I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for their financial support of this project.

1. The issue also included fragments of reminiscences by O'Hara's friends and excerpts from Perloff, Marjorie, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

2. These were the first but not the last translations of O'Hara into Polish. Following the success of the Blue Issue, Piotr Sommer, the editor-in-chief and a leading translator of American poetry into Polish, published an anthology of O'Hara's poems with his own translations and afterword: Frank O'Hara: Twoja pojedyńczość (Warsaw, 1987). The anthology also included several portraits of O'Hara by his friends as well as examples of abstract expressionist art. In 1994, a Polish translation of O'Hara's early poems as well as selected poems by Ashbery, Koch, and James Schuyler, appeared in the third issue of Literatura na świecie together with Ashbery's dramatic works and additional essays on the work of Ashbery and Schulyer; clearly, this issue was meant to complement the Blue Issue of 1986. These later publications, however, were the result, not the cause, of the initial fascination with O'Hara and his status as a cultural signifier at a moment of great political transformation. Indeed, part of O'Hara's appeal was that, though scarcely known in Poland in the late 1980s, he was nonetheless recognized as an American poetic phenomenon.

3. For a brilliant treatment of the bruLion's generation in the context of the poetry of the 1990s, see Śliwiński, Piotr, Przygody z wolnością: Uwagi o poezji współczesnej (Kraków 2002)Google Scholar. See also, Klejnocki, Jarosław and Sosnowski, Jerzy, Chwilowe zaxuieszenie broni: 0 twórczości tzw. Pokolenia “bruLionu” (1986-1996) (Warsaw, 1996)Google Scholar; Grupiński, Rafał and Kiec, Izolda, Niebawem spadnie błoto czyli kilka uwago literaturze nieprzyjemnej (Poznań, 1997)Google Scholar; Maliszewski, Karol, Nasi klasycyści, nasi barbarzyńcy: Szkice o nowej poezji (Bydgoszcz, 1999)Google Scholar; Wieczorek, Marcin, bruLion: Instrukcja obsługi (Kraków, 2005)Google Scholar.

4. One of the most popular binary oppositions was to divide the poets into classicists and O'Harists (also known as “barbarians” and “personists“). The typical contrasting qualities attached to classicists and O'Harists were, respectively: “convention—authenticity, classicism—avant-garde (focus on the past versus turning to the present and future), a sense of being rooted—sense of alienation (outsiderism), objectivism—individuation, description—expression, condensation—dispersion, mannered—straightforward diction.“ Niewiadomski, Andrzej, “Inna twarz niezalezności,” Kresy, no. 6 (1991): 91 Google Scholar.

5. My understanding of “turn“—in this context a contesting gesture of replacing the native with the foreign—is informed by Harold Bloom's theory of transgenerational poetic anxieties. Bloom, , The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar.

6. For a sociological treatment of this shock in the period of transition, see, for instance, Sztompka, Piotr, The Trauma of Post-Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar.

7. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennigton, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis, 1984), xxiv Google Scholar.

8. The debate was stirred by Maria Janion's famous 1991 declaration, “farewell to Romanticism.“ Janion is Poland's leading authority on the Romantic formation. Janion, , “Pozegnanie z romantyzmem: Z Marią Janion rozmawia A. Bernat,” Nowe ksiazki, no. 6 (1991)Google Scholar; for a more recent example, see, for instance, Marcin Król's discussion of the misinterpretation of the Romantic message in its mass-cultural interpretation in Poland. Król, , Romantyzm: Piekło i niebo Polaków (Warsaw, 1998)Google Scholar.

9. Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Pan Wolodyjowski (Warsaw, 1969), 547 Google Scholar.

10. Janion analyzes the influence of Mickiewicz's poem Konrad Wallenrodon Poland's nineteenth-century struggles for independence. Janion, Maria, Życie pośmiertne Konrada Wallenroda (Warsaw, 1990)Google Scholar.

11. The patriotic poetry written by the O'Harists’ immediate predecessors under martial law in the early 1980s can serve as the most obvious and (in many ways) unfortunate example of this tendency.

