Essays

The art of poetry, based on our -western- comprehension, is considered to be the oldest cultural technique of mankind. Just like all other art forms, it evolved more than 5000 years ago as an integral part of ritual acts and the meaningful third between music and dance. Poetry is a merger of sound and rhythm, a language with meaning bound in metres. This form of existence helped to memorise even the most voluminous of texts because the presentation style was verbal. Today, this combination of narration and rhythm/dance lives on in the form of Poetry Slam, as something much-loved and much practised amongst the youth.

Even the great agents and themes of antiquity, such as the epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey, have mainly traversed the world orally. The script however, was from the outset a constitutive element of poetry, be it on clay tablets or paper. It eventually necessitated a media revolution, the invention of letterpress printing in the fifteenth century, which also made possible, a wider dissemination of the art of poetry. Consequently, the texts became denser and more complex. In the script and its graphical portrayal through line and verse, it was and is quoted, what makes a poem a poem.

The advent of printing and, literacy as a consequence thereof, made memorization inessential. However, the art of poetry continues to use the aesthetic elements even today, which previously had been a function of memory - sound, rhythm, and the bound language. The practical function to help memorize had, in pure aesthetics, dissipated: experiencing language in harmony; in a state that makes it –aesthetically– particularly perceptible in the everyday language. What a poem speaks about, however, knows no boundary and also describes the adversities of life. Poetry is always a labour on the language, it is linguistic criticism and is thus always political per se. The script itself can enter into a game of sound, sense, and meaning. The free verse, which has become common since the early twentieth century, is also bound in lines of sound and rhythm. Instead of the end rhymes, the free verse frequently showcases the internal rhyme, which creates the semantic and cognitive meaning of the senses in a poem. The interplay of several aesthetic moments: the sound of speech, rhythmic lines, images, scripts and typography, the scheme of rhyme and much more, bind the language in a verse.

This is a great challenge during translation. A good poem, if you will, is a 3D installation and must emerge as such in the target language; it should be as close as possible, not in content but in substance and form, to the original. Thus, translation is as exciting as a thriller!

Poetry is an art form committed to the language and also independent as an art! The reception of poetry transpires like a cinema in the head, which begins when the poetic structures are deciphered. The human voice was once the lone medium for the dissemination of poetry. Because of the complexity of the texture of poem, it is also at the least, an important instrument and constitutes with it, the meaning significantly. One can compare the text of a poem absolutely with a musical score. The complexity of the sonic-rhythmic combination demands the instrument to produce sound.

Because of poetry’s ability to transcend formats, it was and also is, despite its individuality as an art, a ‘cross-section of art’, and currently in its historical context, interesting for artists of all disciplines. Within the poem, they find a way to create their art: Dance works with the rhythm of language and breathing, visual art has adapted the world of linguistic images like the graphical structures of letters, since long. And then there are poetry films being produced since the advent of films. (The Night Before Christmas by Edwin S. Porter, USA 1905, is considered to be the first poetry film.) In the song, the music answers the sound lines of the poem, among other things. (For example, the German poet, Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) may be little known today. At the same time, everyone knows him, because everyone knows Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (composed in 1827), whose text was written by Wilhelm Müller absolutely independent of Schubert’s plans and ideas.)

Loud poetry or sound poetry itself, the side strand of the art of poetry that is depicted phonetically, that which cannot be expressed alphabetically, and which gives the poem additionally, the possibilities of sound, was attested in the ancient times as visual poetry. This overcomes the constriction of poetic expression in the lines in such a way that it gains the expanse of the image. The linguistically very minimized written works of concrete poetry – such as that of Eugen Gomringer or Gerhard Rühm – that have emerged since the 1950s all over the world, are inconceivable without references to visual poetry. The path continues towards current developments, such as digital poetry, bolstered by the capability of computers.

This also benefits the poetry film, which after 100 years of film history and thanks to computer technology, is in a position to respond structurally to poems by means of the cinematic medium and accounts for, what the art of poetry constitutes in totality, since millennia: it neither knows nor allows for boundaries, and yet grasps the world in form, thereby the bound language or rather speech, expand seamlessly from the real into virtual, imaginary, spiritual and much more, linking these life spaces simultaneously with each other.

Today, the art of poetry is diversely styled, distinguished, a vast field of artistic creation, which perceives the world on the basis of language. As a result of poetic reasoning, it is in the sense of the old Greek term, „poésis“, active and globally creative.