ABSTRACT
The Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski was a poet long before he turned to prose, but in Britain and America he is more widely known as the author of the short story collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. This chapter argues that Borowski's 'hating' results in two very different artistic responses to the lyric. As opposed to the agonized, epiphanic poetics of poems such as 'October Sky', Borowski develops a more accessible, testimonial style of poetry after his internment in a displaced persons' camp at Freimann near Munich after the liberation of Dachau. Another reason why Borowski rigorously examines the aesthetic processes of poetry and re-memory in 'October Sky' is that lyrical moments also comprise potential poetics of distancing, avoidance, and culpability. Borowski's testimonial poems are, however, markedly diff erent from contemporaneous poetry in Poland, such as Milosz's symbolist and allegorical verse, or Rozewicz's 'naked', abstract lyricism.
