Yes. For me, poetic creation was about action, not writing pretty verses. Not verses: facts. I created – it’s what I thought, it’s what I still think – certain facts. Not (more or less successful) lyrical bits and pieces. I reacted to events with facts – which I gave a verse form – and not with ‘poetry’. That’s why, even though I was a diligent student of the Masters of the Word, I was never interested in so-called ‘schools of poetry’ and their market-place, auctioneering rows about versification and metaphor… Speaking ‘directly’ was to lead to the source. To the restoration of banal faith, banal hope, banal love. Love that conquers death. Love conquered by death. Those were my concerns, those simple matters. The poems where I strained for originality, uniqueness, ‘novelty’, they’re of secondary importance. Possibly from the point of view of ‘aesthetic experience’, they’re better than the others. You can’t have ethics alone. But avant-garde dogmatists had created so much havoc; the only remedy was to replace what people call ‘poetic meaning’ with ordinary meaning, common sense. I consciously began to give up the privileges of ‘poetic meaning’. I turned to the banal truths. After a short trip to the land of ‘poetic meaning’, I go back to my rubbish heap.
Here you will find an interview with Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz. [via 3:AM Magazine]
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