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Poet
ACT Theatre, March
21 , 2001
Biography
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Adam Zagajewski writes lucid poetry—at once imaginative and insightful—that
illuminates the post World War II history he has experienced. He is widely
considered to be the preeminent Polish poet of his generation. The
New Republic writes, “[Zagajewski is] a thoroughly contemporary
man who aspires, without embarrassment, to a verse that is a concrete
avenue to an invisible reality.”
Born in Lvov, in what is now the Ukraine, in 1945, Zagajewski and his
family were forced to relocate to western Poland after the Soviet takeover
of the town. He started writing by satirizing, both in verse and prose,
the surreal character of the totalitarian state. In the 1970s, along with
many of his fellow artists and intellectuals, he turned to activism. This
offered Zagajewski “the bitter bread of urgency, of contempraneity,”
he writes in Another Beauty (2000). “It ripped me from the
lovely sphere in which time doesn’t count, where I could read Norwid
one day and Kafka the next, as if the real, historical worlds in which
they lived were completely extraneous.”
In the last two decades Zagajewski’s poetry has moved from the political
toward an examination of the individual’s relationship to history,
philosophy, and the divine. “To defend poetry means to defend a fundamental
gift of human nature, that is, our capacity to experience the world’s
wonder, to uncover divinity in the cosmos and in another human being,
in a lizard, in chestnut leaves, to experience astonishment and to stop
still in that astonishment for an extended moment or two,” he writes.
He lives in Paris, France and teaches one semester a year at the University
of Houston.
Adam Zagajewski’s
many honors include a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstleprogramm (Berlin),
the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Stockholm), the Prixe de la Liberte (Paris),
the Koscielski-Foundation Prize (Geneva), and a Guggenheim Fellowship
for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker,
The New Republic, and The Paris Review. He co-edits Zeszyty
Literackie, a quarterly Polish-language literary magazine.
Selected
Works
Tremor (1985)
Canvas (1991)
Mysticism for Beginners (1998)
Solidarity, Solitude (1990)
Two Cities (1995)
Web
Site Links
Academy of American Poets web page
of Zagajewski
University of Texas homepage
for Zagajewski
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