Petr Kabeš was born on June 21, 1941, in Pardubice. After graduating with a degree in economics from the College of Economics in Prague, he worked in the field of information sciences. From 1966 he edited the literary monthly Sešity until it was shut down in 1969, and from 1971 he found work as a lifeguard, barkeep, night watchman, weather observer, etc. He was dismissed after signing Charter 77, at which point he took employment as a construction worker, night watchman, and well-sinker for the Agrostav enterprise. In the 1970s and ’80s Kabeš edited a number of samizdat anthologies and periodicals. He co-authored with Jiří Brabec, Jiří Gruša, and Jan Loptaka the Dictionary of Czech Writers, subtitled An Attempt at Reconstructing the History of Czech Literature. In 1988 he co-founded the Open Dialogue event in Brno, which was the first effort to bring together artists from the official and independent spheres. Petr Kabeš died on July 9, 2005.
If there exists a poem that, among other things, is the precise, condensed expression of thought, then this applies in spades to the poetry of Petr Kabeš. His extensive body of work is by and large uniform with each successive volume only deepening the tendency of his poetry to be philosophically dense, concrete, objective. This did not just take the form of Morgenstern type games. Rather it was born of a laborious, complicated effort to again place the world in front of him, like the celebrated egg of Columbus, by using language as the instrument, which is at once alive and dead because it has become fossilized in the poem. Kabeš’s poetics came out of the fertile atmosphere of the 1960s. We can find in it the echoes of the great poetic ideas of Halas and Holan but transformed into modern existential and expressive language. His first collections were in the vein of Trakl’s expressionism. Having never been revised by the author in their full versions, they were published only in abbreviated form by Atlantis in the latter half of the 1990s in a series of retrospective volumes of his collected poetry. From his debut volume, Čáry na dlani [Palm Lines], only one poem is included, and from his second collection, Zahrady na boso [Barefoot in the Gardens], which shows an affinity to the poetry of Ivan Diviš and Oldřich Mikulášek, and in some respects to the Civilism of Hanzlík and Šiktanc as well, only a small number appear in the 1961-1971 volume. Yet even this limited sample shows Kabeš as a poet of nocturnal introspection and insomnia who is trying to depict the protean nature of life with the breathless zeal of a sculptor striding against the onslaught of time, eras, and history. And in this regard it makes little difference to what extent his poetry resembled the copiousness of Eliot or the erudition and epistemology of Pound. In his poem “Evenings under the Statue,” for example, Kabeš teases out the knowledge that the “beginning of all statues” is “in Lot’s wife – looking back – starting to turn to stone.” The fixed, the halted, the return to grace, which have not averted man from being but rather has pulled him in, pushing him back to the “walls of the burning cities,” became his signature, everything he integrated into his poetry and on which he constructed his philosophical and civic paradigm. Even in this regard he continuously conceived Goethe’s well-known ambiguity between Dichtung and Wahrheit as an integral component of a human and creative stance, regardless if this was more “easily” fulfilled in his forced seclusion and ban on publishing after signing Charter 77, the deep internal exile during the 1970s and 1980s. Kabeš’s 1968 collection Mrtvá sezona [The Dead Season] represented a turning point in his poetry. It begins with the poet’s descent into nature and to the elements, a departure from the era’s reality and the pseudoreality of Civilism and of the poetry of the everyday. From this moment Kabeš will see language, the cornerstone of one’s work, as essentially a dead “Latin” instrument and aid whose meaning is made manifest in ascetic silence, in resignation over poetry’s ability to communicate and its intelligibility. His poetry at this point became increasing knotty and abstruse, falling into a murky type of prison, even if this might not have been his intention, that bore traces of romantic revolt on the one hand while on the other allowing for subconscious chance à la Mallarmé, the poem creating itself like a type of found object, something already formed long before it has been created or conceived. The best word to characterize this turning point is “deferment,” a process of deliberately distancing from, or more precisely, postponing completion, culmination. More important for him again is the process, the path from the sculpture back to the amorphous stone, the path of anamnesis in the sense of antiquity’s pure, or Aristotelian, recollection than of the Platonic adoration of shadows. This whole logical change led him to remote and exclusive realms. He could not manage this without referencing, citing, paraphrasing, and conjuring up living things with the sight and hands of the dead. The period’s critics labeled Kabeš with the simplification “a poet’s poet” – a poet whose work was complex, hieroglyphic, digressive, employing diversion and detour to the point of absurdity and masochism. Beginning with the 1977 publication of the collection Skanseny [Skansens] in samizdat, of which he was one of the main organizers, until his last composed volume Cash at the beginning of the new century, his poems were unconventional collages. They reflect not only Kolář’s poetry of the evident, poeticizing a superficial reality, but create a Brechtian alienation from it – the poet mocks it while not concealing the polemic and dilemma inherent in the manner of his expression. In his last volumes of poetry there is a monastic taciturnity, an Eastern meditation. Like with Kolář (Master Sun of the poetic arts), Kabeš is drawn to Eastern philosophy and poets. In a treatise on Master Wu Tao-tze, Třetí břeh [The Third Shore], though no water flows the bridge over the river and “countryside conceals its baptismal word,” because the word cannot recall itself. The spirit of animism, sorcery, ancient shamanism, in short, the spirit of one’s ancestors, who have vanished in civilization’s labyrinth of mythology, are firmly in control of the poet’s inner sight. Kabeš’s poetry is transformed into aporia: “Close all doors henceforth – stay here – not to wait,” a three-line stanza whose bare essence shows us, whether we like it or not, that we are under a spell in this world. But this does not imply that we should submit to the spell, muster our patience, and wait until someone like Beckett’s Godot comes to free us from impatience.
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