“In your synthesis the signal condenses”: Adam Dickinson’s polymers and Kacper Bartczak’s organic poems and the plastic poetics of the contemporary organic poem

• Autorzy: Ambroży, Paulina

Abstrakty

EN

The article “In Your Synthesis the Signal Condenses:” The Plastic Poetics of the Contemporary Organic Poem” examines contemporary poets’ revisionary engagements with the concept of the organic form. For the analysis I have chosen Adam Dickinson’s Polymers (2013) and Kacper Bartczak’s Wiersze organiczne [Organic poems] (2015) – the two recent innovative volumes of poetry which approach the notion of organicity via the conceptual metaphor of plastic. The poets take up Roland Barthes’ challenge, as formulated in his Mythologies, to engage with the contemporary mythology of plastic and to reclaim for poetry the infinitely transformative potential of synthetic forms. Barthes looks into the “negative reality” of plastic, observing that, “in the hierarchy of the major poetic substances”, plastic is perceived as “a disgraced material”, a mere substation for the original, “something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant smoothness of Nature” (98). “[M]ore than a substance,” the philosopher claims however, “plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature”(97). Using plastic at once as a metaphor and formal frame for their most recent collections, Dickinson and Bartczak experiment with its proliferating, ubiquitous, flocculent and repeated structures, as well as its contradictory nature which thrives in the tension between the natural and the artificial, the original and the imitative, the malleable and resistant, the shaped and shapeless, the colloquial and the scientific. As I argue in the study, Dickinson sees plastic as both outdated and futuristic form, and a curious and ubiquitous language of the contemporary Anthropocene capable of “recreating the world as an alternate and translated reality” (The Polymers). Bartczak, in turn, pulls us into “a translated reality” of his “organic” poems in which highly condensed, opaque and stratified metaphors flaunt their artifice, revealing the obsessive discursive pollutions and transformations of language. Plastic incorporates the inherent paradoxes of organic form in which the notions of completeness, perfection and unity are interwoven with their opposites – temporality, process, contingency and becoming. This doubleness, as evidenced in Bartczak’s and Dickinson’s poems, proves particularly productive for addressing the aesthetic, ideological and epistemological challenges of contemporaneity

Słowa kluczowe

EN

contemporary poetry; organic versus synthetic form; plasticity and innovative poetics; Kacper Bartczak; Adam Dickinson; Roland Barthes

• Wydawca: Uniwersytet w Białymstoku. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku
• Czasopismo: IDEA. Studia nad strukturą i rozwojem pojęć filozoficznych
• Rocznik: 2017
• Tom: 29/1

Daty

wydano

2017

Twórcy

autor

Ambroży, Paulina

Bibliografia

• Barthes, Roland. “Plastic”. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Farrar Strauss & Girroux, 1972. 97-99.
• Bartczak, Kacper. Wiersze organiczne. Łódź: Dom Twórców Literatury, 2015.
• Bartczak, Kacper. “Neofita Rafinata.” Wiersze organiczne, Łódź: Dom Twórców Literatury, 2015. 13.
• Bartczak, Kacper. “Polimer i nic” [Polymer and Nothing]. Wiersze organiczne. Łódź: Dom Twórców Literatury, 2015. 29.
• Bartczak, Kacper. “Pieśń tworzyw sztucznych.” [The Song of Synthetic Forms]. Wiersze organiczne, Łódź: Dom Twórców Literatury, 2015, pp. 5-9.
• Burwick, Frederick. Introduction. Approaches to Organic Form: Permutations in Science and Culture. Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987. ix-xvi.
• Coleridge, Samuel, Taylor. “Shakespeare, with Introductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage”, in: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. II.
• Collected and Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge. London: Pickering, 1836, pp. 7-12.
• Skurtys, Jakub and Robert Kaczmarski. “Poezja nie jest już liryką”. An Interview with Kacper Bartczak. BiBLioteka: Magazyn literacki. http://www.biuroliterackie.pl/biblioteka/wywiady/poezja-nie-jest-juz-liryka. Online source.
• Culler, Jonathan. “The Mirror Stage,” in: Lawrence Lipking (ed.), High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Print.
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• Dickinson, Adam. The Polymers. Toronto: Anansi, 2013. Print.
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• Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University, 2008. Print.
• Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.
• Stevens, Wallace. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. 471-489. Print.
• Whyatt, Rachel. Review of Adam Dickinson’s Polymers. Lemon Hound 5 (2013). http://lemonhound.com/2013/06/08/rachael-wyatt-on-adam-dickinsons-the-polymers/. Online source.

Identyfikatory

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11320/6654

DOI

10.15290/idea.2017.29.1.16