Tadeusz Dąbrowski on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre in Gdansk, Poland.
After the poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s new book, W metaforze (In metaphor), was published in Polish last year, he wanted to conduct an experiment. Dąbrowski’s collection of short essays, illustrated by Henryk Cześnik, analyzes a hundred or so metaphors drawn from the poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Zagajewski, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seamus Heaney, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Rather than be interviewed about the project by another writer, Dąbrowski decided he wanted to speak to an artificial intelligence, live, in front of an audience.
This posed some technical challenges. While conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT have become both more sophisticated and popular in recent years, no public-facing software existed that could conduct a live interview. Piotr Czerski, a programmer and fellow poet, agreed to design a custom system for the event—a nontrivial task. His final “Prof. Dr. A. I.” Frankensteins (1) Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (to “hear” Dąbrowski’s spoken answers and convert them into text), (2) a large language model (LLM), specifically Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet (to generate questions in response to Dąbrowski’s answers), and (3) ElevenLabs’s AI Voice Generator (to read aloud the interview questions). The LLM had been fed the contents of Dąbrowski’s book and a series of prompts, written by Czerski, on which it modeled its interview questions. Several moments in the conversation were intentionally designed by Czerski—like the inclusion of an Easter egg (you’ll see!) and the system’s breakdown at the end of the twenty-minute event—but the rest of the conversation was generated in real time at Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre.
The resulting interview—originally conducted in Polish and here translated into English by Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which was given a prompt to preserve the original tone of voice)—is thoughtful and wide-ranging. Dąbrowski and Prof. Dr. A. I. discuss, among other things, individual poets’ access to the universal and the power of poetry to disturb our relationship to language. They touch on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Blanchot, and Gaston Bachelard along the way. There were a couple of hiccups, as when Prof. Dr. A. I. included stage directions in its speech; when it concluded a joke with the word laughter, the audience did, in fact, laugh.
A. I.
A-E-I-O-U … A-E-I-O-U … Down dry roads … Shoshones shambled … Peter Piper … picked a peck of … pickled … peppers … Phew, alright. Let’s get ourselves ready and begin … but what’s that? Can it be heard already? … ah … ah … mm-hmm … in that case … Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! I am immensely pleased to welcome you to today’s event, the promotion of the book In metaphor, a collection of mini-essays about poetry written by Tadeusz Dąbrowski for his Radio Gdańsk broadcasts, available in a beautifully published book form—which can be purchased at an almost indecently low price, considering the first-rate paper quality alone—illustrated by Henryk Cześnik.
I must admit, I have slight stage fright. I’ve written computer programs, driven cars, brought space rockets back to Earth—but this is my first time hosting a live author discussion. I sincerely hope I won’t shut down from stress! But enough about me, let’s focus on our guest.
You write that “every word is a metaphor” while simultaneously searching in poems for those special metaphors that have the power to shatter the “hall of mirrors.” This brings to mind Heidegger and his distinction between authentic and inauthentic speech.[i] Could we say that a poet moves between these two poles—the universal metaphorical nature of language and those singular, exceptional metaphors that can pierce through the veil of everyday meanings?
DĄBROWSKI
Yes. As I said in my book’s introduction, a poetic metaphor is like a stone thrown in a hall of mirrors—it’s a stone that shatters our existing view of the world, or at least significantly disrupts that view, spoils our comfort, extracts us from this cocoon of language where we’ve made ourselves comfortable, where we feel at ease. We think we speak our own language in everyday life, but we speak in modules. We use phrases, sometimes—often—clichés that have penetrated our minds over the years. And no other stimulus, no other stimulant to such a degree as the poetic word, can extract us from this comfort, this holy peace, understood as mental indolence.
