In my talk, I analyze the relationship of language, epistemology,
and the aesthetic in the work of the twentieth-century Polish poet
Miron Bia&lbar;oszewski (1922–1983), focusing on his poetic
cycles as an act of mind.
From this, I draw the conclusion
that Bia&lbar;oszewski's verse appears to be an aesthetic
manifestation of the act of cognition.
Virtually unaffiliated with any poetic school or movement (except
for a brief association in the 1960s with the Linguistic Poets),
Bia&lbar;oszewski has often been labeled as a poet of the empirical
(M. Glowinski), of the quotidian (M. Levine), or of the immediate
(S. Baranczak) whose poetic language can be identified with spoken,
even low, language. More recent criticism, however, has problematized
these claims by pointing out that Bia&lbar;oszewski's verse
encompasses not only linguistic, minimalistic, and empirical aspects
but also what has been referred to as a maximalist-realist
agenda—what Baranczak passingly calls
[Bia&lbar;oszewski's] revelation of both language and
reality
(1993). Despite Baranczak's insight into
Bia&lbar;oszewski's work, critics have not yet fully addressed the
tension between the minimalist (empirical) and maximalist (revelatory)
aspects of Bia&lbar;oszewski's work, perhaps on account of the largely
structuralist approach that has played a determining role in the
reception of Bia&lbar;oszewski's work. It is possible, however, to
explore the seeming contradiction between empirical and revelatory
facets in Bia&lbar;oszewski's work by reframing that contradiction as
a question of the formation of the poetic self within the Kantian
paradigm of cognition as self-cognition.
The maximalism of Bia&lbar;oszewski's poetics is apparent in his
refusal to observe any restrictions on what he includes in his verse
and in the consequent inclusion of all acts of perception regardless
of their aesthetic value. This ever-changing flux of perceptions
creates a kind of hyper-realism,
endowing reality with
an excessive, even hyperbolic, quality that fully exposes the mind's
perception of the heterogeneous ingredients of phenomenal reality
before it subjects that reality to the analytical process of exclusion
and ordering into chains of causality and analogy.
In this, Bia&lbar;oszewski's cognition is comparable to Kantian
self-cognition, rather than to the Cartesian structures of the
self. The plurality of phenomena in Bia&lbar;oszewski serves not as a
screen for him to project individual psychology, but a means to
manifest the form-giving faculty of the mind. Ultimately this results
in writing where we see the process of reality emerging as it is
comprehended by the mind. In the oscillating tension between the
exteriority of reality and the interiority of the self (which
Bia&lbar;oszewski refers to in his poems as migotanie,
or shimmering
), Bia&lbar;oszewski's I
either exuberantly loses itself in the excitement of reality's
excesses or cautiously distances itself in order to establish, if only
momentarily, a sense of singularity. This folding and unfolding of
reality around the axis of consciousness can be compared to the effect
of the sublime, which for Kant creates a higher awareness of the
subject's mental faculties by overwhelming the subject. Whereas in
Kant the sublime marks the failure of articulation, in
Bia&lbar;oszewski language seems to be both the tool of cognition and
articulation, apprehension and comprehension. The apprehension of
reality by means of the senses is transformed into an
aesthetic
comprehension of reality via its totalization
in language. By transforming his perception of reality into a
totalized act of comprehension through language, Bia&lbar;oszewski mak
es his poetry appear to be an aesthetic manifestation of the act of
cognition—that is, an act of mind.