We send our warmest congratulations to Prof. Aleksandra Kremer, winner of the 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies for her book The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II, which was published by Harvard University Press last year. This prize is given to the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs, and so represents a broad field of work across the humanities and social sciences.
Book Discussion: “The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II,” by Aleksandra Kremer
Thu, October 13, 2:45 to 4:30pm CDT (3:45 to 5:30pm EDT), ASEEES 2022 Virtual Convention, VR5This roundtable will discuss Aleksandra Kremer’s recently published book “The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II” (Harvard University Press, 2021). Kremer’s study of recordings and live performances of Polish poetry productively expands how we take stock of a poem’s life cycle and considers how a poem’s soundings contradict, complicate or complete what exists in print. She invites us into a practice of close listening that seeks out a poem’s core not in a discrete text but in its author’s extended, plural efforts to connect print to voice. While Anglophone scholarship has long accounted for spoken and recorded iterations of poetic text, Kremer’s book makes a novel attempt to assess the role of authorial sound recordings against the specific historical contours shaping Polish culture. “The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry” sheds new light on the evolving poetic self during politically turbulent decades and in the laboratory conditions of twentieth-century Poland. Roundtable participants bring expertise in Polish literary, cultural and sound studies to a discussion of this book and the ideas it sets in motion.
