New Polish Beat Archives #1
free to read, free to share
http://archive.org/details/NewPolishBeatArchives1
“This collection of poetry, free verse, stream of consciousness, gibberish and not so radical cut-ups contains six original New Polish Beat chapbooks published in Poland in 2009 and 2010, and related bonus material. The oldest pieces are “Venice on Fire” and “The Moon as a Talker”, written in 2008, though the roots of “Moon” reach deep into 2005 when the author spent extensive periods of time in Cracow, “writing songs and taking down notes of the night sky”. The latest chapbook included is “Cut-Up 2010”, which contains pieces perhaps read best as appendixes to Basquiat’s paintings. Those six print chapbooks were converted from original documents into this digital format, and put together for the first time as a testimony of the most ignored, radical and experimental, yet still comprehensible, current of the modern Polish poetry scene. The most “conventional” approach to writing is represented by poems from / parts of “New Architecture” and “First Text Only”, while one of the earliest flirts with cut-ups, though without actually using the technique manually or digitally, only on a subconscious level perhaps, are documented by “Venice on Fire” and “The Moon as a Talker”. The progress / current state of Kaufmann’s cut-up technique in the year 2010 is immortalized in the adequately titled “Cut-Up 2010”. “Angelic Ego Freak-Out” contains the title piece, which wasn’t edited or even corrected in any way – this “suite” is a giant stream of consciousness, and the main reason why the word “gibberish” was used in the first sentence of this text – the piece ends with the untitled “Land Your Machine”, later taken out of the context and presented as a standalone poem. “Animal Hands” was written in Berlin, back in 2008, and the chapbook originally ended with two early 2004 pieces – “Tiny Buddha” and “Eloi”, presented here without any alterations. Bonus material includes the never published “Cut-Up 2011” chapbook, also known as “Airy Reels”. Those cut-ups have a strong relation with dub and industrial going on, and its best experiencing the texts while listening to appropriate music. The last addition is “Poet Territory”, another never published New Polish Beat chapbook, which contains selected verse from Kreuzberg 2008, and early 2010 pieces written in Mr. Kaufmann’s native Poznan, Poland, including the full version of “Profession and the Ocean” and special edits prepared exclusively for this collection.”
Here are the free PDF files of 3 issues of a zine I ran back in 2008, called Eviscerator Heaven – a “kick-ass online journal”. Despite the laughable “design”, there is some nice poetry inside, by a variety of people who used to write the good stuff back then, and I’m sure most of them still do. Enjoy!
