“The Scream”
The HAMMER KCHUNG REMIX Project
HAMMER Reading presenting the work of the late Polish Poet, Nobel Prize Winner Wislawa Szymborska. With the new remix, you are bound to find something in there that will make an incredible soup. Is this a provocative reflection of what is happening in the world today?
Nothing has Changed
I was honored to be asked by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to perform a Nobel Prize winning author’s work from my own country, Poland. It felt very rewarding since many people from outside the small poetry circles haven’t much heard about her or her work. After the event was announced, there started to be excitement about the fact that for the first time the Hammer Museum was putting on an event about a foreigner. Hearing that - for someone like me, an immigrant - it really felt like a huge honor and a very special moment considering what is happening in the world today.
Have times changed? Being an “immigrant”, an “alien”, an “outsider”, a “foreigner” - we all have been called different names over the years and tried to be defined in some way. “Alien” has been my favorite so far, since I imagined myself an extraterrestrial, an ET, and imagined that people see me as fictional being from another world, from outer space, especially an intelligent one. We struggle for identity and suffer displacement. We yearn for love, acceptance from our adopted Mother - America. Szymborska insisted that her poetry was personal rather than political. “Of course, life crosses politics,” she told the New York Times. “But my poems are strictly not political. They are more about people and life.”
To my surprise there was standing room only at the Hammer reading. The event turned out to be magical. Many months later I found out from the Museum that Rhan Small Ernst had been selected to be the Artist in Residence at The Hammer Museum. He was given the opportunity to browse Hammer’s audio archives and select anything that he would like to work on during during his residency. Exploring the archive was like “going to an extraordinary produce section of a really smart grocery store. You are bound to find something in there that will make an incredible soup.” He selected the original recording of my performance of Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry. Rhan Small Ernst did his own remix for KCHUNG Radio and created an incredible poetry soup. He mixed my voice with Zbigniew Preisner’s music, who is known from scoring Francis Ford Coppola and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films. He also discovered a composer and pianist, less well known to the American audience, named Kazimierz Serocki’s , a leading representative of the Avant-garde in modern Polish music.
His surrealistic approach to the poem gave him freedom to play with interpretation, find new word games and experiment with the vocal performance, examine dreams, mental states or bring repressed ideas onto the surface. The remix reflects the world we live in - and right now the world we live in is more chaotic than ever.
February 1st is the 5 year anniversary of Wislawa Szymborska’s passing. She was the ninth woman to win the Noble Prize for literature, and is still one of only fourteen female laureates in literature. Szymborska’s work, although written so many years ago, feels current. Like many of her finest poems, it derives a great deal of its power from her narrative technique, a deceptively simple voice that uses everyday language in an almost detached tone to deliver its zingers.
When I was growing up in Poland, during the chaos that resulted from the Gdansk rebellion, Szymborska’s poems were a source of great inspiration to me. Her use of everyday language in striking, unusual ways, often had a twist at the end. The way her poems dealt with thorny political issues always remained personal and tender, rather than strident. Now that I have lived in America for decades, I find her words to be even more uplifting and thought-provoking as the years go by and just as timely.
Nothing has changed