Przemysław Suchanecki
- Poland -
Przemyslaw Suchanecki - b. 1992 in Szczecin, poet, published three books of poetry: "Wtracenie" (2019), "O" (2021) and "Na rogu" (2023). His poems were translated to Slovenian by Katarina Šalamun-Biedrzycka and to Ukrainian by Anna Zotova. Translated the works of American poets: John Ashbery and Ariana Reines. His first book was nominated for the Wiesław Kazanecki Prize in 2020. Currently resides in Cracow.
ON THE POETRY OF PRZEMYSŁAW SUCHANECKI
By Lynn Suh
Originally from the coastal city of Szczecin in northwestern Poland, Przemysław Suchanecki (b. 1992) moved to the country’s literary heart, Kraków, to study philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, and became part of the city’s vibrant poetry scene. After publishing three volumes of poetry to date, the last two – O (2021) and Na rogu [On the Corner] (2023) – gaining widespread critical traction, Suchanecki has become an important literary figure in his own right. However, there are other reasons for his prominence in Poland. Suchanecki is an accomplished translator, most notably of John Ashbery’s earlier works from Tennis Court Oaths. In addition, he has been an integral member of an influential literary group called the Krakow School of Poetry (KSP), a name playfully riffing off Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch’s New York School.
Partly taking cues from the New York School (especially Ashbery), Suchanecki’s poetry is one of studied indeterminacy, a marked departure from the politically engaged poetry (poezja zaangożowana) that has come to dominate Poland’s contemporary poetry scene. Suchanecki is, as literary critic Dawid Kujawa observes, “an uncompromising poet […] firmly opposing the ‘primacy of content’ that the neoliberal model of cultural management increasingly imposes on creators. Various commentators and cultural journalists […] will not receive from the author any ready-made handles that would allow them to easily discursively analyze his artistic practice, verify his political views, or recognize his stance on the most current issues.” This is not to suggest that Suchanecki rejects out of hand all references to the political; the undercurrent of community and solidarity is keenly felt throughout his poetry. Such undercurrents, however, are delocalized and, borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari, “deterritorialized” as is evident in the poem “I Saw How an Egg Dances”:
Seeing a truck full of Polands disintegrating
Like snow falling on your coat put me on edge
Why isn’t the current running
Something’s falling apart
How to research the sun
How to find and keep you: rock and flame
Both appear equally real
I’m kissing those who aren’t here
All those lands in whose soil I don’t grow
The emotions of a sperm
The eyes of a zygote
From the outset, nationalist ideologies and a sense of belonging fashioned by traditional borders dissolve in Suchanecki’s poetic imagination. Instead, with “[t]he emotions of a sperm” and “[t]he eyes of a zygote”, the poet attempts to craft an emotive language that is capable of registering a greater range of associations and connections, even relations with “those who aren’t here”. In this way, the poet lays out a sense of community and belonging that reflects a fundamental longing that asks:
Where’s China of the imagination
Where’s India of the imagination
Where’s the whole world
[…]
A ghost challenges me: move your ass
Move your heart
Throughout his poetic oeuvre, Suchanecki aspires to a broader sense of self, a “coalition of selves” that embodies his relentless push to deterritorialize the first-person singular into an unbounded third-person-and-nonperson plural. In the poem “totem”, he asserts, “I can turn into open shame / pâté and compassion in the forest”; and in the poem “we’re sitting in the number four tram that turns to kleparz and the next heart is the theatre”, he claims, “and when she sat with me at the edge of a dormant fountain / i was a fork in the road and a velvety peacock tail”. Put differently, Suchanecki writes not just of reaching out to the Other, not just of becoming the Other, but also of becoming a vast collection of otherness that deterritorializes the first-person singular human into something more than human, into something human and nonhuman. Going back to the poem “I Saw How an Egg Dances”, the following lines make Suchanecki’s ontological aspirations more apparent:
I’m the one and only
I’m a common fissure in the floor
A bamboo cut down by a round of rifle ammo
An entrepreneur waiting in line at Auchan
A landlady going to the cinema to watch a controversial film that got amazing reviews
A farmer who wants to buy a gift for his wife for their twentieth wedding anniversary but has
no clue what to buy
Why am I at this very moment a fleeting smell of rot wafting around a plant
The poet here lists a truly diverse catalog of selves where a “common fissure in the floor” is equated with a “bamboo cut down by a round of ammo fire” and an “entrepreneur standing in line at Auchan”. It is a poetics that reveals a non-human-centric worldview that gives no precedence to any one category of being, but incorporates all on equal terms.
Suchanecki’s poetics of shape-shifting beyond the first-person singular, however, is not simply one of transcending traditional definitions of the self, but of thoroughly rooting into the moment, into the “here and now”, while branching out among human and nonhuman others. This is abundantly clear in such poems as “The Tragedy of Socrates”, where the poet writes:
Sometimes I understand them,
those who condemned [Socrates], though they weren’t the best sort, I know.
Sometimes I understand the rotten scraps of food
in the kitchen sink drain.
Sometimes I understand the fall of civilization
under the sprawling pressure of heavenly bodies.
Sometimes I understand descending into the garage pit,
peering under the car chassis
and finding there dark crystals,
clear waterfalls,
electric tribes.
“Descending into the garage pit”, Suchanecki journeys into a wilderness where carefully created borders and systematic divisions lose their sway over language, no longer solely determine how we relate to our environment. Suchanecki’s poetry of indeterminacy is one of unlimited associations and connections, one of coming across “clear waterfalls” and “electric tribes” while “peering under the car chassis”. Afterwards, “sweaty and out of breath, hair damp, sensing / a pulsing heavies in [his] legs, [the poet] think[s] only about which sandwich to eat: / cheese or salami.”
Poetry
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I Saw How an Egg Dances / Widziałem jak tańczy jajko
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Q&A / Q&A
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Shore / Brzeg
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Situation / Sytuacja
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You’re Not a Pest at All / Wcale nie jesteś zarazą
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The Tragedy of Socrates / Tragedia Sokratesa
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we’re sitting in the number four tram that turns to kleparz and the next heart is the theatre / my siedzimy w czwórce która skręca do kleparza a następne serce to teatr
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guam / guam
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totem / totem
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ideas are born in spaces / idee rodzą się w przestrzeniach
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illuminati calls / illuminati calls
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a light pressure in the head. it starts to rain / lekki ucisk w głowie. zaczyna padać deszcz.
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house / dom
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what a juke! / co za ju-ju!
