The Legs of Izolda Morgan [excerpt]

We recited poems. People stood on their chairs and tried to shout us down. The poems were bad, but the audience didn’t seem to notice. I remember Irena Solska, an actress of exceptional courage and brilliant intuition, giving some of her most beautiful renditions to a lifeless response, apart from the hostile murmur of idiots.

In another instance, the same audience wanted to lynch the poet Aleksander Wat as he recited his namopaniki — epic poems whose words had been liberated from the yoke of logical content.

These days, when there is far less screaming at my poetry readings (apart from that of the police, a conservative institution by its very nature, who will surely have difficulty forsaking their tried-and-true methods for some time to come), when our books are selling in increasing numbers and have even (!) found more sponsors, when our artistic output is gradually becoming a handbag rummaged through by even those artists who adamantly reject any kind of relationship with us, these days, when the crisis can be considered a thing of the past, though the process itself is in no way over, we might cast a calm eye back to the last five years and work out a kind of summation.

We wrote a lot of bad poems, produced a lot of bad paintings — history will forgive us.

It was a strange and beautiful time, a time where every strophe was a thrust, every poem a parry, when poetry was cooked up like dynamite, every word a primer cap, a time of eternal vigilance and constant alert, of straining the eyes to locate the soft spots for striking a blow.

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