Rzeczywistość i „szelest papieru”. Paradoksy Wisławy Szymborskiej i Ewy Lipskiej

Wisława Szymborska and Ewa Lipska adopt a stance of opposition to the currently dominant attitudes of looseness of poetic identity, formulating programmes of “negative poetics”, emphasizing the issues of word’s “inexpressibility” and a questionable status of practised profession. Auto-thematic reflection on the creative act seldom appears in their literature and rather in a humorous, auto-ironic convention – they both reject the former conventions demonizing the role of poetry and a poet as well as contemporary poses accentuating the helplessness of the word. The two writers define art as a peculiar annexe to reality – extratextual concrete reality is simultaneously the source and the target of a poem, thus negating the traditional text and context opposition. Mimetic aesthetics is described as “eccentric” against the background of contemporary conceptions of autotelism of the work of literature and questioning its referentiality. There still remains the awareness of radical border between empiricism and the language sphere – therefore the artist is adopts the role of a mediator in a tough mission of settling these two perspectives.