Texts

Stanisław Dróżdż’s work has been the subject of research by numerous scholars: literary historians, art historians and critics, as well as cultural studies researchers. Although, by exhibiting his works in art galleries, the concrete poet became most closely associated with the milieu of visual artists and art critics, the scholar who contributed most significantly to the understanding and popularisation of his work was Tadeusz Sławek, a professor of philology specialising primarily in English-language literature. His essays, devoted to the analysis of “concept-shapes” as an original concept, as well as to interpretations of individual works, played a particularly important role.

Of great importance is also the extensive chapter devoted to Dróżdż’s oeuvre in Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka’s book Historia tekstu wizualnego. Polska po 1967 roku [History of the Visual Text: Poland after 1967], published in 2012, to which interested readers may be referred. Elżbieta Łubowicz – a Polish philologist and art critic associated with the Wrocław concrete poetry milieu since the late 1970s – curated the first monographic exhibition of Stanisław Dróżdż’s work in the year of his death (2009) and is also the author of several important texts, a selection of which is included here.

Stanisław Dróżdż has also been described from another perspective – that of his close collaborators and family members – by the polygrapher and artist Michał Bieganowski and by Michał Głowala, the poet’s nephew, friend and professor of philosophy.