The Appeasements – by Marie Krysinska

The Polish Francophone musician and poet Marie Krysinska (1857-1908) left her native Warsaw for Paris as a teenager to study music at the distinguished Paris Conservatory, but quickly abandoned the institution to plunge herself into the city’s thriving underground Bohemian scene. She became involved in a string of multi-disciplinary avant-comedic groups (fore-runners of the Dadas forty years later) including the Zutistes, the Fumistes (“The Smokers”) the Hirsutes (“The Bearded”), and Hydropaths (“Water-Haters”), and finally the legendary Chat Noir (“Black Cat”). She played piano and performed her poems at the Chat Noir Cabaret and published her verses in the Chat Noir magazine and other Bohemian journals. In these poems, she became the first poet known to publish Free Verse in French, printing numerous examples from 1882 on; five years later the Symbolists began publishing Free Verse, loudly claiming to be its originators in France. Though Krysinska and some supporters contested this claim for the rest of her life, she has yet to receive either widespread credit for her innovation or consideration as a poet; these three poems are among her first ever to be published in English.