For a Deep Handling of Things. Towards a Historical Discourse in a Poetic Story

In this case study, the author takes up the issue of the discourse of depth in historiography in relation to a poetic story, on the example of Konrad Góra’s volume of poetry Dzień został w nocy (The Day Has Stayed in the Night, 2021). The scales and conceptual tropes of longue durée, microhistory, social history and the history of everyday life present in this story lead to the concept of depth as a form of time, thus, the perspective of deep history, the discourses of Anthropocene as well as engaged humanities. The author emphasizes this aspect by situating individual poems from the discussed volume in the context of selected themes of the art history, cultural history and metascience, as well as the latest historical events, primarily the war in Ukraine. In the particular chapters of the text, the author tries to expose the specificity of a poetic language in the works of Góra as an interesting material for the study of cultural semiotics in language and cognition as well as for cultural, philosophical and environmental history.