12. See Król, , Romantyzm, 6 Google Scholar. It was also the Romantic paradigm that made Poles create a self-image in which moments of rupture were privileged over quotidian routine; for instance, in the extolling of such events as the nineteenth-century uprisings regardless of their political failure. The recent public debates over how to remember the communist period also tend to privilege the active opposition to the communist system over the accommodation a large portion of society reached with it.

13. To refer to Stanisław Barańczak's influential book, Etyka ipoetyka: Szkice 1970-78 (Paryz, 1979).

14. Sommer, Piotr, “Poezja ‘odświętna’ i poezja ‘codzienności,'” Kresy, no. 21 (1995): 47–48 (the translation is my own)Google Scholar.

15. This appellation was applied by Grupiński, Rafał, a bruLion critic, in “Ci wspaniali mężczyźni od podstawowych wartości,” Kultura, no. 9 (1988): 13–23 Google Scholar.

16. Barańczak, Stanislaw, “Spójrzmy prawdzie w oczy,” Dziennik poranny: Wiersz£ 1967-1971 (Poznań, 1972)Google Scholar.

17. Needless to say, the O'Harists’ showed little interest in the poetry written under martial law, which is likely the weakest if the most “engaged” post-World War II poetry.

18. Though these are twentieth-century examples of the struggle with Romanticism, the debate started in the mid-nineteeth century with Roman Klaczko, a prominent Romantic critic, who proclaimed in the late 1840s (while criticizing realism) that the model of high Romantic literature enabled Poland's cultural survival. By contrast, Klaczko's contemporary, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, used irony to distance himself from the prophetic mode of high Romanticism. Even the very creators of Polish Romanticism, like Mickiewicz, became victims of this reductive understanding, as can be seen in some of the criticism of Mickiewicz's epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) for its focus on the quotidian and domestic in the life of the Polish-Lithuanian gentry rather than on the messianic messages associated with his earlier works.

19. For an interesting discussion of the references to Mickiewicz in the rhetoric of “breakthrough,” see Śliwiński, , “Albo Mickiewicz,” Przygody z wolnością, 208-27Google Scholar

20. Śliwiński, , Przygody z wolnością, 20 Google Scholar.

21. Dariusz Pawelec believes that the fact that the poem was written in 1988 before the change of the political system, first performed orally in 1989, and only published in 1990 (in the first issue of the weekly Tygodnik Literacki) proves that reading it as a generational manifesto is inadequate. Pawelec argues that in 1988, the end of the communist regime was only wishful thinking and, thus, the poem cannot be read as a response to a new cultural configuration. I prefer to read “Dla Jana Polkowskiego” anachronistically (that is, with an awareness of its reception) radier than as an archeological remnant of a specific historical consciousness, especially since Pawelec ultimately reads the poem as a rejection of Herbert's ethical mission of poetry and, thus, like myself locates it against the larger “Romantico-symbolic” tradition of Polish poetry. See Dariusz Pawelec, “Oko smoka: O wierszu Marcina Świetlickiego ‘Dla Jana Polkowskiego,'” in Aleksander Nawarecki, ed., Kanonada: Interpretacje wierszy polskich (1939-1989) (Katowice, 1999)

22. Translation quoted from Martin, William, ed., “New Polish Writing,” Chicago Review 46, special issue (Fall 2000): 278-79Google Scholar.

23. For an early response, see, for instance, Marian Stala's criticism of the aggressive tone of Świetlicki's “programmatic pamphlet” and the poet's “refusal to participate in the world that goes beyond individual and interpersonal experience. Ideas, communities, politics, ethics, and metaphysics do not matter. What really matters is one's own, individual, separate world.” Stala, Marian, “Polkowski, Machej, Świetlicki, Tekieli …” Teksty drugie, no. 1 (1990): 46–62 Google Scholar. See also, Kornhauser, Julian, “O wierszach Marcina Świetlickiego,“ NaGłs, no. 2 (1990): 115-18Google Scholar.

24. Koehler, Krzysztof, “Oharyzm,” bruLion, no. 14-15 (1990)Google Scholar, translated as “O'Harism,” by W. Martin in Martin, ed., “New Polish Writing,” 280-81.

25. Świetlicki, Marcin, “Koehleryzm,” bruLion, no. 16 (1991)Google Scholar, translated as “Koehlerism,” by Martin, W. in Martin, ed., “New Polish Writing,” 282-84Google Scholar.

