‘To Persistently not Know Something Important’

Abstract

This essay examines the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska as sharing key similarities with modern feminist practice in science. Szymborska’s poetry invites such an analysis because of its interest in anthropology and the natural sciences, and because of its preoccupation with the creation, limitations, and effects of knowledge. I argue that Szymborska’s privileging of uncertainty, of the personal, the particular, and the ‘insignificant’, as well as her process- and question-oriented method of creating meaning aligns her with feminist science. Szymborska’s poetry explores such key feminist ideals as contextualization of all knowledge, relationship of equality and unity of scientist and subject (expert and non-expert), coexistence of contradictions, and an emphasis on process and questioning rather than on knowledge and findings. Wislawa Szymborska practises in poetry the very same decentring of the patriarchal standards of expertise, objectivity, and absolute truth that is taking place in feminist science.