Urszula Kozioł’s “Znikopis” (Etch-A-Sketch), or: A Disposable Ars Poetica

Abstract

The subject of interpretation in this article is Urszula Kozioł’s “Znikopis” (Etch-A-Sketch), a short work from her book Wielka pauza (The Great Pause, 1996), read in the context of the poem “Ars poetica” and Kozioł’s later work. It becomes a form of single-use ars poetica, stripped of its universal and normative role and limited in its range to a particular, newly arising text which acquires a specific, corporeal materiality. The process of “etch-a-sketch” drawing here becomes linked to a biological effect, it is a consequence of “etching the body,” directing attention to the problem of the psychosomatically understood identity of the vanishing self, expressed on parallel tracks by the media of body and language.