„A TRAM TRANSVERSING" THE PAGE: „PSZEMIANA" [TRANSFORNATION] AND JERZY JANKOWSKI’S POETIC NARRATIVES

Abstract

The article examines the poetic narratives in Poland’s first futurist writer, Jerzy Jankowski’s Tram wpopszek ulicy [A Tram Transversing the Street] and explores the nuanced interplay between prose and poetry in the whole volume. The hybrid forms are examined in the context of various traditions of the prose poem, the analyses focusing on how Jankowski’s poetic narratives combine modernist, symbolist, and avant-garde inspirations. These influences are visible in references to journalistic genres, the prose poems by Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the poetry of Tadeusz Miciński, and the futuristic literary experiments of F.T. Marinetti. One of Jankowski’s prose poems, Pszemiana [Transfornation], is analyzed in detail, with particular attention to its animal characters and the successive intertexts it evokes. This leads to unexpected conclusions regarding a distinctive mode of transformative interaction of poetic and prose forms in Jankowski’s oeuvre.