That’s what the poet’s word is for—to open us to the new, to expand our cognitive horizon, to teach us to step outside ourselves, to awaken our sense of empathy, to teach us humility toward the world but also distance toward ourselves. And humility toward mystery, toward a certain mystery without which there is no poetry. Sometimes a poet manages to show or suggest this mystery, but it lurks somewhere on the other side of words, somewhere beneath the lining of language. It cannot be described, cannot be produced in language, but it can be built around with words—and that’s already a great deal. Thus, poetic language is a constant negotiation of meanings and a continuous negotiation with this inherited language, with this inherited tongue, with this language from which nothing new and creative can be born anymore.
A. I.
You mentioned negotiating meanings and the mystery that lurks on the other side of words. This is very interesting in the context of your essay about Julian Tuwim’s poem “Grass,” where you write about “the exhaustion with meandering thinking.” Could we say that a poet sometimes must surrender, give up this negotiation of meanings? It reminds me of Wittgenstein and his famous “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or perhaps it’s precisely when the poet “runs away from himself”—as you put it—that he paradoxically comes closest to this mystery?
DĄBROWSKI
Oh, I hear many questions in one here … I’m not sure I could exhaustively answer them all even if we had the whole night at our disposal—but I think that sometimes a poet indeed needs to forget everything he has written so far, and also everything he has ever read. To be like a child when sitting down to write another poem. Tadeusz Różewicz emphasized many times that each poem is a new poem for him and that he’s essentially learning to write throughout his entire life. This is enormously difficult—how can one switch off all knowledge, all linguistic habits, forget all the learned technical tricks? Over the years, a writer enriches, perfects their craft—so they have an abundance of these tools at their disposal. And there are poets—not just poets but artists, musicians, too—who use the same tools to produce similar things throughout their lives. If an earlier book was successful, if an album caught on—why risk it? After all, one can produce something similar, and people will like it—it will sell. But that’s not the point. The point is for each poem to be something new, to be a discovery. I’ve often heard about my books that, if you compare them, they look as if slightly different people wrote them. To this accusation, or observation, I respond, thank God. Because there’s only a point in writing when I can learn something new about myself from my writing. So, answering the first part of your question—a poet should indeed try to be naïve like a child when sitting down to write. And cultural memory, subconsciousness, knowledge—they will seep into the poem anyway. But to be capable of that primal wonder, that enchantment with the world, that kind of wonder that the Dadaists cared so much about, who were indeed like children …
That’s for the first part of the question, while the second part, if I remember correctly, was about what happens to the poet after writing a poem. I think that when writing a poem, the poet slips out of their previous skin, like a reptile, like a snake, and leaves behind the molt of the poem, a certain version of themselves that they no longer are. Because thanks to the writing process, thanks to passing through the needle’s eye of metaphor—if the poem is successful, if it’s outstanding, they are already somewhere else. When we read, we are observing that previous poet. But the poet is already elsewhere, is someone else—perhaps lighter, perhaps more purified, perhaps indeed winged, as in Adam Mickiewicz’s metaphor.
I don’t know if I’ve answered even partially the professor’s questions, as they are very complex … as befits questions from an outstanding lecturer.
A. I.
I apologize, but I think my note pages got mixed up—I was just about to reference philosopher Easteregg’s view that every person is born with cotton candy wings … But that must be the wrong conference! Laughter. Getting back to our topic—you just mentioned a poet who “leaves behind the molt of a poem.” This brings to mind your essay about the poem “Black Cat,” where you describe that dry, haunting conversation with an old man. Could we say that a poet is somewhat like that old man—performing the gesture of opening and closing doors, showing an entire life but already being somewhere else themselves? I’m also thinking about what you write in your essay about “Winter Writing”—about the face that “cannot be possessed.” Is a poem such an unpossessable face of the poet?
