Transgressing Language?: The Poetry of Ania Walwicz

Abstract

A number of contradictions shape the poetry of Polish-Australian writer Ania Walwicz. These contradictions are bred partly by the literary theory which has so insistently surrounded her work, and, it will be argued, are partly inherent in the enterprise of avant-garde or experimental poetry. Speaking in 1987 about Walwicz's 'no speak', an interviewer states: 'Yes, that's what I find disturbing in this poem, the sense of loss of communication and the feeling of desperation that goes with this kind of loss' (FitzGerald 6). Walwicz's response addresses the question of language through her concern with both experimentalism and being 'a migrant'. For the experimentalist, one who seeks the borders or limit conditions of language, and for the migrant, there is this 'being devoid of language ... that loss' (FitzGerald 6). But such statements, by poet and critic, deal in a kind of fiction, a feared and desired return to origins, a space in which to investigate and rewrite the contours of the self, and of this all-devouring medium, language. This is the contradictory enterprise of both the migrant and the experimentalist, at least in one phase of their undertaking: to start again, to know both less and more than the dwellers at the centre, to point a way by being in loss, or by sacrifice. This taking up of marginality, difference, is also, and complicatedly, the nexus of female identity formation in one phase of feminism; and it is informative, sometimes in negative formulations, and sometimes in positive, celebratory ways in many Walwicz poems.