On Monday, June 21, a meeting was held at the Stanisław Wyspiański Youth Cultural Centre in Bolesławiec with Paweł Dunajko, a poet, creator and enthusiast of liberature, a new genre that challenges traditional literary conventions. “In a liberary work, the text is only one element, part of a greater whole,” Dunajko explained.
The term “liberature” (derived from the Latin liber—“book”, “free”) was coined by Zenon Fajfer, who in 1999 published the essay “Liberature. An Appendix to the Dictionary of Literary Terms” in “Dekada Literacka”. “In this text, Fajfer focused, among other things, on what traditionally understood literature looked like. Its most important elements are content, narrative and characters. Liberature, on the other hand, breaks out of this pattern, focusing on perceiving the book as a whole—as matter or an architectural design,” the poet said during Monday’s meeting.
A text anticipating liberature was Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”, published in 1897. The French poet abandoned the traditional division into recto and verso; the text was spread across two pages, something previously unimaginable. “This poem has the form of a musical score; one can even try to perform it,” Paweł Dunajko pointed out.
An example of a liberary book is “The Unfortunates” by B.S. Johnson. The work was published in the form of a box containing several-page blocks. “Apart from the first and last blocks, the others can be read in any order. Each time, an entirely new whole emerges,” the liberat emphasised.
The same applies to Raymond Queneau’s poetry volume “One Hundred Million Million Poems”. The book contains only ten texts, but its pages are cut into horizontal strips, with one line on each strip. This allows the reader to read “One Hundred Million Million Poems” in many ways. “We can create a new poem for every day of the week. Queneau calculated that reading all the combinations would take people 200 million years,” the poet said with a smile.
In turn, Zenon Fajfer’s emanational poem “Looking Through the Ozone Hole” was printed on transparent film, while the text itself was placed in... a vodka bottle. “We were taught that books should look a certain way. In liberature, however, the book is considered as a whole,” Paweł Dunajko stated.
On Saturday, June 26, the premiere of the poet’s debut book will take place. As stated on the “Ha!art” website, “Paweł Dunajko’s book debut is a prose poem without a fixed title—a thought stretched between silence and quiet. The work consists of 34 cards placed in an envelope with cut-out windows; depending on how the cards are arranged, a changeable, moving title is created.” “For me, liberature is the only literature, because I can see it, not merely read it,” the poet confessed.
(GA information)