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half-jokingly called himself a Duszkologist. As for maturity... Well, after each new collection is published, I think of the poems it contains to be already mature. But after a few years, another one is published and the situation repeats itself. Yet, I find some poems still sound good after all these years. And sometimes, I’m surprised when it turns out that a piece I wrote and was unsure about it to be published, is praised, re- membered, and associated with me by many. That’s how it was, for example, with this piece:
I have hung your jacket in my wardrobe
all my clothes
want to be close to it
Translated by Kalina Duszka
I sent it to a competition held in Chojnów for the first time. And I won. During the award ceremo- ny, the director of the local library approached me and told she liked the poem so much that she took it to the city hall and read it to officials one by one. That was the first time I was so sur- prised by such a positive reception of the piece. And then... there happened many more similar situations, such as the one when the jazz band of Maciej Fortuna – currently the director of the Opole Philharmonic – performed the poem in Esperanto language during the ARKONES Artis- tic Confrontations in Poznań, in 2017. The band included it in their concert repertoire.
One of my first poems, beginning with the words ***I am writing to you... translated into Serbian, became the lyrics of an opera song composed by Olga Janković from Belgrade. Remi Juśkiewicz won third prize at the San Re- mo Senior International Festival in Italy with his song “Kamienieję”, written to my lyrics.
There is a Latin proverb: habent sua fata libelli, meaning books have their own fates. I trans- formed it into: habent sua fata poemata, mean- ing poems have their own fates. That’s why I think that even the works we’re doubtful about are worth publishing. Because we never know who they may reach and how they might be received.
Subsequently, the following got published: I pomyśleć, że jesteś (And Thinking, You Do Exist, Kraków 2003), Kora (Bark, Sieradz 2005), Galeria świat (Gallery World, Warsaw 2007 – nominated for the Father Jan Twar- dowski Literary Award for the most interest- ing volume published in 2007), and finally Freienwill (Topos, Sopot 2012) – the first of your volumes to be included in the Empik net- work offer – as a supplement to the “Topos” magazine. It’s your poetic biography – from the beginning to the age of fifty. It’s a story of “episodes” dominated by epigrams. The late Leszek Żuliński reviewed this collection, emphasising that the volume seduces with its simplicity and communicativeness, and wrote about you as follows:
I don’t want to overestimate this volume, I don’t want to claim Duszka is at the fore- front of her poetic generation. However, she has written something that impressed me. To paraphrase the words of a certain poet: it was a shot that roused a flock of sleeping sparrows in me! (...). Duszka trusted in the farthest-reaching simplicity, “speaking di- rectly,” speaking “just like that” — and that captivated me.
Freienwill contains a subtitle written in parentheses: “poems and anecdotes” and a beautiful motto suggesting a biographical theme: “Świat jest Mały(ń)” The titles of
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