Kai Pohl: Guns against the chatter

These poems are not for tree huggers and flower sniffers. Anyone who likes to watch the tea brew in order to be one with the chamomile flavor of external time and then read their inner philosophical contemplation captured in words will probably not be happy with this lyric either. Duden diggers, for whom the good to very good text is characterized by remote vocabulary found with fingers bloody from leafing through the pages that no one uses or understands, can also save themselves the tenner that this volume costs. Everyone else is well advised, Kai Pohl’s “The Thing with the Sparrow. 10 poems & no haiku« to buy and read.

What’s the matter? People, politics, society, oppression, resistance, against war. Admittedly, this is formulated in an abstract way; But writing in a global way is anything but self-evident in German poetry, even in years of changing times, militarization, impoverishment, environmental destruction and the shift to the right. Awards from the academy and savings bank funds usually go to well-behaved fountain pens of power who hide in their emotional lives or in the German forest.

Kai Pohl is not one of these people. He is committed in the best sense of the word, a driving force of the literary counterpublic. Pohl has been editing the magazine “Abwärts” at the East Berlin publishing house Basisdruck for many years, he also publishes texts in all sorts of formats that don’t need an ISBN, but are available and sold in real places with real people, and writes poems tirelessly, even without a pat on the back from the state.

But anyone who fears aggressive alt-punk platitudes is completely wrong. Kai Pohl is not afraid of rhyme schemes without being formalistic. There are quotes from newspapers, music and literature; Foreign material of various kinds is cleverly arranged, not simply displayed. Montage, collage, cut-ups, modern means are at work. We work with ambiguities, harmony, jokes that at second glance are not real. Pohl constructs anagrams, makes puns – there is nothing static or monolithic about the texts, but rather they are small guns against the chatter of everyday life that has been muted: “There is no goal set for ingenuity./ The youth switches to Elektron’s shores/ and Old Europe has made a fool of himself. / A bucket of jam is enough to live on.” That’s what it says in the poem “Screenshot.”

The new booklet from the distinguished Saxony-Anhalt publisher Moloko Print includes, among other things, a “Rhapsody in rapeseed honey,” a long poem called “Bluthendl am Bachufer” and “Bread & Games.” A subtropical song.” The verses are directed against mental and material impoverishment, gentrification, i.e. sterilization of cities, and warmongering. The volume also includes a collage by the artist Joerg Broksch: Social criticism must not be ugly. The volume ends with “No Haiku,” which reads: “The only thing that happened here is the tomatoes.”

But the tone of the lyrics is not at all defeatist. In a cheerfully anarchic manner, the “Lolita Company” goes on a plundering spree that spans several pages; In the very precisely titled “Political Poem, Oct. 19, 23, FRG” it says: “Today I’m going on a trip/ without a steel helmet and values ​​vest/ to the border of criminal liability.” It’s worth being part of this trip be, because such lively, funny poems that don’t want to join in the self-destructive grin society are rarely found.

Kai Pohl: The thing with the sparrow. 10 poems & no haiku. With a collage by Joerg Broksch. Moloko Print, 36 p., br., 10 €.

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