The Moral Traps Of Poetry: Between Art, Memory, and the Traumatic Past A Conversation With Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
The Moral Traps Of Poetry: Between Art, Memory, and the Traumatic Past
A Conversation With Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
By Katarzyna Świerad-Redwood
Edited by Abigail E. Lewis
Note from the editor:
EuropeNow is proud to publish this interview with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Polish scholar, musician, poet, and activist. Kwiatkowski currently serves as the Artist in Residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive and is curating the What About Exclusion? workshop at Oxford University. The interview, conducted in March 2024, is now a year old, and speaks powerfully and poignantly about art’s importance as a vehicle of free speech and memory activism. Kwiatkowski wields his poetry, music, and activism to speak out against violence, hatred, and human rights abuses in the past and present. His work invites his interlocutors to investigate the difficult, often painful, past as a means of understanding the present. These issues continue to be painfully relevant as the Russian war in Ukraine continues to rage on and against the backdrop of continued instances of state violence, including the suppression of free speech. At a time of war and stark international divisions, he argues that art builds empathy and mutual understanding: “In the past I thought that the most stupid motto in the world was “all you need is love” and now I really think that’s right. If we see a lot of darkness and such bad situations full of violence, then we need love, light, friendship, cooperation, and help.”
Kwiatkowski has consistently used his artistic platform to raise awareness about state violence and Poland’s need to remember its own difficult past. He uses both his poetry and his music to shed light on the Holocaust in Poland, especially Polish collaboration, a past too often forgotten in Poland’s society and culture. In 2015, Kwiatkowski discovered nearly 400,000 shoes outside of the Stuthoff concentration camp belonging to victims of the Holocaust. This history hit close to home as Kwiatkowski’s grandfather, a Polish Catholic, had been held prisoner there. Kwiatkowski was pivotal in pressing the city to memorialize the Jewish ghetto in Gdansk. In 2019, he spoke out against the public assassination of the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamomicz during his band’s set at South by Southwest. Today, he continues to see art’s power to raise awareness about political injustice and acts of violence, both in the present and in the past. Kwiatkowski and his psychedelic band Trupa Trupa, are collaborators with Polish filmmaker, Agnieszka Holland, and wrote part of the music for her 2024 film The Green Border, which examined human rights abuses and the experiences of refugees at the Polish-Belorussian border. Kwiatkowski’s raison d’être as an artist is to directly confront the past and to ask his interlocutors to do so as well. Kwiatkowski’s work is all about the need to examine the past – not because it could happen again, but because it is already happening again.
This interview, conducted by Katarzyna Świerad-Redwood, a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame, explores the intersection of history, memory, and art in Kwiatkowski’s chapbook, Crops, which examines Poland’s complicated Holocaust history, including Polish complicity and antisemitism through poetry. This interview was conducted in March 2024 as part of a Notre Dame digital humanities project about art, memory, and human rights entitled Fighting for Democracy and Human Rights Through the Arts. This piece was originally published on the Nanovic Institute for European Studies graduate student blog, Europe in the World.
The interview was conducted in March 2024 on Zoom. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Content note: This interview contains descriptions of violence and antisemitism.
Kasia: As most Polish families, your family was directly affected by World War II, but your family was also affected by the Holocaust, and shadows of that family history are a strong presence in your poetry. In that sense, is poetry more than art for you? Did writing help you deal with the generational trauma? And, how did your family receive your work?
Grzegorz: You are the first person to actually ask me this question. This is a great question, a very hard one. Firstly, I think my poetry was written for myself; I didn’t think about communication or some message, it was therapy, a cure. I was curing myself. When I was young I was a musician, so for me, the world of history, and the history of my family mixed with the world of music, classical music, and because of that, this strange combination is poetry. Poetry is also music, so in some ways it’s just one mix.
Most Polish families were affected by the war, my grandfather was a prisoner at the concentration camp Stutthoff, thirty kilometers from Gdansk, and his sister Marta was also a prisoner. He was a broken person, a person of trauma, very calm and very shy after the war. His sister was just destroyed because of this concentration camp experience, there was no contact with her after the war. When I was a child my grandfather took me to the museum of the Stutthoff concentration camp, his first time after the war, and he started shouting, screaming, and crying. One more time he was in this hell. For me, as a child, it was a very strange experience, and I guess I didn’t know what was happening. Now I think it was one of the most important events in my life. Because of that I would ask myself “why are people building concentration camps?” “Why are people killing each other?’ “Why are people building gas chambers?”
