nominated for Poland's most prestigious literary award, the NIKE prize. An inheritor of the tradition of
Miłosz and Zagajewski, Różycki deals with questions of personal and collective memory in his work, and with the question of tradition itself. He was the first poet to take part in the Polish Cultural Institute's Poland-U.S. Artists-in-Residency Exchange Program, hosted by the Vermont Studio Center in 2009.
Adam Zagajewski's Tenth Muse presentation with Tomasz Rozycki and Marie Lundquist takes place at the Unterberg Poetry Center on March 28, 2011, 8:15 PM
The Unterberg Poetry Center
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
Source:
www.polishculture-nyc.org