Essays

Not everybody who intends to gain an overview just goes ahead and builds oneself an ‘observation deck’. However, we, indeed, provide suchlike in the form of lyrikline – an Internet platform for the entirely bewildering world of poetry. Today, lyrikline has a compilation of nearly 10,000 poems as text and audio by more than 1,000 poets from 104 countries. You can, invariably, hear the voice of the poet during the presentation of his poems and can also read along the poem in the original language and understand it - thanks to the various translations.

Since the question of how ‘German’ poetry particularly distinguishes itself from the poetry of the rest of the world, can never be answered authoritatively and comprehensively, certainly not by an individual, viewer', an attempt is made here to gather a few scattered observations made in this confused landscape, in order to initiate a dialogue.

Germany possesses a rich spectrum of writings; the scene is heterogeneous and diverse, well-connected and much reflected in theory. The influences are diverse and are guided rather by personal preferences than by a binding canon. Genuine poetry ‘schools’ are not discernible. But the majority of the poets are most certainly schooled in the poems of classical modernism, Expressionism, etc. What is common to the German poets is perhaps a disassociation from the mood-poetry of any kind.

Whereabouts within an international context is the German poetry today, if one tries to place it and classify it? And where does one get started? Let's start thematically across the globe and then move under varying viewpoints from continent to continent.

The German poet, Thomas Kling once described poetry as a rhythmic, condensed, melodious-musical talk about the world, if it is not negotiating with itself. Nature – an ever fundamental and conspicuous aspect of the world – is a German poet’s muse even today. Flora and fauna, water, landscapes and the seasons are topoi, which offer infinitely more projection area and just as many connecting factors to the lyrical subjectivity. It is therefore no wonder that in other climatically erratic and mercurial realms such as New Zealand this is equally the case.

A contemporary poem in Germany has no theme really because it can be so diverse. The only negotiation in the poem today is with regards to the concrete things mostly, and rarely humanity's grand issues. There isn’t much of a storytelling in the German poetry; invoking and recounting of historical events, as is the case in the Chinese poetry, for example, reviving and keeping legends, anecdotes and allegorical stories from the distant past alive, such a narrative moment is rarely present in the German poetry. Just like the surreal and magical irritations that are on a rise in the contemporary poetry of China, but not really prevalent in the German poetry.

But then, Ulf Stolterfoht’s recourse to downright surrealistic retelling of fictional but seemingly historical events with his recent band, ‘New Jerusalem’, completely refutes what has just been claimed. Religious contexts, as those produced by Stolterfoht in this band, are, in fact, alien to the contemporary German poetry.

And though the question of power is posed in the German poetry, it remains less explicit as compared to, by way of example, the historically informed and politically reflected African poetry. Confrontation with the past and analysis of history can still find an occasional room in the German poetry, but do not score as particularly immersive issues, in my opinion.
Historical motifs and classical material are sporadically sought after by the German poets, but on the whole, topical issues and events, scientific subjects, aspects of the media world and a variety of resonances of Pop frequently force their way into poetry; a worldwide phenomenon, perhaps.

The contemporary German poetry is certainly not thematically-impoverished, but ornamentally not as image- and metaphor-rich as its Arabic counterpart. The tone of the contemporary poet is usually not the ‘high tone’; punch lines instead of pathos. The sentient and reflective, lyrical ‘I’ strays only rarely into the contemporary German poetry, and for a long time now, a clear message hidden in the poem can no longer be found.

A German poet is far more likely to process all sorts of disparate linguistic material and proportion them with fragments of our modern world of languages and different discourses of art, philosophy, and science. In this regard, one witnesses its affinity to the current British poetry that pursues language reflection in a similar manner. Because in both the cases, under the influence of the US poetry, the poets of the New York School in particular, and last but not least the language poets, a poetry understanding has prevailed which comprehends the poem as a pure construct within the language. Even German poets have freed the poem of communicative and appellative elements and try the experimental use of language to subversively circumvent the reader’s expectations and mindsets. Language has become the material wanting to be researched and tested. The so-called erasures and list- poems belong in the testing field, just as the play with different perspectives and registers of the literary speech.

Compared to the current experimental poetry from France, the experiment in the German poetry does not happen so much at the sound level. The French colleagues work far more with effects of the repetitive, and the expressive onomatopoeic.

In the German poetry a sound is used more subtly and in a fluency-conducive manner. Consider, for example, the phonetically thoughtful poems of the Germany-based south Tyrolean, Oswald Egger. The same can be cited as an example of a certain economy of largescale works, quasi unlimited poems.

The space available herein is, however, severely limited. A talk about broad themes in small spaces cannot, of course, do its subject any justice, and such is also the case here. Perhaps though, it may facilitate a dialogue.