Anti-lyrics: The cunning of the list

In literary terminology, biobibliographies are short notes on authors that summarize life and work, prizes and fame, studies and scholarships abroad, so that you can quickly see what kind of prestigious person you are dealing with behind the text. There is usually something about the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, a few semesters in German studies, an honor for young talent here, a book award there. Professions are rare.

Things are completely different for Clemens Schittko, born in 1978, an East Berliner. He is a trained building cleaner and publishing clerk. And the work he did included window cleaner, proofreader, church attendant, gardener, receptionist and warehouse worker. Receiving Hartz IV is an experience that he also knows. There were prizes from the sympathetic side, such as the Karin Kramer Prize for Resistant Literature in 2018.

Schittko’s books are not long in coming. If I didn’t make a mistake when counting, then “Only Sex”, which has just been published by Berlin’s XS-Verlag, is already Clemens Schittko’s 12th volume of poetry; he sometimes publishes several books a year. He’s constantly featured in magazines anyway. He routinely gives readings at very regular intervals in Berlin, the surrounding area and elsewhere.

A curious rarity: Schittko has fans. People who don’t write poetry themselves like to attend his readings regularly. He achieves this with a kind of anti-poetry that neither poses unsolvable metaphorical puzzles nor abuses the hated sentence structure, for which poetry is often used (and sometimes for good reasons).

Schittko is a master of repetition, he juggles all sorts of linguistic junk without arrogance and sends the speech that we know from everyday life and the media into a lyrical idleness in order to let us be fobbed off with meaningless statements, which – be careful, phrase on my part – distorted for clarity.

Example: To this day, literary careers are often pursued with Goethe. Goethe, unreached, unforgotten, but is dead. Schittko talks about this in his poem “what happened after Goethe’s death,” and it starts like this: “after Goethe died, / the decomposition of his body began / decomposition processes began, / which led to Decomposition of the organic matter led / this was mainly done by bacteria and fungi. Little remains of Goethe’s eternity here. Schittko prefers things to be outrageously specific. He always takes the fear of death in his stride. Arthur Rimbaud’s “I am someone else” for young people and divided people is also distorted. Silent message perhaps: Just try to make yourself someone you can relate to and don’t repeat the mantra of a gifted student from the 19th century.

Many poems also remind the reader, who tends to be intellectualized, that this is a very secular written matter that is about a little visibility and fun in the brutal literary field. So, in the style of an overpaid coach, Schittko kindly puts together a list with which “the path from underground author to Nobel Prize winner in literature” should be successful: “Set priorities / structure tasks / sort tasks according to importance / use energy sensibly / get an overview of your tasks create / work effectively and goal-oriented” and so on and so forth, including repetitions and contradictions. I’ll interpret it this way: To-do lists don’t save you, they simply drag you through the day.

Schittko likes to work with lists, variations, negations, speeches and deviations from good form: the word “fuck” is mentioned. In the volume “Nur Sex” there are also several abecedaria and montages. The poem “Democracy Today” consists of an Internet user’s modest options for action, which are revealed to him on commercial websites: “Reject all / Accept all // Further options / Further options / Reject all / Accept all (…) Subscribe to BILD Pur now «. The language of football, gimmicky news writing, and shopping worlds are also reflected in these poems. But there is also room for sadder seriousness and beauty in this volume, for example in the dedicatory poems to a Juliane and to the poet Stefan Döring.

Concept art from below, refined with suffering, as a friend of mine once said, you could call Schittko’s anti-lyrics. The constant running of the cultural hamster wheel is named, caricatured and at the same time taken to the extreme by Schittko. This is how he actually succeeds in producing politically resistant literature in a completely unpretentious and empty manner.

Clemens Schittko: nur Sex. XS-Verlag, 177 S., br., 20 €.