He [my grandfather] was a young boy when he was at the concentration camp, his sister was [there] in the worst year, in 1944 when it became a death camp. They were Poles, so my family origins are Polish. But my wife’s family history is a Jewish history. Her grandmother with her family, they were hiding in the forest near the city of Rzeszów, and near Mielec, and it was a family secret for decades. I found out about it by accident some years ago when I asked my wife’s grandmother where she was during the Second World War. She said she was hiding in the forest. I asked her why, and she said, “everyone was hiding in the forest.” Then I asked her very directly “are you a Jewish person?” And she said that she’s not and that she hates Jewish people, that when she was a child she saw two Jewish boys who stole Holy Communion from the church and they crushed it with a hammer. And I said “well I know this story, it’s a Middle Ages pogrom story.” It was the end of the conversation. Then I thought I found something about this family. I thought that my wife didn’t know, she told me she didn’t know about it. Actually, they all knew, but it was a secret. They are still afraid, more or less, because of antisemitism, which is rising and rising.
It all affected my work, my poetry, and it’s affecting this memorial project more and more, and right now I am even more dedicated to this issue because we have two sons, and I feel responsible for society, and the world, really, because of them. They’ve got Jewish roots, they are Jewish boys, Polish-Jewish. So for me this is even more important than the past.
You asked me how my family received my work… I don’t know. I think that they don’t talk about it. Well I think it’s not that they don’t talk about it, I think that they think that I shouldn’t talk about it, that I will cause trouble. On the one hand, they are proud that I work for example at Oxford University, but they don’t think it’s a good topic to talk about when you are in Poland. But I think it’s changing for the better.
Kasia: Do you think of your poetry as resurrecting the voices of those who have been lost to history? How do you do your research?
Grzegorz: I’m reading everything I can, I’m watching everything I can, and I’m listening to everything I can. I’m talking especially with older people and I’m trying to know more about this past. Years ago, by accident, I found camp notes written by my grandfather. So this is another source, which is very shocking for me because we didn’t talk a lot, he didn’t talk a lot with anyone. My English and French translators say so, and I agree with them, that I write in the same way as my grandfather. I mean, it’s exactly the same thing. Genetic memory is a proven thing, it’s not a hypothesis anymore, so it’s very shocking for me that I contain him, that he’s in me. I wouldn’t say that I’m obsessed with the past but I think I’m very focused, and I really know how to walk on this very complicated territory. In some way I think that this genetic memory plays some role here, but I do use a lot of materials. When I was young I was a coordinator of Amnesty International in Gdańsk for many years, so very quickly I found out that the past is not the past, that the violation of human rights and the suffering of innocent people is happening constantly. So it’s not only about the past, it’s not only about the Holocaust and the Second World War, it’s about the human ability to kill each other—something like that.
My books and my memorial project are about violence, it’s about human beings who are violent and I’m trying to show a lot of different perspectives on the same topic. For me, one of the most important books is written by a Chicago-based poet Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote the Spoon River Anthology. This book contains hundreds of epitaphs of people from the same city, from the same place. From him, I took the idea to make a kind of genocide landscape, full of different perspectives, different voices, but they are talking about the same thing in some way, from different angles. So I am using old voices and new voices. But the point is that I am not using my imagination, and I don’t want to touch my imagination. I think that it is very hard to navigate this genocide territory, it is very easy to make it kitsch and to make melodramatic histories. So what I do, really, is like a work of sculpture, I am just shaping, I’m just removing words. I want to be as close to the facts as I can, as close as I can to the brutality of facts, and I want to keep moving.
I am also an activist. For many years I fought for the commemoration of the Jewish Ghetto in Gdańsk, it took me eight years. A few months ago the City Hall of Gdańsk commemorated the Jewish Ghetto. The point is that no one in Gdańsk and no one in Poland knew that the heart of the city was a Jewish Ghetto. It was a small ghetto, but still it was a ghetto—I heard by accident about it. When I see something is wrong I very quickly move forward and I think that one thing about me is that maybe I’m naive, but I’m not afraid, I just do things. I don’t calculate that someone would be angry.
