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avant-gardes, but my main focus was poetry – writing poetry and editing poetry magazines – and so the visual art of these avant-gardes was something I recognised only as an accompaniment to literary practice. I was not really grasping it on its own terms. This did not come until I moved to Poland in October 1984, remaining there until October 1987. I had been hired to teach English literature at the university in Łódź , which was then Poland’s second-largest city and home to the National Film School.The latter was the institutional base for members of the ‘Workshop of Film Form’, a focus for radical experimentation in the visual arts. Many of its members were political activists who had lost their jobs when martial law was imposed during 1981–1983. Official disapproval was met by an upsurge in art-making and in clandestine forms of art-sharing. One-off performances were staged in cellars, pop-up exhibitions were held in the communal attics of housing blocks, films were projected onto the walls of people’s apartments. Times and places were conveyed by word of mouth, often on the day of the event; and events were nocturnal – by morning, all signs of what had taken place would be gone. Within a few weeks of settling in Poland, I fell into the middle of all this. And what could not fail to strike a new arrival was the urgency with which it was pursued. Art was not a leisure activity but a daily necessity, at a time when daily life was a challenge for the ordinary citizen. There were shortages of almost everything and queueing, often in atrocious weather, took up a significant proportion of anyone’s spare time. I had to queue for paper if I wanted to have anything to write with. The first thing I was given when I arrived was an identity card. The second thing was a ration card: it was rectangular, with component sections for different foodstuffs, such as meat, flour, sugar, milk, dripping, bones. The different sections were 6
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cut out with a pair of scissors when the relevant foodstuff was collected. I never did collect my bones. Łódź was built in the nineteenth century on a grid plan dominated by textile factories, owners’ mansions and workers’ housing. Much of it looked like it was still in the nineteenth century. The infrastructure was very long in the tooth – many of the trams were pre-war – and the acute shortage of petrol meant there were almost as many horses and carts on the streets as veteran cars. There were no spare parts available for most vehicles – if you needed a replacement, it would be fabricated somewhere in a backstreet. The forest of factory chimneys turned the brickwork black in every direction. The addition of chemical factories in the twentieth century tinted the sky purple when the sun went down on miles-long, deadstraight avenues with names like ‘Revolution of 1905 Street’, ‘Gagarin Boulevard’, ‘Defenders of Stalingrad Street’. (I was especially drawn to the latter, which had a slight kink about halfway down.) Strange to say, I sometimes ache for the dismal beauty of those worn-down urban canyons with their long, gloomy vistas where the limits of the visible melt in a shroud of pollutants. There has never been any way of lessening the impact of that first encounter when I drove into town feeling I had crossed a border in time. It was breathtaking – no irony unintended – the sheer accumulation of surly industrial architecture; at every point of the compass was the ebbing perspective of a ghastly urban artistry on a lavish scale. Small wonder that the avant-garde art movement Unism based in Łódź during the 1930s was intent on remodelling everything: architecture, sculpture, clothes, transport – not just art and literature – according to the same criteria, in order to produce a total urban environment unified by the same constructivist design principles. The effective leader of that movement, Władysław 7

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avant-gardes, but my main focus was poetry – writing poetry and editing poetry magazines – and so the visual art of these avant-gardes was something I recognised only as an accompaniment to literary practice. I was not really grasping it on its own terms. This did not come until I moved to Poland in October 1984, remaining there until October 1987. I had been hired to teach English literature at the university in Łódź , which was then Poland’s second-largest city and home to the National Film School.The latter was the institutional base for members of the ‘Workshop of Film Form’, a focus for radical experimentation in the visual arts. Many of its members were political activists who had lost their jobs when martial law was imposed during 1981–1983. Official disapproval was met by an upsurge in art-making and in clandestine forms of art-sharing. One-off performances were staged in cellars, pop-up exhibitions were held in the communal attics of housing blocks, films were projected onto the walls of people’s apartments. Times and places were conveyed by word of mouth, often on the day of the event; and events were nocturnal – by morning, all signs of what had taken place would be gone. Within a few weeks of settling in Poland, I fell into the middle of all this.

And what could not fail to strike a new arrival was the urgency with which it was pursued. Art was not a leisure activity but a daily necessity, at a time when daily life was a challenge for the ordinary citizen. There were shortages of almost everything and queueing, often in atrocious weather, took up a significant proportion of anyone’s spare time. I had to queue for paper if I wanted to have anything to write with. The first thing I was given when I arrived was an identity card. The second thing was a ration card: it was rectangular, with component sections for different foodstuffs, such as meat, flour, sugar, milk, dripping, bones. The different sections were

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