The quixotic model of Tymoteusz Karpowicz’s poetic project

The article is a reappraisal of the work of Tymoteusz Karpowicz, one of the landmarks of the Polish poetic Neo-avant-garde, in terms of the quixotic model (principle). This approach brings into focus the following building blocks of Karpowicz’s autocreative poetics: the private library project, the idea of the book of books, the concept of holistic interconnectedness and the poet’s programmatic detachment (isolationism). In his verse they form sylleptic configurations in which language-games collide with the existential concrete and, in effect, transform the poetry into a performance acted out by the author both in his text and his highly mythicized geographic space. The superposing of his autothematic statements on his autocreative performative actions shows their remark-able congruence, and hence t the incontestable applicability of the quixotic model to describe the nature of Karpowicz’s creative project. In sum, he was a poet bent on finding his own place between the totalizing power of language and the harsh realities beyond the pale of literature.