I’m an activist, that’s one thing, but I’m also a musician with the psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa and part of Trupa Trupa is a democratic structure, it’s a band known more in the western world than in Poland, for sure, and generally speaking this is the situation for my art because my poetry is more known in the western world than in Poland.
The reaction to our art in Poland is not about big criticism because there is no criticism, but it’s like… pointless? Senseless? Most of the readers and listeners, they don’t get the point. And I understand them, I don’t criticize them. I think that Poland is still a land of trauma, people are very traumatized, even if they don’t know about it. I think maybe it’s not something for them. If someone is in the middle of trauma and maybe even doesn’t know about it, it’s not something that will give him the cure.
Kasia: The voice of the “I” is essential to poetry, the lyric voice. But in your work it is a voice simultaneously of a whole town, a community, and in many ways of history. How were you thinking of the blending, of your poetic voice and the voices of those you were drawing into your work?
Grzegorz: I think what I’m doing is making a selection. I’m choosing the stories, I’m choosing the voices, I’m choosing the fragments. For me the ideal situation when you’re describing genocide is tone. The world of music is very important to me, for me the most important artist is Glenn Gould, he was a Canadian artist. I have listened to Glenn Gould, for fifteen years now, for eight hours a day. I love his neutral tone of playing, very mathematical, very anti-melodramatic. So I took one thing from Edgar Lee Masters and one from Glenn Gould: to write about some horrific things that we can’t even imagine in a regular, normal way. I think this creates a [situation where] the reader is protesting, he can’t agree with this kind of tone when you’re writing about genocide. But the point is that it’s not my imagination; I am choosing this neutral tone from real people, from their real voice. And I think in times of peace we can’t imagine it, but I think one of the biggest secrets of the evil and crime and violence is that it’s very normal, and we can’t stand it. This is the point, that we want to reject this knowledge. And you can even see it right now in Israel and Gaza. Every day, day by day, we see the horrors and the murdering and death and I think we are very close to being used to it. And we can say we’re sorry, that we’re shocked; we can be devastated for fifteen minutes, but then life goes on, right?
I am the person who is shocked, I am rather over-fragile, I really can’t stand it. But in my work I don’t want to show my emotions. What I want to make in art are moral traps; my art is full of moral traps, questions without good answers. I think that the narration is so neutral and so complex that when someone is reading my book, they should decide who is good and who is bad, and I think this is a trap. Someone whose moral apparatus is turned off will suddenly have it turned on, but there are no good answers.
When I’m reading Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, great art, it always says a lot about myself because I’m deciding, because there’s a lot of space for me. It’s not that I’m reading a book and think “this is a great book, well written,” because in great art there is always a lot of space for the reader and your decisions and imagination. And that’s why we love it so much, because we’re involved. And I think I try to do the same, not saying that I’m succeeding, but I’m trying to do the same, especially on such delicate territory. The Holocaust, genocide, it’s such delicate territory, it’s so easy to make a horror movie from it, to make it kitsch and melodramatic, and I hate it.
Kasia: On this note of leaving a lot of space for the reader, your poetry is very stark and often brutal in its starkness, emotionally hard to grapple with. Did you ever fear that the clinical precision with which you speak of atrocities and violence would be too much for your audiences? Why is it important to not only write about uncomfortable topics but write about them in uncomfortable ways?
Grzegorz: Stark, yes, it’s a word that is most often used in the reviews of my poetry. I think there is always a very thin line, and I don’t always trust myself. I’m always very suspicious, checking that I know what I’m doing and that I know what the purpose of it is. It’s very easy to go too far. I think—I hope—that I didn’t, but I don’t know. I am focusing on stuff that is so shocking and unimaginable, but still this is the truth. And for me, this mix of neutrality and truth and unimaginable horror, I am rejecting it. And when I reject something I have to face it, and I try to be as close to the situation, knowing that I can’t be as close as I want. There is a great book by Didi Huberman, The Images In Spite of All, and for me this is a crucial book because he’s writing here about photos from Birkenau. He thinks that we should try to be as close as we can and write about it, and I agree with him because we, as human beings, have the ability to do these kinds of things on and on, and this Holocaust story can come back in the future. That’s why. It’s not science fiction, it’s a portrait of humanity. My ideal situation is that the reader can think about himself that “maybe I would be this wrong person,” “maybe I would be a murderer.” And when you start to think about that then you can have a kind of moral enlightenment, to look at yourself from this dark side. But it’s not only about the topic, the message, it’s also about music and the mechanics. Art is always about music. Without music it’s just like an article.