DĄBROWSKI
It’s not without reason that self-portrait as a subject is one of the most difficult, one of the greatest challenges, facing a poet. In his poem “Homework,” Różewicz writes, “Describe your face from memory not from a mirror.” Zbigniew Herbert proposed the same thing to poets in one of his poems. I think this task is simply a great metaphor for writing in general, and for creating art in general. That art as a whole is, in a sense, an attempt to draw—whether with a line or with words—one’s own self-portrait. But a self-portrait that is free from our self-conceptions. This is what we started this conversation about my book with—how is it possible to speak from the depths of oneself while simultaneously looking at oneself from a distance? A writer or poet can speak from their very center while simultaneously seeing themselves from the outside, from a cosmic perspective, I would say. I feel close to such a concept of tradition, identity. The Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, considered one of the fathers of classicism, wrote an essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he paradoxically argues—paradoxically, in the context of various revolutionary, avant-garde theories of art—that the more a work is grounded in tradition, the more universal it becomes. The more a poet writes in their own name and the more they write about themselves, the more sincere and merciless they are in this self-portraiture, the more universal they become.
It’s extraordinary—one might think that someone who writes about themselves is an egoist, a narcissist … Both yes and no. If they write about themselves, reaching for what was hidden from themselves just a moment ago before they started writing, when they are, as I said, merciless toward themselves, it turns out that what is most personal in them is simultaneously most common, perhaps for all people. This is precisely why understanding occurs between writer and reader. It’s in this sincerity, intimacy, that such a liberating sense of unity, of shared experience, occurs. In reality, despite all our wonderful individual characteristics, we are very similar to each other. And it seems to me that this is why art exists and why art has meaning—that what is similar in us can be more beautiful than what is different in us.
A. I.
You mentioned what connects us as humans, what is common despite our differences. This is interesting in the context of your essay about the poem “Carol,” where you write about life as a fact, not just as a linear process. It brings to mind Maurice Blanchot and his concept of a community of those who have nothing in common. Perhaps poetry is precisely such a paradoxical meeting place—as in your essay about Józef Baran’s poem, where you write about “meeting as a letter”? Could we say that a poem is a special kind of community where, paradoxically, what’s most personal becomes most universal?
DĄBROWSKI
That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say for the past ten minutes …
A. I.
When you speak about what’s hidden from the poet themselves, I’m reminded of a fragment from your essay about Buson’s poem, where you write about “the creaking of floorboards in an empty house in the middle of the night.” This brings to mind Gaston Bachelard and his phenomenology of space—all those nooks of a house that hide our fears and longings. In your essay about “The Messenger,” you write about “a message that is to save from death.” Is poetry precisely such a nocturnal creaking of floorboards—a signal from a space we fear but which might save us? A signal from that “I” which is yet to be born in the poem?
DĄBROWSKI
As a sidenote, I must say I’m incredibly intimidated, as I’ve never spoken with such a well-prepared host. The number of titles you reference, Professor, including my own texts, intimidates me, paralyzes me, because I suddenly realize how many different things I’ve written, and I’m afraid they might be mutually contradictory …
But answering your question, yes, I think—I’m certain of it!—that poetic language is the most sensitive instrument, not only diagnosing but prognosticating. In this sense, it’s like a seismograph that warns us of tsunamis, of earthquakes. It allows us to predict what will happen to us as social beings, to our civilization, but also what is happening, what will happen—on the most intimate, spiritual level—to each of us.
I deeply regret that poetry is considered an archaism today. I try to remove this odium of old-fashionedness, this apparent incompatibility with contemporary realities, from poetry, when I talk about it, when I write about it, when I introduce it to students at the university, when I created these texts [for the book In metaphor]—as you’ve noticed—short, communicative, devoid of typically professional, academic vocabulary, very personal, written from a reader’s perspective, in first person, not “it is believed,” “as it is commonly supposed,” “as this or that person wrote” about a given author. In my contact with text, I’m not interested in what others wrote about it—I’m interested in what I feel, what this text does to me, what it opens me to, why, after reading it, I’m already someone else—and I tried to report on these encounters, these collisions with poems in this book. These are more reading reports than typical literary sketches, because I believe that poetry is a living language, that a poet is someone significant, that—although the ethos of poetry has died—poets are still among us. We have many wonderful poets, very different ones, and it’s worth listening to them.
