The Provisional Sung Poetry of Jan Krzysztof Kelus

• In Event: Voices of Polish Literature: Sound and Performance in the 20th Century

Abstract

Jan Krzysztof Kelus, a Warsaw-based sociologist who took part in the work of the Polish opposition during the 1970s, only reluctantly understood the songbooks and recordings of his sung poetry (poezja spiewana) as music making, emphasizing prosody over vocal lyricism and drawing attention to the hyper-realism of his original texts, which described the ironies and vicissitudes of everyday life in the People's Republic of Poland. His performance style, which always animated the sound effects of the acoustic guitar as an additional level of political commentary, confronted the fragile and contingent nature of sound. In this paper I explore Kelus's creative output as a mode of singing that is fundamentally provisional, an alternative to the flamboyant, gritty, and sweeping performances at cabarets like Piwnica pod Baranami and the crooning declamatory virtuosity of other Polish bards like Jacek Kaczmarski.

Author

• Andrea F. Bohlman, UNC at Chapel Hill