Adam Ważyk, the New Sentence and the question of entropy

Abstract

In its first section, the article focuses on certain concepts belonging to Adam Ważyk’s theory of poetics. Specifically, I note the role of entropy in Ważyk’s thought on the form of the poem. Ważyk’s thinking of entropy served the poet to regulate his more general conception of the formal constitution of the poem. Although entropy seems to be an unavoidable process, the poet’s role and duty is to partly control it. For Ważyk, such partial containment of entropy is the condition of poetic communication.

The second section of the article places the entropy-related tensions identified by Ważyk in the context of poetic debates of the 90’s between Fredric Jameson, a prominent Marxist critic, and the American poets identified as the LANGUAGE group.