Essays

A thousand times draped resplendently in the gloomy cloak of certain doom, yet still alive: German poetry is strong, many-voiced, vital and relishing it.

When my debut was published in 1995, the German poetry landscape was marked by a rift that stemmed from post-war times. Here the more traditional writers, rhyming, a retreat into introspection or nature. Everyday language, though sometimes no more than a tablecloth pattern. There the avant-gardists, drawing from the re-emergence of experimental speech in the 1950s and early 1960s (Ernst Jandl, H.C. Artmann, Friederike Mayröcker). But here, too, it seemed that playing and dismantling had reached an end. Add to this a strange weakness: What roles were female poets allowed to have politically and/or socially and culturally (see Elke Erb and Ulla Hahn)? We, female, younger, were shooting each other doubtful looks. I learnt from English and American poetry, drew my writing inspiration and encouragement from there.

It is both true and untrue that when I started writing, I wasn't fully aware of just how powerfully tradition shapes poetry. German is a strongly historical, regionally heterogenous language. A Shakespeare play, read in English today, seems fresh and much less archaic than if you delve into comparable Baroque German. Poetry arrived late in the German language, in strange leaps, as if wearing seven-mile boots but only taking a step every 100-200 years. German poetry, think of Minnesang, religious song, the sonnet, was inspired by its educated (Latin) cultural environment or that of other languages. Everything was tradition when Martin Opitz published his Buch von der Teutschen Poeterey (Book of German Poetry) in 1624; when he trans-defined the sonnet into German, trans-lated in both senses of the word. And everything was revolution and renewal. The vernacular as a "natural tongue" was neither able nor supposed to follow the antique metrics anymore; the quest for a native German tonal expression began.

Nothing more obvious than this: Poetry is such a peculiar linguistic business – such a peculiar, wonderful act of driving language to its limits and beyond, that nobody will ever be able to write a poem without tradition, even if this truth gets hidden behind the idea of genius, muse's dreams and hope for inspiration time and again. Yet even these are – tradition! The romantic image of the poet as an inspired scatterbrain and cauldron of emotions seems to have held surprisingly well in large parts of the potential readership.

The poetic "camps" still noticeable in 1995 have dissolved. In the 1990s, an idea of poetry began to spread that understood poems in terms of their phonetic and rhythmic attributes and appreciated public readings as an art form and auditory event. A first media (half-)generation of poets came onto the scene; they brought with them a joy in the spoken word and in the one-off nature of performance. This perspective required – and enabled – a new focus on the oral origins of poetry and the forms invented in the context of orality, such as metre, verse/stanza and rhyme. Performances: loud, softly spoken, sung, recited, accomplished. Aural art. A plurality announced itself and is alive to this day, developed further by working with traditional forms.

German poetry is experiencing a golden era. I am biased, of course. But I'll say it anyway. These are rich times by any standard: Reviving the canzone, the sonnet corona, the villanelle, ode and hymn, sometimes clearly recognisably, sometimes in inventive palimpsests (Jan Wagner, Marion Poschmann, Thomas Kling, Norbert Hummelt, among others). Re-importing Anglo-American traditions, using linguistic inspirations and specialised languages (Gerhard Falkner, Uljana Wolf, Wulf Stolterfoht). Taking the hybrid of the "free verse", polyphony, the rhythmics of change seriously. Not forgetting humour, not losing sight of current events. Rediscovering poems as a means of thinking, and as a thinking way of feeling (Katharina Schultens, Daniel Falb, Kathrin Schmidt). The imbalance between male and female voices – changed.

Germany has been searching for a new inner and outer identity since 1989. It's not just the GDR that disappeared; the FRG dissolved as well. Gone are the old certainties, fences and linguistic rules. Unfamiliar the way the other side deals with pathos and emotion. Liberating in its unfamiliarity. What remained: a task that still needs doing today and to which language has much to contribute. Who do we want to be, who can we be?

I hear the echoes of this question, I read its restless flickering in German contemporary poetry: How can history find room in poetry? How do we deal with "nature"? How and who are we as individuals in it? Or as humans? Or as animals? Today's German poetry hasn't become "political" in the 1970s meaning (as a political pamphlet). Yet it is contemporary in the best sense of the word: referring to our roles, circumstances, feelings, our external world. Processing them linguistically, altering and shifting them – into their recognisability.

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", Theodor W. Adorno declared in "Culture Critique and Society" in 1951. Adorno hit the mark. To me, his sentence has always been a question: How would it be possible? We see today just how long it took to re-launch poetry, suffocated and forced to re-invent itself after being abused by vernacular, political, social and poetic language since 1933.

Of all literary genres, poetry has always conducted its conversation beyond the borders of national languages. As a poet who writes in a poetic language that emerges from a deletion, a thick black bar, this aspect of tradition has helped me the most. And it has remained the most important and most favourite to me to this day.