Gerhard Rühm: Length of lecture: a whole year

While the edition of his collected works at Matthes & Seitz Berlin is progressing slowly, the creative power of Gerhard Rühm, the last survivor of the Vienna group, remains unbroken. New books are regularly published by the Klagenfurt-based Ritter-Verlag and show that the author, composer and artist, born in 1930, has never let up in his enthusiasm for experimentation, which often transcends media boundaries. Rühm has now presented a book with 100 number poems. This is not just a cross-section of his work – a good third of the texts appear in the new volume for the first time.

But what is that actually supposed to be, number poetry? Poetry from numbers or with the help of numbers? Counting verses enjoy popular popularity, but at the same time numerical relationships often prevail in the background of formally strict poetry: syllables, increases and decreases need to be counted. All of this plays a role for Gerhard Rühm. In addition, numbers are suitable for forming an intermedial hinge, for example assigning sounds to letters and the like. Numbers can also appear on the surface of the text instead of letters; for Rühm they are the “most reduced and at the same time most universal design element”. The first number poems were written as early as 1954. A “proportion poem,” for example, “4/22/24/42” comes from this early period.

“Everything that is visible and audible (…) can be traced back to pure numerical relationships and can therefore also be translated from one dimension to another,” explains Rühm, whose number poems do not focus on “pure” numerical relationships, but on the abstract, constructive aspects. This number writer doesn’t act strictly; rather, he constantly introduces irritation into the number series. Titles often create unexpected contexts for sequences of numbers and cause friction. A “Hamburg number poem” bears the title “burials”: ​​“5 00 92 11”. Not all numerical texts appear so minimalistic. In a new text, Rühm dedicates an “excessive joke” to climate change: “a person dead from heat meets someone dead from cold. He has a question, but no breath. The person who died from the cold might have an answer if his mouth wasn’t frozen over.” The number of people who died from heat or cold increases to a million and ends with the line “and so on, more and more and more and more and more.”

In a series of texts, Gerhard Rühm charges series of numbers narratively, so to speak, in order to use them to elegantly and succinctly represent temporal processes and proportions. A “curriculum vitae” is told from “entry” to “retirement” based on body size: “one centimeter/two centimeters/three centimeters” until adulthood is finally reached with “one hundred and seventy-five centimeters” on the fifth page – between this state and retirement There are then only four lines of shrinkage (to “one hundred and seventy centimeters”). A poem titled “feeling of time” is dedicated to the subjective perception of time. “A week ago I was still a child” is the first line, at the end it says: “Everything after the turn of the millennium was yesterday / I haven’t aged since this morning.” The “Zeitpoem”, on the other hand, extends into cosmic dimensions and the lecture lasts a whole year. The Big Bang occurred on January 1st at 12:00 a.m., the solar system was formed on September 9th, after the appearance of the first humans on December 31st at 10:30 p.m. the events condensed until the moon landing at 11:59 p.m.

Rühm’s numerical poetry is anarchic. Compared to conceptual artists like Dan Graham, whose series of numbers are always predictable and rule-based, Rühm regularly puts himself in the parade. In the number poem “101,” for example, attempts to reach the “goal” 101 by counting from 1 fail and have to be given up. Something similar happens in an “unfortunate counting poem”: “one/two/three/four/five/six/seven/eight/nine/toes/one missing.” The new volume unfolds the entire spectrum of Rühm’s art in a compressed form: Drawings that work with numbers are included, as well as objets trouvés – calculations and tables – and rhythmically precisely notated spoken pieces such as “the bad luck of being lucky”, an “operetta for a speaker” . The political lack of culture in his home country becomes brutally clear when Rühm quotes an unspeakable ÖVP politician in an “Austrian counting verse”: “not with one,/not with two,/not with three,/not with four,/not even with five, /only when ‘Waldheim has strangled six Jews with his own hands does there be a problem’.” With his new book, Gerhard Rühm proves that literature doesn’t have to be as boring as the book prize-winning novels or the poems by Grünbein, Wagner & Co once again brilliantly proven.

Gerhard Rühm: The folded clock. 100 number seals. Ritter-Verlag, 160 pages, br., 23 €.