26. See Dunin-Wąsowicz, Pawel, Klejnocki, Jarosław, and Varga, Krzysztof, eds., Made swoich poetów: Liryka polska urodzonapo 1960r, 2d ed. (Warsaw, 1997), 19 Google Scholar.

27. The poets themselves talk about O'Hara as an important influence. Świetlicki calls the 1987 publication of Frank O'Hara: Twoja pojedyńczość, an anthology of O'Hara's poems translated by Piotr Sommer, “an extremely important event in Polish literature,“ see NaGłos, no. 2 (1990): 112. Several younger writers (born in the 1970s) point to the influence of foreign, particularly American, writers, see Kresy, no. 2 (1997). My thanks to Artur Ptaczkiewicz for reminding me that the label O'Harism originated among the movement's opponents.

28. Wąsowicz, Pawel Dunin and Varga, Krzysztof, Parnas Bis: Slovmik literatury polskiej urodzonej po 1960 roku (Warsaw, 1995), 142 Google Scholar. This dictionary of Polish literature since 1960 is written in the spirit of bruLion's performative mockery. Although the dictionary may not have been designed as a “serious” critical tool, its popularity makes it an important source for understanding how such cultural notions as O'Harism were understood and transmitted.

29. One of the few critical analyses of the term O'Harism appears in Joanna Orska's article “Co to jest o'haryzm?” Kresy, no. 3 (1998): 44-57. Orska seeks to contextualize the term by discussing O'Hara's and the New York School's poetry in the larger American tradition and sees the employment of O'Hara's name as an intellectual shortcut rather than as a stimulus to explore the interpretative potential of a Polish-American juxtaposition. She blames this shortcut for the homogenization of the plurality of poetic voices emerging at this time. I fully agree with Orska's position and her attempt to fill in the critical gap in the exploration of Polish-American juxtaposition.

30. Niewiadomski, , “Inna twarz nieżalezności,” 91 Google Scholar.

31. The fact that the alternative terms for O'Harism, “banalism” (banalizm) and even the O'Hara-related “personism” (personizm) (neither of which connote something specifically foreign) were less popular highlights the Poles’ desire to see the literary scene during the period of transformation in terms of opposition between the foreign and the local. An important factor in this foreign-local optics was Poland's fascination with American culture (and the concomitant anxieties about the Americanization of Polish culture), which had begun even before the post-1989 spread of American pop culture.

32. Altieri, Charles, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s (Lewisburg, 1979), 119 Google Scholar.

33. See Blanchot, Maurice, Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson, Susan (Minneapolis, 1993), 239 Google Scholar; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford, 2001), par. 129Google Scholar.

34. Altieri, , Enlarging the Temple, 113 Google Scholar.

35. Lehman, David, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York, 1998), 180 Google Scholar.

36. O'Hara, Frank, Lunch Poems (San Francisco, 1964)Google Scholar.

37. Dunin-Wąsowicz, and Varga, , Parnas Bis, 142 Google Scholar.

38. Lehman, , Last Avant-Garde, 202 Google Scholar.

39. Both Świetlicki's “Dojana Polkowskiego” and Podsiadlo's “Olsztyn: Zakupy” come from the same period: after O'Hara had become known in Poland but prior both to the fall of communism and the adoption of the term O'Harism. This makes them all the more interesting examples of O'Harism in statu nascendi, not of reaction to but in anticipation of the cultural revolution. Their self-conscious stance and their awareness of their position in the critical spotlight are striking features of later works produced by poets associated with this formation.

40. For the original, seejacek Podsiadlo, Wierszezebrane (Warsaw, 2003), 35 (the translation is my own).

41. Sommer addresses the inadequacy of concreteness for creating the poetry of the everyday, “When I think about the concrete in poetry and about the poetry of the everyday … I'm not concerned with how many times Oolong tea, for instance, or Krucza Street, Broadway, or citizen Malicki from Świdro near Warsaw comes up in the poem; rather, I am concerned about a specific flavor in the language. Stuffing the poem with a concrete topography does not guarantee its credibility…. If topography were everything, there would be successful imitations of Frank O'Hara circulating by the thousands in the States, but actually there are none. And hundreds of poets in Poland would imitate Miron Bialoszewski while this fate—the fate of being calqued—happened to Tadeusz Różewicz and—to a lesser degree—to Herbert and Miłosz. So, perhaps this by itself questions the truth that to be the poet of the everyday is the easiest thing under the sun.” See Sommer, , “Poezja ‘odświętna’ i poezja ‘codzienności,'” 47 Google Scholar.

