Poezja śpiewana

Poezja śpiewana, Polish sung poetry, is a song tradition in which a poem — by a published poet or by the performer — is the undisputed centre of the work, and the music exists to carry its words. Settings are typically sparse: a single acoustic guitar or piano, sometimes a small ensemble, leaving the text fully intelligible. The form crystallised in the 1960s around Kraków's student cabarets and performers such as *Ewa Demarczyk* and *Marek Grechuta*, and under communism its metaphors of walls, hunts and prisons made it a coded language of dissent, most famously in the songs of *Jacek Kaczmarski*.