Kasia: You give voice to the victims and the perpetrators, as well as apologists. Was this a formal decision to achieve a kind of polyphony, or a moral one to remind audiences that atrocities don’t happen in the ether?
Grzegorz: Totally, although I think the voices of the murderers in my books are very full of obscenities, it’s very easy to see that they are wrong. It’s very clear that something is critically wrong. The reader can clearly see on what side I’m standing, the side of love. In the past I thought that the most stupid motto in the world was “all you need is love” and now I really think that’s right. If we see a lot of darkness and such bad situations full of violence, then we need love, light, friendship, cooperation, and help.
Kasia: You are very involved with educational institutions, giving guest lectures, leading workshops. What is your pedagogical objective? What do you think is the role of literature in education especially in the current moment with the rise of a kind of anti-humanist front?
Grzegorz: I really believe that great art is full of beauty and wisdom. Art has a lot to do with preaching, even if we don’t think so, or are afraid to say it. I believe in a big cathartic, therapeutic power of art. It’s a great way of communication, of collection, and it plays a big role even in diplomacy. I’m from Poland, and generally speaking it’s a country of sad, traumatized people; we don’t say to each other “hello,” we think we should be humble, we don’t like outsiders. Personally, I am really addicted to art and it plays a big role. Every day I listen to the Magic Flute and every day I live in some magical land and that’s why I’m not afraid, and I have the courage to protest and be an activist. I think art can change people’s souls and reality. On the other hand there is the art of people like Leni Riefenstahl, who was making very opposite art. But generally speaking, I think that at such a polarized time of black-and-white narration, art is something that is always very complicated and it makes the world very deep and fascinating. Great books are wiser than authors, and that’s the point.
Kasia: There is a long history in Polish literature of writing about the past, especially past violence and trauma, to speak to the present. How important, do you think, is it for writers today to continue that tradition in the face of gross historical revisionism, Holocaust denial, and widespread conflict? Is there something dangerous about writers appropriating the past? Is there some sort of line writers shouldn’t cross?
Grzegorz: People from literary circles always gave me the same advice: you shouldn’t mix poetry and history; you shouldn’t focus on history; you shouldn’t focus on the past. They always told me this [lie] that history is over, that the world of war is over, that I am so wrong because I’m focusing on the past. For me, for example, Czesław Miłosz is someone I read every year, all his poems; I read T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and they were all connected to the world of history and of politics, and there was nothing wrong with it.
Kasia: In your interview with World Literature Today you mentioned that you write your poems on an old Nokia 3310 phone and there is something almost industrial about your stripped-down verse. Can you talk a little bit about how you use technology while writing about atrocities in which technology played such a crucial role?
Grzegorz: I believe that this mobile phone doesn’t help me, it’s rather something that stops me. I can write only one SMS, one poem, very short. It’s not about writing poetry here, I am just using it to write down my thoughts and ideas for poems, but they’re so short and it’s very hard to write on it because the keys are very old and tough, and I’m lazy, so I try trim everything as much as possible to fit it in just over a hundred characters. When I’m taking these notes back to the computer to rewrite in my document file, then in most cases I have a ready poem. I always think that I would create something based on the note, but then after all it’s ready, because I made it [the process] very lapidary, and squeezed it so much that it’s enough. Generally speaking, I think that less is more. My other methodology is that I have one document file with all the notes from my whole life, and this document is now about five thousand or seven thousand pages, and I’m scanning it all the time, like a machine, almost every day. On my desktop I have the number of the page that I am on, for example “375—go up.” Then one year later I am finishing scanning this document and then of course adding new stuff, but I’m always scanning all the notes, and I am changing as a person and focusing on different things. I love this idea because I will always find something interesting because the range of things here is very wide. Usually, artists are often in different stages of art, like Picasso, he had a Blue Period, and so on. And I think I can be in different periods at once, that I can just search for the best stuff, according to the musicality of it and of course according to the topics. I’m really a scanner, and the world of technology is very helpful for me. Almost half of my lectures were Zoom lectures, so the world of technology was very useful there as well. I’m very lucky to live in such a technological world because in Poland I’m very isolated. I am not a part of any literary circle or society, the same with my band Trupa Trupa, we are outsiders. But with the help of technology we can create new worlds, and we are doing it. Technology has given us access to people.