42. In Martin, ed., “New Polish Writing,” 274; for the original, see Podsiadlo, , Wiersze zebrane, 208 Google Scholar.

43. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1997), 85 Google Scholar

44. Ibid., 15.

45. Ibid. In die theological sense, as Bloom reminds us, kenosis goes back to the Pauline description of Christ's willing acceptance of the reduction of his status from the divine to the human.

46. Ibid.

47. See, for instance, Miłosz Biedrzycki's self-consciously immature report: “my father tells me to stop writing when I'm thirty/ otherwise I'll become ‘like that jerk Herbert'“; or a deflation of a predecessor's poetry as in Slawomir Matusz's reference to Miłosz's “Piosenka o końcu swiata” (The song for the end of the world) in “Zaklinanie Mitoszem” (Casting a spell with Miłosz): “Every time during sex / closing your eyes you say: / ‘I'm falling'— repeat after Miłosz: / ‘there will be no other end of the world / there will be no other end of the world.’ / Your children will become / optimistic from birth.” The rewritings of the predecessor's poems have a similar function (i.e., as deflating); for example, Marcin Baran's “Biedny chrześcijanin traci wyczucie proporcji i zwraca się bezpośrednio do Boga w sprawie raczej blahej” (A poor Christian loses a sense of proportion and turns directly to God in a rather trivial matter), which plays upon Miłosz's “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” For the original texts of these poems, see Dunin-Wąsowicz, , Klejnocki, , and Varga, , eds., Made swoich poetów, 21, 117, 15 (all translations are my own)Google Scholar.

48. Bloom, , Anxiety of Influence, 14 Google Scholar.

49. Świetlicki, , “Polska 2,” in Dunin-Wąsowicz, , Klejnocki, , and Varga, , eds., Made swoich poetów, 204 (the translation is my own)Google Scholar.

50. Szymborska employs the everyday in her poetry as consistently as she avoids the Romantic. Notwithstanding the philosophical dimension of her poetry, Szymborska's popularity as the “people's poet” seems to result from her dislike of “costumes and ethoi.” Despite her penchant for finding surprises in the banal, she rarely “personalizes” her poems. One wonders whether this resistance to the personal and her reluctance to create a “louder” media image cloaked Szymborska from the radar of the 1990s rebels with a cause. Gender issues may also have been a factor—the O'Harists favored male cult writers.

51. Świetlicki, , “Nocą z sierpnia na wrzesień,” in Dunin-Wąsowicz, , Klejnocki, , and Varga, , eds., Made swoich poetów, 204 (the translation is my own)Google Scholar.

52. It is important to add, however, that the O'Harists’ perennial opposition to Polish tradition can be read as much in aesthetic as in sociological terms. The O'Harists’ tendency to “offend” the old was a clever gesture of self-promotion regardless of whether it truly responded to the reality of a new literary market or whether it was more a projected anticipation of what this market would look like.

53. Biedrzycki, , “Asklop,” in Dunin-Wąsowicz, , Klejnocki, , and Varga, , eds., Made swoich poetów, 19 (the translation is my own)Google Scholar.

54. Śliwiński, , Przygody z wolnością, 9 (the translation is my own)Google Scholar.

55. Although Bursa's everyday simultaneously contests both the Romantic paradigm and the official rhetoric of social realism during the 1950s in Poland.

56. The Ukrainian magazine Krytyka, which targets an audience similar to that of the Neiv York Review of Books in the United States, reviews and advertises two anthologies of American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s in a recent issue—one in Ukrainian (Den’ Smerti PaniDen’ [The day lady died]) and one in Russian ﹛Beat); see, Krytyka, nos. 1-2 (2007): 39.

57. Pawelec, Dariusz, “'Szyk’ i ‘skowyt': O poezji debiutantów drugiej połowy lat osiemdziesiątych,” Kresy, no. 6 (1991): 90–91 Google Scholar.