'Sommer's poetry draws from the memories and from the past transforming it into the present: 'phrases, words which are still/ to express existence'. This poetry becomes a thread unites its character with the close ones, family, friends but also with the dead which in a beautiful manner - even with the beloved dog. In a poem entitled 'Squares, parks, streets', the mother figure appears in a flashback somewhere on the streets of Manhattan. The character carries on an imagined conversation with her: 'Once I used to remember your facial expressions/ Today I am too busy'. During the meeting with his mother, he expresses what we often do not manage to say to our parents before they leave. In Sommer's poetry everything is well-balanced: the simple form of expression shows itself to be a complex construction, while instead of personal meandering, there is a story about what is most important - intimacy. These poems are focused on tiny scenes, activities, or conversations stay far away from false overtones. They are accurate to one second and to one word." (Justyna Sobolewska)
" 'New relations of words' - is the title of an earlier collection of Piotr Sommer's poems and yet it still brilliantly corresponds with the latest one. In 'Dni i Noce' / 'Days and Nights' we instantly recognize the poet's voice, his interactions with the reader, and what Jacek Gutorow called 'thinking aloud'. Here, words sound as if they have just been linked, heat-bonded almost. The surprising intonation and moody, swinging rhymes of Sommer's free jazz are not a novelty to his readers. The linguistic element, more uncontrollable than ever, sounds familiar in this new collection of poems. For example, when the poet lets the equestrian metaphors loose, they gallop to the horizon of imagination. When the words do not 'run wild', they often become the object of a patient observation, or a practical cognitive criterion, a modest regulative idea. From time to time, the poet teasingly refreshes the semantics - even such serious expressions as 'catch fire' or 'a schedule'. He constantly makes a poetic dementi since, as we read in the new collection of poems, 'somehow we say all the time/ not what we should and yet/ we hear what we should'. Certainly, we say what we should not, and even though the language in 'Days and Nights' often corrects itself, even though the poet sometimes actually - to quote another poem - 'puts down phrases', he does not, however, 'undermine the grounds'. The poet does not radically doubt in the capability of a linguistic representation, or communication with reality, with others, with himself, in other words - with the references of his poem." (Jakub Ekier)
Source: www.biuroliterackie.pl
Piotr Sommer's Dni i noce / Days and Nights has been nominated for the Nike 2010 Literary Award.
"Gazeta Wyborcza" presents books nominated for the Literary Award "Nike 2010":
Rebellion? It is foreign to me.
The poetry of Piotr Sommer does not represent any programme, it does not directly pose metaphysical, religious, or historio-sophical questions. It is ostentatiously separate, sometimes also very personal, as if it was written only for oneself and a small circle of close friends. The poetry searches for distinctive linguistic forms, it often turns to humour usually derived from the linguistic ambiguities. It is scared to death of a linguistic numbness, or a loss of hearing for the sense of transformations and the development of language. In the rarely published collections of poems by Sommer, the hidden discussion with "high style", so typical for a significant part of the Polish contemporary poetry, is quite apparent.
Sommer's poems distinguish themselves with a calmness; a contemplative attitude towards tenderness, cruelty, vagueness and dispersion of life. "I do not remember exactly what I fought for/ and yet I took a stand./ Now I make no statement". The latest collection is dominated by the theme of time, which is not treated in abstract or philosophical terms. Sommer does not contemplate the idea of time, but concentrates on the phenomena through which time becomes apparent: flow of days which "come to an end without any reasons" and we do not know what binds them; growing back of the same days week by week; the barley noticeable transformation of past into present; memories of small events from the past which grow into the most important ones.
Time, in Sommer's understanding, is a subjective phenomenon, composed of private sensations, disruptions, continuity, accelerations. Time is neither an enemy nor an ally, but something inevitable inside us, which brings about astonishments of forms in which we experience it. "And through the wind I heard/ how it banged and rumbled unmercifully/ that means it ticked away without mercy/ And not being asleep, I dreamed that I was in a hurry/ though I realize there is nothing to hurry for, nothing, nothing/ I called the refrain as if I was playing staccato/ or plucking a wing's string with my own leg/ Then I discovered that it was me measuring time/ rubbing space, ticking inside/ that I would fall asleep for good if I stopped."
Conversation with Juliusz Kurkiewicz and Piotr Sommer
Juliusz Kurkiewicz: In one of your poems, you ask: "Why beautify everything?" Doesn't poetry make everything beautiful, even the most painful experience, through the search for form itself?
