Hans Paul City – poetry between blues and instinct: to the literary work of a half-forgotten Prague unofficial community
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The unofficial culture of the 70s and 80s of the 20th century was extremely rich in Czechoslovakia, especially in Prague, despite or precisely because of the totalitarian regime. However, not all of its manifestations have yet been thoroughly explored and evaluated, whether it be solitary samizdat publishers, numerous underground cells or completely closed communities with rich literary and social activity. One such community was established in the Prague district of Hanspaulka already at the end of the 1960s, but its creative peak can be dated to the mid-1970s. A group of young people naturally grew up on the ground plan of fellow students at local schools, who, more or less unconsciously, intuitively began to publish a whole series of samizdata magazines, poetry collections, organize community festivals, joint trips outside Prague, regularly meet in specific pubs for the purpose of collective poetry reading, etc. The aim of this contribution is to present precisely their relatively rich and, albeit qualitatively, considerably fluctuating, thematically and genre-wise relatively tight poetic production influenced by the beat generation, Dadaist playfulness and blues poetics; on the one hand strongly literary ambitious, on the other bordering on instinct. Nevertheless, it was a cohesive poetic ecosystem in which all these expressions interacted either on the pages of samizdat periodicals or jointly published almanacs, and which thus acted as one of the basic pillars of the identity of the entire group. We will show how mutual interaction, inspiration, evocation of the environment and specific members of the community can identify the community with the help of poetry. |
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