This talk centers on Polish poet Krystyna Miłobędzka (1932 –) as part of my dissertation on nonagenarian women poets. Although Miłobędzka made her debut in 1960, she only began to receive national recognition in the 1990s. Since then, her place amid the Polish avant-garde solidified in the early 2000s and she has been remarkably prolific in her old age.

My dissertation looks at varieties of temporal thinking in three poets for whom past, present, and future matter in changing proportions. An ideal of eternity or timelessness adds a kind of fourth temporality, one in which the always dynamic elements of time’s passing are as if paused. Miłobędzka’s poetry falls into this fourth temporal dimension. Miłobędzka writes in a style that is markedly precise to the present moment. Scholars have noted the way her writing style cannot be placed in the context of any single generation of poets. Throughout the decades, she has consistently stood on her own, writing apart from poetic trends.

Miłobędzka’s extratemporal mode is visible in her 2008 collection ever lost, for instance, written when she was seventy-six, in which she traps language in a continuum. For Miłobędzka, the perpetual present-time enacted by the imperfective nature of the title is complicated by the fact that the present both persists and yet its ontology is dubious. How can something be constantly lost? The poet bends the present tense according to the whims of her own poetic conceits in a way that pushes past her biographical age out towards agelessness.

Authors:
Alex Braslavsky, Harvard University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator of poetry, and PhD student at Harvard University. She is writing her dissertation on nonagenarian women poets from across the Slavic world.

Additional website of interest
https://alexbraslavsky.com/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Thursday Schedule

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