Namysł i emocje : studia i szkice o doświadczeniu poetyckim Haliny Poświatowskiej

Abstract

The collection of studies and essays on poetical experience of Halina Poświatowska is coherent due to the both superior eponymous categories: consideration and emotions. Paradoxically, those two, so different and contradictory to each other, symptoms of human responses to the world seem to order the poetical world view of the author of Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie (One More Recollection). Poświatowska skillfully blends those all too human experiences and creates a remarkable weave of them thanks to whom the subject of the poet’s work is able to access the complicated matter of transgressive human experiences of love and death, which are exceptionally “sensitive spots” on the poetical map of her considerations and emotions. What makes them become cohesive is corporeal; a body, painfully experienced by subsequent romantic disappointments and, through illness, becoming more and more aware of approaching the end. Moreover, Eros and Thanatos are for the hero of Poświatowska’s poems quite demanding antagonists. In this uneven wrestling match the gods fight the constant battle to rule her body forcing her to think over its condition, abilities and constrains. The battle is not in the least a delusion, or a literary self-image creation. The two elements, sexual and mortal, are peculiarly symbiotic. The sexual element, in its expansive vitality, becomes synonymous with life. But, on the other hand, it always casts a long shadow – the though of death. The scription result of this poetry is weighty as a testamental inscription – a poetic rendering of a human being facing the cruel fate of prematurely fading life. The poetry of Poświatowska is the genu ine live-writing; somatic writing in which every line of gasping style gives an impression of a hasty autotherapy. The category of experience is no less important in the studies on Poświatowska’s poetry, since it assumes a leading role of the measure of individual sensitivity of human being while approaching oneself and the world. This sensitivity was developed by both consideration and emotions. Considering the reality, including herself and her fate, was a process that demanded from the poet a sustained intellectual effort that was put under circumstances of violent emotional tremors and the hubbub of feelings. All of this was depicted in the poetical notebook – the collections of poems, formed as a study of a human being and the world. The permanent thinking-over of the reality was always triggered by the lifelong attempts to conceptualize the poet’s own existence, its passing nature, and poor condition in confronting experiences mandataries of which are the members of human community always keeping scientific definitions, religious doctrines, as well as dogmas, cultural clichés and stereotypes, on their deposit. This constant comparison of patterns used in perceiving the world; stemming from what the reason usurped, what rules of language (in terms of its logic and grammar) provided; to what tedious, though full of traps and surprises, life experience offers (and deals us with). Traces of cognition in Poświatowska’s poetry become apparent in various ways, for example through applying the “points of view” category which helps to access the complicated matter of existential experiences, or through the attempt to find the words that convey those experiences’ meanings and great weight. This investigation is by no means isolated or conducted with laboratory-like sterility. On the contrary, the considerations are inherently accompanied by emotions – those of fear, fright, and feeling lost. In a way, they thrive in the background, never fully conceivable but always ready to overtake the foreground. To indentify all those dramatic experiences of, not only her own, life’s finiteness, is the purpose towards which the endeavor of Poświatowska’s poetry is directed.