Joanna Łępicka
- Poland -
Joanna Łępicka is a poet whose first published volume, Zeszyt ćwiczeń (Biuro Literackie, 2023), was shortlisted for the Gdynia Literary Award, awarded the Wiesław Kazanecki Literary Award of the President of the City of Białystok for the best national poetic debut and winner of the Artur Fryz “Złoty Środek” Literary Competition for the best first published poetry collection of 2023. She was awarded the creative fellowship of the City of Kraków.
On the Work of Joanna Łępicka
Joanna Łępicka is a poet, editor and literary critic originally from the Podlaskie region of Poland, now living in Krakow. Her debut book of poetry, Zeszyt ćwiczeń (Exercise Book), published by Biuro Literackie in 2023, was shortlisted for the Gdynia Literary Prize, received the Wiesław Kazanecki Literary Award of the City of Białystok for the best poetry debut, and won second place in the Artur Fryz ‘Złoty Środek Poezji’ literary competition for the best poetry debut of 2023.
The title of this collection—Exercise Book—signals that we’re entering a space of deliberate experimentation in which the poet pushes the boundaries of language, content and structure, transforming what might traditionally be seen as preparatory sketches into fully realized literary explorations that challenge conventional notions of what constitutes finished verse. The titles of some of the poems (“Sonnet”, “Pantum”, “Villanelle”, “Ode”, “Canto”, “Sestina”) suggest that the poet is testing herself and seeing what can be done with fossilized forms and canonical templates.
The reader thus settles into an expectation of established patterns and poetic rules…only to swiftly become unsettled. How is this, in fact, a sestina? A villanelle? A sonnet? Indeed, Łępicka’s “Sonnet” has fourteen lines, but where is the metre, the iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme that the title leads us to expect? And then we recall the book’s title—this is, after all, an “exercise book”. A sphere of experimentation, of learning, of exploring limits and possibilities. It’s as if Łępicka’s words, as soon as they spilled from her pen and hit the page, burst out of the timeworn constraints of these traditional forms. They sloped off the exercise book’s carefully drawn lines and exploded into the margins.
In “Sonnet”, there’s a relentless tumble of odd images and references: a blackberry bush in the autumn, a neighbour’s hen that has vanished, Artur Rimbaud, the Sirens of Lesbos, a mother ill with cancer, an obscured road, seasons of the year deceiving each other, the “violence of chronology”. According to Dawid Kujawa, a Polish literary critic, reading Łępicka’s “Sonnet” is an experience “like watching the sky become illuminated by fireworks, as allegories shoot up one after another, creating spectacular constellations of multicoloured explosions.” He situates her work within a broader set of cultural events, describing it as not only “a fascinating case of individual talent” but also the embodiment of a trend that has been growing more apparent in contemporary Polish poetry in recent years, characterised by several aspects, including “high-octane phrasing, phrasing with the highest possible degree of intensity, created through rhythm, tone and, above all, the unique ‘breadth’ of the poem.” This high-octane writing is “always somewhat more intuitive than cerebral, not grounded in the encryption of preconceived meanings but rather in the release of one’s grip on the steering wheel.”
Joanna Łępicka views herself as belonging to a young group of Polish poets whose work flirts with surrealism and is strongly influenced by Tomaž Šalamun, a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe. The influence of Šalamun on Łępicka’s work can be seen in what she herself calls her “wild stream of language” and her “attempt to discover a new kind of language that is vital.” Karol Maliszewski, in a review of Zeszyt ćwiczeń published in biBLioteka literary magazine, perceives in Łępicka’s “delirium of associations, sound and meaning clusters” echoes of Šalamun’s methods and tricks of surprising, or even stunning, the reader. But he claims that these methods are fresher, more startling, in Łępicka’s work, “as if it were she (and not Šalamun) who invented this verve, this rhythm of associative and intonational leaps.”
Łępicka is a queer poet, and Kujawa points out that “fluctuating manifestations of gender and sexuality are not only fascinating and inspiring to her, but also lie at the very core of her way of being in the world. Without taking this context into account, it is impossible to fully grasp her poems.”
If you avoid the Sirens of Lesbos, you won’t
be allowed to enter.
(“Sonnet”).
In Łępicka’s work, there is a lyrical persona that has been described by readers, and by the poet herself, as “obrotowy” (revolving); her poetic voice changes from poem to poem and revels in inconstancy as it shifts and mutates:
to abandon one’s body, abandon the net of names,
to play with you, to remain silent about it
(“Storeys”)
It is this poetic device of “lyrical revolving” that allows Łępicka to: shape-shift from “a room ready for a departure” to “a broken-down, burning stream” and then “a hole in the text” (“Untitled”); “kill pathos with a lofty ‘Sup’” (“Ode to Blue”); soar between Yalta, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper in a single line (“Storeys”); shift seamlessly from visionary imagery to expletives (“Coda to Be”); describe a vast spectrum of experiences using a single colour (Ode to Blue); become Bartók, Basquiat, and Bas Jan Ader (“Coda to Be”)… and so on.
The revolving possibilities in this little book of poetic exercises are as endless for the reader as they were for the exploratory poet when she put her pen to the page. One senses that there was a loosening of cognitive processes in the composition of these poems, and an expectation from the poet that readers will allow themselves to yield to the words’ flow in a similar manner. As the Polish poet (and Šalamun’s nephew) Miłosz Biedrzycki has stated, a poet “exposes feelers to cosmic language.”
Text by Scotia Gilroy / Translations of Joanna Łępicka’s poems quoted in this text are by Scotia Gilroy
Poetry
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Storeys / Piętra
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: / :
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an evolved form of fire / rozwinięta forma ognia
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Sonnet / Sonet
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Ode to Blue / Oda do niebieskiego
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Coda to Be / Coda to be
