Polish band Trupa Trupa will release new album B Flat A on February 11 and they’ve just shared the very well-shot video for new single “Uniforms.” The song starts as airy indie rock but devolves into a good bit of noisy fun by the end.
University of California, Berkeley invites you to the event:
“Crops”: Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Polish poet and musician, in conversation with Jenny Browne, 2017-18 Poet Laureate of the State of Texas
The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley invites you to a conversation about the poetry of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and his latest book ‘Crops’, published by Rain Taxi. Kwiatkowski and Browne will read from their respective works and discuss the history that informs these poems, as well as the role poetry can play in offering testimony and hope in our troubled world.
The meeting will be held on Friday, January 21.
Iggy Pop had the radio premiere of Trupa Trupa’s new single, ‘Uniforms’, on his BBC Radio 6 Music show.
This interview was conducted via e-mail in November 2021. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski was in Gdańsk and Sanford Jacoby in Los Angeles. They met through Grzegorz’s poetry and discovered that they shared K.Z. Stutthof, a concentration camp in Poland, as a presence in their lives. The prisoners included ethnic Poles and Jews (the latter self-identified or categorized as such by the Nazis). It’s estimated that nearly two-thirds of its 110,000 inmates were murdered until the camp was closed in May 1945, the last camp liberated by the Allies. Here Kwiatkowski reflects on the violence perpetrated in Poland during the Second World War, and the dualities of the Polish experience. Is it possible for art to reckon with the darkness, free of melodrama and kitsch?
Henry Rollins just played Trupa Trupa’s “Twitch” single in his KCRW show.
Our new single, “Twitch”, is all over BBC Radio 6 Music! Thank you Lauren Lavern, Iggy Pop, Steve Lamacq and Marc Riley and Gideon Coe.
At the end of February, my book will be published by the French publishing house La rumeur libre éditions. “Joies”, which consists of 4 volumes – “Radości”, “Spalanie”, “Sową” and “Karl Heinz M.”.
The first review of “Crops” in “Words Without Borders” by Tobias Carroll:
“How do you address a legacy of genocide through art? Crops has a daunting task before it, and what makes these works particularly impressive is the way that Kwiatkowski’s stark use of language offers a sense of absence throughout the book. This is haunting work in more ways than one.”
The poem, “world”, was included in ‘the Palaeolithic Grotte du Lazaret in Nice’, as part of the project by The University of Texas at Dallas and the LabSynthE studio of professor Xtine Burrough. The poem, “world”, taken from book, “Crops”, translated by Peter Constantine, can be heard starting at 48 seconds.
Actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) reads a poem from the future French book “Joies” in the Paris Galerie du jour agnès b. at the exhibition of the great photographer Nolwenn Brod, who decided to use two poems from “Joies” – “connu “and “grogner”.