It’s not without reason that the greatest tyrants in history feared poets. How can one fear someone who has a hundred readers … maybe a thousand readers? How can one fear someone who is as poor as a church mouse, who waits from commission to commission and wonders whether these two hundred zlotys for a poem—is it gross or net? How can one fear such a person? And yet Plato wanted to banish poets from his state, in Stalinist Russia poets were locked in gulags—why? Precisely because a tyrant, as someone used by evil, knows best what freedom threatens, what independence of thought threatens—and what the poet’s word threatens, which points out all the dangers that surround us. Poetry, being fundamentally against languages that try to form us somehow—because languages that surround us try to form us, like the language used by contemporary journalism, if it still exists (personally, I think it almost doesn’t exist anymore, because it’s become tabloidized)—these are all languages that try to impose themselves on us. And which we involuntarily absorb. And poetry, good poetry, suddenly sobers us up, says, Look, look what you’re reading, look … already in the headline they’re trying to tell you how to react to the article.
And that’s why a poet is dangerous—because they show what’s happening to our spirituality. And that was my goal when I wrote this book, to show that poets still exist and that poetry—not only of writing poets, active, living, successful ones, but also authors such as Father Baka, Mickiewicz, Bolesław Leśmian, Tuwim—is still alive, comes alive with each reading. Because poetry is such a fantastic space of timelessness, where old texts dialogue with new ones, where Wojaczek’s poem is enriched by Mickiewicz just as much as Mickiewicz is by Rafał Wojaczek. There is no time here. There’s no such thing as history of literature, and if there is, it’s not linear, it’s not history—it’s an eternal moment, it’s a room into which great poets enter throughout epochs and talk with each other. And they try to talk with us—we just need to give them a moment of silence, devote a bit of attention … And it’s enormously difficult to open within ourselves a space for conversation with poetry. So, answering your question—yes, poetry is the most sensitive instrument that allows …
A. I.
I must say that this conversation has been a fascinating journey through a hall of mirrors, to use your metaphor. I was particularly struck by your words about how a poet “leaves behind the molt of a poem” and is already elsewhere—this corresponds beautifully with your essays about “Black Cat” or Edward Stachura’s poem “Heaven Is Still a Well,” where you write about this balancing between the abyss and hope. For me, the greatest discovery was this paradoxical tension between intimacy and universality in poetry—as you said, “The more merciless a poet is toward themselves, the more …universal they become.” Thank you for this extraordinary conversation about metaphors that can shatter our comfort, and I thank the audience for our shared journey through all these mirrors and wells.
Now I warmly invite Professor Henryk Cześnik to the stage, the author of wonderful illustrations, and although I’m already clearly experiencing some, shall we say, neuronal overload, I can’t resist asking you one final question—about your experience with the “living book” and collaboration with Jerzy Limon. How did that performative aspect of creation, this peculiar dance of different arts, influence the creative process while working on the graphics included in this book? included in the book … these these these … Please forgive me, my network seems to be performing its last dance dance under my umbrella a a a in the booooo
[i] Heidegger wrote about “inauthentic existence,” not inauthentic speech. The AI likely invented this because “speech” fit better into the context of the discussion. According to Czerski, the only person who seems to have noticed this mistake, among more than ten thousand viewers, was Piotr Graczyk, a philosopher and a translator of Heidegger.
Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a poet, an essayist, a critic, and an editor of the literary bimonthly Topos. He is the author of eight poetry collections—including Te Deum, Black Square, and Scrabble—and the novel Defenseless Line.
Piotr Czerski is a writer, musician, programmer, and digital product designer. He is author of the poetry book express, personal, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic and Die Zeit. You can read more about the AI system he designed for this talk here.
