Apotheosis of Music: Selected Poems

The first English-language collection of Witold Wirpzsa, a major post-war Polish poet known for his subversive language, irony, and political satire. Witold Wirpsza's poetry belongs to an experimental and intellectual current less present in the Whitmanian English-language tradition. Reveling in spoof, buffoonery, the grotesque, paradox, hyperbole, and nonsense, his work employs every poetic means to undermine our propensity to take what is being said at face value. His linguistic explorations stem from a mistrust in language as an adequate means of communication and a scrutiny of its susceptibility to abuse and misuse for political ends. By turns "difficult," abstract, darkly humorous, his poetry is steeped in ethical and social concerns. This collection draws from his many books, covering a period from the late 1940s to the 1980s, and includes poetic cycles on Stalin, on music, on dance, and the 1955 exhibit, The Family of Man. \\ "Like his vital contemporaries of the previous century, such as Miron Bialoszewski, Julian Przybos, and Tadeusz Rózewicz, Witold Wirpsza is a dynamic poet unafraid to speak truth to power and insist on "a separate table, please." His poems sing in counterpoint against the growing tides of dangerous groupthink or vapid insularity. Wirpsza's twentieth-century troubadour could be staring into the future when he sees the absurdity of windmills whacking at each other like stationary Three Stooges and sardonically wonders if they 'have their own sky and will / they take off into that sky and / take all the possessed to tranquility.' If there's a more apt metaphor for our tech-siloed quixotic age, I haven't encountered it." --MARK TARDI \\ "Witold Wirpsza is the Polish John Ashbery, with a cause. The labyrinth of his art-educated work has periscopes trained on the brutalist and brutal regime outside. He has Ashbery's humor, his large playing field of language (with more consonants), but another slice of the twentieth century (the nasty one) and another country (one with boots on it). Wirpza's music is marvelously apt now as the U.S. of Ashbery becomes the Poland of Wirpza." --ANDREI CODRESCU \\ Polish Poetry. Music. Cold War. Poland. Translation.