Thursday 14 November 2024 at 20h
Prof. Dr. Piotr Florczyk - University of Washington, Seattle
Lecture in English, organized in cooperation with the Forum on Central and Eastern Europe (KU Leuven) and with the support of the Polish Institute Brussels.
Lecture in room R.013, Rodestraat 14, Antwerpen.
Free admission. To register: email to ijs@uantwerpen.be.
Poetry of witness is the term generally applied to poetic works that provide first-hand testimony of, as the American poet Carolyn Forché puts it, conditions of “historical and social extremity,” among them political persecution, warfare, occupation, torture, censorship, and exile. The twentieth century furnished countless horrific narratives of what human beings are capable of, but not only are the survivors of the last century’s worst crimes against humanity dying out, the events themselves, including the Holocaust, are beginning to recede from the world’s collective memory. Are poets and writers working today allowed to write about things they have only heard of from history teachers? If they do, what purpose should guide them in the process? And how do they navigate charges of aestheticizing someone else’s suffering? These are some of the questions at the heart of Piotr Florczyk’s poetry volume, From the Annals of Kraków (2020), which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Piotr Florczyk is a poet, essayist, translator, and scholar. His latest book, Dialogue and Influence, which is forthcoming from Academic Studies Press, is a collection of essays on Polish and American poets engaging with each other’s work. Among his honors are awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Wisława Szymborska Foundation. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and lives with his wife and their two children in Los Angeles.
