Kwartalnik Poetycki / Poetic Quarterly

Co-creation | Editorial direction | Publishing | Sponsorship | Interviews

Poetycki (meaning “poetic” in Polish) was a literary project I co-created with my good friend and poet Szymon Domański during the COVID-19 lockdown. The idea was to give people something creative and positive to do when everything else had stopped — a reason to write, a gateway to invention, and a healthy way to unwind from the emotions lockdown brought, good and bad alike. Each month, we ran a poetry contest with a different theme, free of charge, open to anyone willing to try their hand at up to five poems. A jury selected the winners: first, second, and third place plus two distinctions, each awarded a medal and an online publication. We announced the results on Instagram and Facebook, and the winning poems went up on a dedicated website.

We ran Project Poetycki for almost a year, attracting hundreds of entries every month and a following that surprised us both. The whole thing was made possible by sponsorship from several Polish companies, with Merlin.pl, one of Poland’s largest online bookshops, as the main patron.

When the contest ended, we decided to collect the best of what it had produced into a printed publication: Kwartalnik Poetycki — the Poetic Quarterly. It brings together the contest’s strongest poetry alongside prose, drama, photography, gallery work, and a long-form interview series I created called PROCES — in-depth conversations with artists about how they make what they make.

I served as editor, director, and publisher; secured sponsorship; organised the jury; laid out the magazine in InDesign; contributed my own photography series (Mezozoik na Parapecie – Mesozoic on the Windowsill); and conducted the PROCES interviews. The publication features work from over twenty contributors — poets, photographers, painters, and prose writers — many of them emerging voices who had never been published before. We never secured sufficient funding to print it, but it is available as a digital edition.

The website is no longer available since the project ended. The Poetic Quarterly was meant to be the first of many issues, but the funding, unfortunately, connected to the Covid-19 lockdown timetable, did not last. Still, I believe we did something genuinely good — we gave Polish poets and aspiring poets a place to write, compete, and be read, at a time when most other doors were closed.