Piotr Sommer: I am not sure whether "the most painful experience" has to be ugly. Or whether pain has to be aesthetically disgusting. For example, labour pains do not have much to do with ugliness, and the poem from which you quote talks about childbirth. No, I do not believe that poetry has to beautify everything. If the "search for the form itself" was an act of beautification, it would probably mean that the world is formless by nature and that we can lick our lips at the sight of it only when we "give it a form", because without us forming it, the world is ugly. I think that's not true.
JK: The title of your latest collection of poems resonates with - maybe banal - literary connotations - Nights and Days by Dąbrowska, Work and Days by Hesiod. Is there something more to it?
- This may not be a question to me. The title resonates to you, as you say, as banal, then how come you would like me to explain in more detail how it resonates to you? The truth is I am not even sure whether the resonance of the title carries a significant meaning outside the context of the book. And well, Hesiod is not such a banal connotation after all.
JK: If I am not mistaken, Hesiod was the first writer who did not write on gods and heroes but on his own life, on everyday, earthly matters. Maybe in that sense he could make a patron of your collection?
- Yes, he could. I enjoyed this intriguing link; it subtly goes against expectations - one would expect a title such as "Works and Laziness", not "Works and Days", correct? And these particular earthly overtones and linguistic stimulation contained in the title gain our immediate confidence.
JK: Time is the main theme of your collection. Coming back to your poem, do we listen to time ticking or do we rather tick "inside"? Is it possible to get to know time?
- How does one establish the main theme of the collection - would you mind telling me? If I understand correctly, I would need to be more "meta", smarter than the poems themselves, but I am not so much for that. I am trying to learn from these poems myself. As soon as I find out something, I will let you know. I will even tell you about time, if it allows me to, of course.
JK: Your poetry is strongly autobiographical. You mention specific individuals, places, animals. Isn't a circle of friends, who take the hints right away, an ideal place for reading your poetry? Why share your poems with outsiders?
- Here you are subtly hinting that the jury of the Nike Award have nominated me because they are interested in my biography, or because they belong to my circle of friends? But I would rather see them as experts on language and literature. I doubt whether they could be seduced with a moving scene from their life or the delinquent's liking for domestic animals, so your idea wouldn't have crossed my mind.
JK: Reading your poetry, I feel invited to enter to your world but I cannot immerse in whole. You write about situations, persons well-known to you, which stay to some extent unclear and mysterious to me.
- Well, you have never met Sextus Propertius' Cynthia, nor Catullus' Clodia, nor Horace's audience and you will never completely get immersed into their world but you probably enjoyed their works. I see no reason why characters from my poems shouldn't stay somehow unclear or mysterious.
JK: You are considered to be a rebel against the mainstream of Polish poetry - metaphysical, religious, political…
- Am I not considered a rebel mostly by a few authors who believe that they represent, as you call it, the mainstream of Polish poetry, or even that they basically impersonate it? I am asking out of curiosity: what does it mean exactly "to be considered"? I realized that apart from the main theme of my collection, we are also establishing the main stream of Polish poetry. By the way, the theme of time has nothing to do with metaphysics, if I understand it correctly?
And speaking about rebellion, it is inherently foreign to me. It is hard to admit it but I have been dragging submission and subordination around since my kindergarten days. Authority figures have always been the most important to me. If my opinions did not comply with those of my authority figures, I used to cry.
JK: The question of time is certainly metaphysical. However, you never ask directly about time, as, for example, Saint Augustine, did. You rather describe the state of experiencing time. The rebellion of an author can also be manifested in the themes he explores, or in the writing style itself. In this sense, Białoszewski was a rebel as well.
- Oh, so we become more metaphysical if only we ask about time directly, as in the said classic, or if we refer to his questions and themes. Is it enough to ask about nature of time in a coarse, hendecasyllable verse for my reputation to improve? I agree with you that rebellion can be found in explored themes and in writing style - if these two can be separate. Wherever it is worth a second thought, these two cannot probably be separated.
JK: What works best for your poetry, nights or days?
- I like to have my eyes open.
JK: Are there any questions you do not enjoy?
- I like them all.
- Piotr Sommer
Dni i noce
Published by: Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2009
160 x 215, 86 pp., paperback
ISBN: 97883-60602-94-2
www.biuroliterackie.pl
Author: Juliusz Kurkiewicz – www.wyborcza.pl, July 2010
Translated by: Katarzyna Różańska, August 2010