Marcin Mokry

Marcin Mokry – poet, designer, and UX specialist. Born in Silesia, currently based in the Sejny region. A graduate of the University of Silesia. Since 2015, he has curated the literary program of SLOT Art Festival. He also co-leads Dings and SLOT Zin – participatory projects in which he creates handmade literary art books together with local communities. The projects have been presented at various venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (LA Art Book Fair).

 

He is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections (czytanie. Pisma, Świergot, żywe linie nowe usta), recognized with awards and nominations such as the Gdynia Literary Prize and the Kazanecki Award. His writing combines formal precision with linguistic experimentation, often reflecting on memory, violence, and history. Known for his powerful performative readings. He collaborates with the Avant-garde Research Center at the Jagiellonian University and has been active in the IT sector since 2023.

Website: https://marcinmokry.cargo.site/swiergot-eng

Erasure and Excavation in Marcin Mokry's Poetry of Witness

 

While confronting the burden of collective memory and trauma, Marcin Mokry’s poetry is one of constant experimentation, enlarging what it means to witness while simultaneously questioning the very efficacy of witnessing. Mokry is acutely aware of the smallness of human words. By collocating fragments of texts with large swaths of blank space—of silence—he creates compositions that either compel us to fill in the gaps or allow the omissions to persist. Consequently, except for those readers already familiar with such works as Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost through erasure) or Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path (where seemingly fragmentary lines are spliced together), reading Mokry may be hard going. There is a resolute, avant-garde refusal to honor any convenient narratives that might distort what fragmentary texts and their corresponding silences can bear: the weight of memory and history. This was already evident in Mokry’s acclaimed first volume of poetry reading: Writings [czytanie. Pisma] (2017). His second volume, Warbling [Świergot] (2019) – from which the poems below have been selected – continues to confront human events, large and small, through the legacy of the avant-garde, as Mokry weaves scenes of home life together with geographic coordinates, place names, dictionary and catalogue entries, and reports documenting the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

 

    In Mokry’s poems, blank spaces aren’t mere absences. They produce a charged atmosphere, until text in its many guises congeals into texture, becoming almost a visual sign or marker. Take the poem “ANTONI TAKES OFF HIS SOCK”.

 

 

The title opens an intimate scene: the poet’s son Antoni (defiantly) removes his sock. An extended silence follows. Then right-aligned verses appear, as though we’re seeing a text that’s been partially erased. The first line abruptly starts mid-sentence, linking Antoni’s small gesture to the Peloponnesian War, then trails off—only to be picked up by a mention of Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen. These isolated markers of ancient and medieval history not only frame the domestic moment within a vast historical panorama, but also punctuate the largely empty page.

 

    At the poem’s end, the language shifts. 

 

Left-aligned are colorless excerpts from a dictionary, a catalogue of flowers, and an atlas—arrayed like unrelated footnotes. They share the language of official documentation stripped of feeling, disconnected and decontextualized from life. However, there is something disconcerting about each of them. “Beschickungsbühne” (German for “loading platform”) hints at darker uses. There is also “Fig. 10 A”, which pins flower names like specimens. The “Political Map of the World,” scaled to 1:160,000,000, recalls a line from Elizabeth Bishop: “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.” Together, these fragments suggest a dehumanizing worldview that scales human lives down to the size of insects.    Writing on Mokry’s poetry, literary critic Jakub Skurtys observes that Mokry “is concerned with nothing less than preserving the essence of humanity in a modern world where a range of anthropological mechanisms continually reshape […] and desubjectivize that essence.” The “Political Map of the World” is one such mechanism, downsizing humanity to a scale of 1:160,000,000. Mokry’s poetics of erasure and open spaces could be read as exposing those mechanisms as wholly inadequate for capturing what is essential to humanity. Put differently, his work is not about sweeping words off the page, but about rearranging language into new conditions for recovering our fragmented humanity. At times, Mokry’s poetry resembles a reverse palimpsest—uncovering a layer long hidden from view, waiting to be excavated.

 

For example, one untitled work consists entirely of dotted lines and the following words centered at the bottom of the page: 

 

 

The page itself resembles a grave site, a killing field, a site of memory veiled in silence, yet charged with presence rather than absence.

 

 

Another untitled poem reinforces this reading: flower names are spatially arranged on the page, noted as being “found preserved under executed bodies” in Kozluk, a mass grave of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.

 

 

Here the placement of flowers – marking where “executed bodies” once lay – recalls  what Guillaume Apollinaire called “the materiality of language.” The text becomes more than language; the page becomes a sort of canvas for exploring spatial relationships between words as flowers texturing the surface. 

 

    As seen in these poems and in “ANTONI TAKES OFF HIS SOCK”, Mokry takes great care with the typographical layout of his work. He often builds complex visual collages where straightforward reading, with the usual left-to-right and top-to-bottom movement of the eyes, is no longer possible. Interruptions and shifts of perception and register abound. Particularly striking examples of this are two poems that appear as mirror images: one is an autopsy report of “Body Number […] 525,” the other an ultrasound report of a “Living fetus.” Both are superimposed on the field of flowers mentioned above. “Vetchling,” “Evening Primrose,” “Cornflower,” “Fleabane,” and “Yarrow” appear, interrupting and complicating the reports. The following is a portion of the autopsy report.

 

 

There is a carefully orchestrated disjointedness that powerfully conveys the simultaneity of perspectives and the messy texture of reality. The ultrasound report (either of his son Antoni or daughter Maria) is similarly untidy. 

 

 

Both poems impede conventional reading. In fact, they invite multiple readings along different axes. They also return us to an old question: Where is the essence of humanity to be found? Is it in the “[l]eft shoulder” or the “[r]ight arm” that’s “extended” and “tightly bent”? Is it in one’s “PRIVATE PHONE NO.,” the “170 bpm,” or the “skull/brain” that has a “[n]ormal appearance”? Perhaps it is to be found in the interstices between the words and phrases, beyond the measurements and statistics, as our gaze seeks to transcend the doggedly static texture of these poems. 

 

    Ultimately, Mokry places the burden of witnessing on us. Although the means of discerning that essence are always inadequate, his poems invite us to try: to connect certain dots, both literally and figuratively. Amid the mix of verses, geographic coordinates, dictionary excerpts, scientific terms, and shifting textual alignments, there are no stable axes. Each poem teeters on the verge of disintegration. Words seem too small to bear the weight of what remains unsaid. Our gaze, in turn, becomes the connective tissue, stretching our anthropological and historical imagination so that the essence of humanity might reemerge, like a distant warbling beyond the clearing. Or, as Mokry himself writes, “so that you’ll return. So far behind you / sound. Sound // soundly–”, whoever “you” may be.