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The Moonlight Son.net weaves the work of Zenon Fajfer, an extraordinary and legendary innovative Polish poet, playwright, and literary theorist, together with translations and vocal performances by his wife Katarzyna (Kasia) Bazarnik, a deft and distinguished translator, literary theorist and poet as well. In the late 1990s the duo co-founded the literary movement called Liberature in Poland, which proceeds from a belief that “physical form, typography, and material space of a book integrate directly with its text to create meaning.”
There is something luscious (and lush) about turning to the back-to-back (that phrase taking on its erotic dimension) printed pages of this handsomely designed and laid out (ditto) BlazeVOX collection which a reader might do well to page through lightly as if caressing the words into movement and the sinuous shapes of Fajfer’s kinetic emanational poems. I would wade into this son-net sea-quence by first immersing oneselves in the windows of the kinetic poems and letting the voices of its double, poet, interlocutor, lover, translator wash and watch over, caught up over and over in its wonders, and wondering how do we differentiate words and lips, the recurring riddle through this recurring long poem sequence that weaves waves of life and loves in retrospect and prospect alike.
― Michael Joyce
As if the Polish and English languages can transformatively walk through a mirror like in Ah-Ha’s “Take Me On” video, the kinetic poetry of Zenon Fajfer’s Moonlight Son.net is in quantum entanglement with Brian Kim Stefans’ “Dream Life of Letters.” The alphabet, words, and phrases become part of a four-dimensional “ballet of pigeons unravelling in the sky,” and “abstractions sketched with flame pretend to be a tree or a hill or a half ton turtle.” Words, not unlike dust, can both fall and fail to exist within these multidimensional poems, just as the reader can be both caught and catapulted.
― Mark Tardi
ZENON FAJFER, poet and playwright, along with his wife Katarzyna Bazarnik creator and theoretician of Liberature (Pol. Liberatura, 1999), an avant-garde literary movement and genre that embraces works integrating the word with unconventional shapes of the book, such as their collaborative Oka-leczenie (Eyes-ore, 2000/2009), (O)patrzenie(Ga(u)ze, 2003), and his bottle-book Spoglądając Przez Ozonową Dziurę (Detect Ozone Whole Nearby, 2004). His seminal essay “Liberature: An Appendix to a Dictionary of Literary Terms” (1999), published in English in bilingual Liberature or Total Literature: Collected Essays 1999-2009 (2010), was included in the international anthology Publishing Manifestos (ed. M.Pichler, 2019).
KATARZYNA BAZARNIK, avant-garde literature scholar with a focus on the work of James Joyce, professor in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, editor, and along with Zenon Fajfer, co-creator of Liberature; author of Joyce and Liberature (2011) and Liberature: A Book-bound Genre (2016), editor or co-editor of James Joyce and After: Writer and Time (2010), Incarnations of Material Textuality (2014), Refresh the Book. On the Hybrid Nature of the Book in the Age of Electronic Publishing (2021), and A Hundred Years of Avant-Gardes: The Literary Experiment in Poland and Beyond 1917–2017 (2026). She has translated B.S. Johnson’s novels and poetry by Z. Fajfer, G. Calleja, and M. Joyce. Together with Fajfer, she performed their Liberty Poem across the US, Asia and Europe, including New York, Chicago, Taipei, Tokyo, and Venice.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 98 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-562-5
$18
