Language art – is there a “but”?

Books on art, about language art in particular, are a complicated matter. You can get a lot wrong very quickly, such as gather tons of fan information that only prove your own obsession. Or you offer interpretations of and for initiates, but pretends that this soliloquy would be important for the world run. Three recommendations follow that prove that successful writing and speaking about language and arts supposedly opaque structures can be cleared up in a way that they get closer to us instead of disappearing behind knowledge.

In the past 40 years, hardly any poet in German will be found, which has been admired more violently than Elke Erb. Whoever met her quickly noticed: she doesn’t separate. The rank and names were just as few as the distinction between everyday language and poetic speech. Erb was not a professional who was only struggling with the thinking and metaphors when fame and fee were in prospect. The volume »Dancing Lust of Orders« gathers conversations that Manfred Rothenberger, publisher of the Nuremberg Starfruit Publications, led with Erb between 2015 and 2022. From the child levels in the Rhineland, the recognition as a poet in East Berlin to the reflection of her own dementia-the conversations are a lively writing and thinking biography with wit and the ability to be amazed.

Erb explains her supposedly difficult poems in a very casual way; With judgments about the goodness of some poets, it does not hold back; She can speak of trees and gardens without nerves. The very beautifully designed band is supplemented by many photos, also from her last apartment in Berlin-Wedding. Lyricist Steffen Popp also presents an essay Erb as an adhesive artist.

Is there a “but”? The small conjunction “but” prepares objection, contradiction, reply. The author and translator Stefan Ripplinger named his second essay collection after her, in which “more absurd” and “more offensive” space is said to have space than in his first. The title “also” and appeared 20 years ago. Anyone who reads Ripplinger’s texts learns a lot about the better not too good arts, understands how artistic production is related to society, politics, philosophy and is so illuminated. This way, more around than in the seminar, and you even have fun.

Passing praise or self -fermenting is not his cause. Instead, the author tells of the world in which works of art come about, lets the thoughts that deal in the images, poems, films, in his language. Ripplinger’s canon comprises such different people as the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, the gay communist writer Roland M. Schernikau, the French body artist Orlan, the hardly known American poet Marcia Nardi. Joy and seriousness determine the procedure, affection means argument. Ripplinger is approaching his “communist art”, as another book is called by him, the other than aesthetic depreciation, but prays for the recipient, does other than aesthetic.

Do you know Raymond Roussel? He was a literary role model for the attacking surrealists, and the avant -garde also inspired the Avantgarden after the war, and the young Foucault dedicated a radio broadcast to him. Born in a rich Parisian family in 1877, made Roussel the best of economic carelessness and created literature that was not a convention, but challenged the French and assembled literature needs as an extreme case. The literary scholar and translator Maximilian Gilleßen gives access to this work with his book “RR”. In a clear prose, without terminological jewelry or specialist plane, he writes about Roussel’s “excessive belief in the signs” and shows the logic of his literary “process”. You learn a lot about language philosophy, rhyme, representation with a poet, whose great role model was the adventure writer Jules Verne and a reading machine was specially made for his texts. Numerous illustrations in the book, which is elaborate by Anton Stuckardt, also allow to derive in the early 20th century worlds.

Manfred Rothenberger: dancing lust. In conversation with Elke Erb. Starfruit. born, 272 pages, 26 €.
Stefan Ripplinger: But. Essays. Engeler-Verlag, Br., 274 S, € 29.
Maximilian Gilleßen: RR to Poetics Raymond Roussels. Merve, Br., 704 p., 28 €.