It’s not often you open a poetry chapbook and in the “Foreword” are greeted with such a chilling anecdote:
“In the summer of 2015, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and his friend Rafal Wojczal made a gruesome discovery. Walking through the forest outside the Stutthof Concentration Camp where Kwiatkowski’s grandfather had been interned during the Second World War, the two young men came upon several thousand old shoes. These shoes once belonged to those the Nazis brought here and then brutally murdered.”
Today at 20.00 at the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin at the Festival für Neue Musik, the German premiere of “The Sixth Commandment” by Elżbieta Sikora will take place, performed by SWR Experimentalstudio and Les Métaboles, conducted by Léo Warynski.
Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski offers a cold, distilled look at the collusion of everyday Poles who participated in, or fueled, the murder of Jews during WWII. His minimalist writing, as Jesse Nathan describes for McSweeney’s “Short Conversations with Poets” series, has the impact of a “dagger”: “Punctuation is rare, and so is human decency.” I recently spoke to Kwiatkowski about his work, and here we present that interview together with English translations of his poetry by Peter Constantine and newly commissioned Yiddish translations of his poetry by Magdalena Kozłowska.
I first met poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski via email when we began corresponding about his band, the Polish political psych-rock four-piece Trupa Trupa. Over the course of our exchange, we began talking about poetry. At the time, Kwiatkowski was working with Rain Taxi and the translator Peter Constantine on a chapbook called Crops. He sent it to me, and I was stunned; the poems were short, ruthless fragments about the horrors of the 20th century, sourced from historical documents but reading as contemporary as ever. This is the crux of Kwiatkowski’s music and writing: to make art against the bleakness of humanity. I was thrilled when he agreed to have a conversation over email about his work as a multi-genre artist.
Die polnische Band Trupa Trupa kommt auf Deutschland-Tour und verströmt in ihrer Musik eine rastlose Energie, die an das kompromisslose Punk-Ethos von Fugazi erinnert. Ein Gespräch mit dem Sänger Grzegorz Kwiatkowski über seine Gedichte, seine Musik und den Pessimismus in der Welt.
During World War II, Granary Island in the Polish port city of Gdansk was the site of a Jewish ghetto. Imprisonment in the Red Mouse granary was the last stop for thousands of people before they were transported to concentration camps in Stutthoff, Auschwitz and Treblinka. The building no longer exists. The place of death, suffering, and humiliation is now an empty square.
Video report from the premiere of my French book “Joies” published by La rumeur libre éditions. The meeting took place at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris and was attended by: Audrey Kichelewski, Claude Mouchard, Mateusz Chmurski and Guillaume Métayer.
On September 17 Grzegorz Kwiatkowski will perform as a panellist at the Czech Music Navigator festival.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a new and dynamic poetic voice from Poland, with six volumes of poetry and several translations on the way, as well as the vocalist of the psychedelic postpunk band Trupa Trupa. His newest collection, Crops, translated into English by Peter Constantine, was published by Rain Taxi in November 2021. In this interview, Constantine and Kwiatkowski discuss the themes of his poetry and his endeavors as a musician and activist.
On Saturday, August 13, the third edition of the Sangam and Agora event will take place. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and UCLA professor Vinay Lal will host Poet Laureate of San Francisco Kim Shuck, Oxford University professor Paul Lodge and a couple of scientists and filmmakers – Dr. Anjali Monteiro and Dr. K.P. Jayasankara.