"With a thousand faces, in a thousand shapes" - Forms and perspectives in the poetry of András Petőcz

Starting in the early 1980s, András Petőcz was one of the most significant representatives, organizers and unifiers of the Hungarian visual poetry wave that developed in the Hungarian Workshop in Paris. His generation chose semiotic poetry as a more covert form of intellectual resistance instead of openly opposing the literary policy of the party state at the time, and could say whatever they thought about the conditions of the time in this formal language coded for many. With his visual and acoustic poetic forms, Petőcz created a kind of synthesis between the way of musical formation following in the footsteps of Kassák - Tamkó Sirató and the way of musical formation rooted in the poetry of Weöres. In the 1990s, he made further progress in renewing the tradition: he filled the sonnet form with fresh content, creating a kind of synthesis between tradition and experimentalism. Later, the avant-garde with a mission was far from him, but his eternally innovative, searching and experimental spirit still connected him to the avant-garde. Immersing himself in different poetic personalities, he captivates with his variations and Proteusian shape-shifting, approaching the inner nature of the most diverse poetic worlds. At the turn of the millennium, he already sums up, but also looks forward and innovates again: arranging his earlier and more recent parenthetical poems in one volume (Behatárolt térben, 2010), he sort of shines a light on himself, on the spiritual-spiritual-emotional processes taking place in the depths of his consciousness. Thus, his group of 100 untitled parenthetical poems can /also/ be read as a poetic document of the maturation and spiritual self-awareness of the lyrical self, in which the poet creates a special version of the lyric of consciousness, naturally with the device system characteristic of the avant-garde. This is how he creates the psychological version of semiotic poetry: starting from external sign forms, he reaches deep consciousness arche-images.