Incomprehensibility as an artistic strategy in the Poetry of Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Krystyna Miłobędzka

The text presents the problem of incomprehensibility as a conscious artistic strategy adopted by representatives of the Polish postwar avant-garde and uses the poetry of Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Krystyna Miłobędzka as examples. Critics often view these artists’ poems as hermetic. Here, they are presented in a comparison that is based on the similarity between artistic programs and inspirations of these two poets. The analysis of selected fragments of their poems is focused on the techniques that are consciously employed to make communication with the readers more difficult. Such techniques are used in the field of imagery, syntax, style, and the visual layer of a text. Creating unique quasi-genres of poetry is a peculiar manner of making a text more hermetic. Against such a background, the relationship between the sender and receiver becomes highly unpredictable and open to various possibilities - from a communicative failure to an intellectual game that deeply engages the reader. Discoveries of critics and scholars of Modernism, such as Jacek Gutorow, Marjorie Perloff, Bob Perelman and Peter Howarth, constitute the background for this analysis. Poems of the Polish poets who inspired Modernist changes (C.K. Norwid) and of the UK and US Modernist poets (E. Pound, W. C. Williams) are used to provide additional context.