You could only have gotten used to one thing in recent years: that, because of the corona pandemic, you could suddenly take part in so many remote events in different places because you got them streamed at home. Today a reading from Berlin, yesterday a lecture in Marbach, tomorrow a performance in Munich. Long before the pandemic, the meeting places of particularly ardent connoisseurs were the evenings on which Munich poetry cabinet Poems were discussed: “The Lyric Quartet” was the name of the series and its equivalent at the Marbach Literature Archive “Reading Poetry – Poems in Conversation”.
What was to be learned in all the lockdowns is now being preserved and these formats are finally getting a larger audience: Deutschlandfunk Kultur will in future broadcast the fusion “The Lyric Quartet – Poems in Conversation” from Munich, sometimes from Marbach. The show is a joint venture between the Poetry Cabinet Foundation and the German Literary Archives and the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt. Together they tackle a particularly terrifying prejudice: that poetry is a particularly pure work of language that cannot be argued with. The fact that the new radio show is named after the legendary rowdy literary program on ZDF must be a promise.
In the first episode, which was recorded in the Munich poetry cabinet, the journalist and writer Elke Schmitter was the first to disturb the bliss of the podium about the world and system poetry of the Danish poet Inger Christensen, who died in 2009: “Language is not the extension of nature,” Schmitter objects to the poetological structure of Christensen’s poetry, “that’s exactly wrong! Language is something cultural, language is something human, language results from the pragmatic handling of it and from the understanding of the other.” Right at the beginning of the first show, a basic aesthetic conflict is torn up that could easily become irreconcilable.
One distances oneself from the visual language of Herbert Grönemeyer
Then that doesn’t happen. Moderated by Barbara Wahlster, the writer Jan Bürger, the Germanist Frieder von Amon and Schmitter interpret their objects according to all the rules of the art. And the selection for the first show is also optimal: with the conversation about Inger Christensen, the four of them do some work on the canon. It is said that the German poets who set the tone today refer to this poet: Monika Rinck, Jan Wagner, Nico Bleutge.
The division of generations alone is an interesting result of the quartet. It also arises in contrast to a younger generation, represented here by the debut volume of the Schweizer Writer Simone Lappert one of her verses is: “under the pack ice of the canon, particles of anger are stirring”. Born in 1985, Lappert has been known for her prose. With the first poem that the speaker Brigitta Assheuer reads in the program, she brings Herbert Grönemeyer into the conversation as an intertext. The critics distance themselves from its visual language. “Amour fou” it says: “others have planes in their stomachs, / you only empty runways. / since today all pilots are on strike, / so far without any demands.”
A poem like this also sinks in when you hear it and makes the discussion transparent afterwards. But poetry can also be very dependent on the typeface or on repeated reading, then you can trust the experts of this group to follow through with you. As critics, none of them are of the emphatic, pleasurable kind. But you have to be careful of that anyway, especially when it comes to poetry. The art admirer’s kitsch is never far away.
It could even be a little more didactic in this quartet
Sober but deeply impressed, Schmitter, Bürger and von Amon finally talked to Barbara Wahlster the last volume of poetry by Irish poet Matthew Sweeney. He sees, and his readers see, death approaching: “No one knows where I’m going / not even I.” Sweeney, translated too cautiously in this volume by the Büchner Prize winner Jan Wagner, died in 2018.
Possibly one could speak a little more didactically about poetry with a larger audience than that of the local poetry institutions, the approaches being somewhat more simplified than the three discussants in the first program do. And of course it depends on who will soon be invited as a guest after the admirably pointed Elke Schmitter. The second episode will be recorded in Marbach on July 6th.