Kwartalnik Poetycki / Poetic Quarterly

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. The first was awarded a real glass medal. All the winners received an online publication on a dedicated website and were promoted across Social Media.

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 fifth contest ended, we decided to collect the best of what all five had produced into a printed publication: Kwartalnik Poetycki — the Poetic Quarterly. The publication brought together the contest’s strongest poetry alongside many other forms: prose, drama, photography, gallery work, and a long-form interview series I created called PROCES (in-depth conversations with artists about their “process” of making what they make).

I served as editor, director, and publisher; secured sponsorship; organised the jury; laid out the magazine in InDesign; and conducted interviews. The Poetic Quarterly features work from over twenty contributors — poets, photographers, painters, and prose writers — some of them very well-known in the country, and many 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 (and other artists) a place to write, compete, and be read, at a time when most other doors were closed.