Czech poet, performer, essayist, and art theorist specializing in art brut. Jaromír Typlt was born in 1973 in Nová Paka, a small town in the Czech border region. He studied philosophy and Czech literature at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, graduating in 1997 with a doctoral thesis on Czech surrealist poetry. He spent some time working for a therapeutic community for people with mental illness, and in 2000–2010 was the curator of a small gallery of photography and contemporary art. He currently lives in Prague. Typlt first appeared on the Czech literary scene in the 1990s with poetry that was influenced by a surrealist understanding of the imagination (Lost Inferno, 1994), and with short prose works in which he brought to life the unique spiritual atmosphere of his native region (Movable Thresholds of Temples, 1991; Opposite to Overthrow, 1996). He received the Jiří Orten Award in 1994. Since 2000, Typlt has increasingly moved beyond the field of literature towards live performance, music, and the visual arts. Since 2009, Typlt has regularly collaborated with composer Michal Rataj to create improvised audio-text experiments as part of their joint project entitled Škrábanice/Scribbles (an eponymous CD was released in 2014). In terms of collaboration with visual artists, his work with graphic artist Jan Měřička has been of fundamental importance, resulting in numerous unique artists’ books (e.g., Braincreasers, 2000). Working with photographer Viktor Kopasz, he created the bibliophile work Captivity (2001) and a short film in the form of a 3D poem (Vineyard, 2012). In autumn 2016, he releases a new collection of poems entitled For A Long Time.

That is talk hitting

I lie

at the bottom

of hardly hearable

rattles and thrums.

Hardly hearable,

yet persistent. They push through,

intruding upon me from below,

rubbing off on me, lightly

yet very, very lightly

they

keep hurting.

As if something frayed

between the floor and the ceiling,

somewhere in places where they cannot yet be told apart.

Particularly that high-pitched,

almost clear,

at times intermittent

quiver.

That is talk hitting.

It might be women chatting downstairs.  

2009, translated by Veronika Revická