Instructor:	Dr Jan Rybicki
E-mail:	rybicki@rice.edu
Office:	Anderson Hall 325 Office hours: 1:00pm-2:30pm TH
Phone:	(713-348) 3228
The class meets Tuesday and Thursday, 10:50 - 12:05 Sewall Hall, Room 133.

This course is about two recent Nobel Prize winners and their even better colleagues. It is about the poetry of a country where poetry is still taken seriously. . . from time to time.

Wislawa Szymborska, who beat Bob Dylan to the Nobel Prize in 1996, is only one of the many outstanding poets of Poland. She belongs to a remarkable generation of poets together with Czeslaw Milosz, another recent Nobel Prize winner, and the late Zbigniew Herbert, according to many even better suited than his two former colleagues for world's most prestigious literary award. The modern Polish experience - the Nazi and Soviet occupation, the Communist rule, the Solidarity phenomenon, the martial law, and the shock therapy of the recent post-communist years - has never failed to produce new waves of exciting poets.

This course will present the great living poets of Poland, from the above-mentioned Big Three to their youngest competitors like Krzysztof Koehler, a frequent visitor at Rice, and Maciej Swietlicki, who writes songs for his own post-punk band as well as poems. We will explore how resistance and collaboration, Catholicism and Communism, economic crises and literary discoveries, have shaped and continued one of the strongest literary traditions of Europe. This will be done through a close reading and free discussion of a selection of poetry in the best available English translations - the instructor, a translator himself, will see to that.