Kasia: You said that less is more, and of course your poems are very compact, you abandon punctuation, and make very good use of line breaks. You mention your work is anti-Wagnerian and there are echoes of Paul Celan in there too. Is this all an anti-Romantic reaction?
Grzegorz: Yes, I think so. Paul Celan is an interesting topic because I started reading him very, very late. I was lucky not to have read him earlier, when I was just beginning, because his brilliant work might have influenced my writing too strongly, making it less independent. Of course, I greatly admire his art, especially the musicality of Death Fugue, and the controversies surrounding it are crucial to me. To be clear: I don’t think there is anything wrong with this poem – these controversies only highlight the immense power and truth of this poetry. I deeply admire this author and his art. I love Wagner’s art, his operas, and Romantic art in general. However, I call my project anti-Wagnerian due to his antisemitism and his awful role as an inspiration for the Nazis. But this is also a semi-joke, because my stories themselves are very close to grand drama – they’re huge. Genocide is more than a hundred operas; it’s simply unimaginable. Art dealing with this topic can never be fully successful. It can never be perfect. If it appears perfect, it becomes melodramatic kitsch. Still, I want to stress that it’s also a very musical matter – there is music inside [the poetry]. I hear the music. It’s truly perverse to hear music in such territory, but this is the nature of the world: even there, people played music and talked.
Kasia: You asked that your work should be read continuously like prose, though it remains poetry ‘jak proze a nie poezje / a jednak to poezja.’ Where are the formal boundaries between the two, for you? How do you interact with these boundaries in your writing process?
Grzegorz: For me it is poetry, but I mention prose because people often read poetry not as a continuous work in chronological order but rather as a bunch of different poems. And my books, I think of them as one big poem, twenty-two or twenty-five poems but one story and so—one poem. Sometimes there are individual poems that have this kind of character and you can read them individually but that’s not the aim; I am not fighting to create a great poem. And this is the point for me. I love great poems but I was always interested in something different. For example, when I’m reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and his “Cycles,” it’s one poem, one body of art. I am not a fan of individual poems. I am always fascinated with the whole landscape of the artist, his poems, his life story, his letters. Big writers create whole landscapes around their books, and it’s always much more than one poem or even one book. I see the whole territory, the whole cosmos.
Kasia: What is something you find hard to describe, something where you think “oh, I can’t write this one”?
Grzegorz: When there is too much blood, too much brutality. I’m afraid of violence. I’m not fascinated by violence.
Katarzyna Świerad-Redwood, a native of Poland, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Notre Dame, where she works on the connection between emotions, literature, the periodical press, and nationalism in the Russian Empire.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (b. 1984) is a Polish poet, musician, activist, and scholar. His work revolves around themes of history, remembrance, and ethics. He is a member of PEN America and the European literature network Versopolis. Kwiatkowski plays in the psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa, whose music has been released by international labels such as Sub Pop and Glitterbeat Records. With the band, he recorded sessions for NPR’s Tiny Desk and BBC Radio 6.
Kwiatkowski curates the What About Exclusion? workshop at the University of Oxford and has been a guest lecturer at prestigious universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; Yale University; UCLA; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Chicago; Northwestern University; and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive.
In collaboration with UCLA’s Vinay Lal, he co-initiated Sangam and Agora: A Forum of Poets, Philosophers, Scholars, and Autodidacts. Alongside Paul Lodge from the University of Oxford, he co-founded It Sings Therefore We Are: Philosophy and Music in Conversation. He also participates in The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, a collaborative research initiative.
As an activist, Kwiatkowski is committed to preserving Jewish heritage in Poland, particularly the once-forgotten Jewish Ghetto in Gdańsk, which has now been commemorated.
More at: www.grzegorzkwiatkowski.com
