Come out, you air fish! Dark clouds over the big city, in this case Frankfurt am Main.
Photo: dpa
A few weeks ago, Engeler Verlag, based in Berlin and Schupfart, Switzerland, announced the publication of two new volumes of poetry in the “roughbooks” series: No. 64 by Stefan Döring with the title “WENN WELT” and No. 65 by Brigitte Struzyk called “counterweight lifting mechanism”. The simultaneous publication of poetry from the Prenzlauer-Berg connection may be unintentional, but there are circumstances that could indicate that this is not a coincidence.
On the one hand, texts by Stefan Döring and Brigitte Struzyk were already printed in the same issues of magazines such as “Herzattacke” or “Abwärts!”, and on the other hand, both of them have birthdays in April: one celebrated his 70th, which was the reason for the publication on the The publisher’s website is named; the other, from Thuringia, is now 78 years old. And thirdly, both of them lost a familiar person in quick succession. In the case of Stefan Döring, it was Bert Papenfuß, who died in Berlin at the end of August 2023 after a short, serious illness; Brigitte Struzyk is Elke Erb, who completed a full life in January at the age of almost 86. A memorial matinee was dedicated to both Erb and Papenfuß at the sold-out Berliner Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Nevertheless: Of the two recently published “roughbooks,” each one stands on its own.
The “roughbook 065” by Brigitte Struzyk, edited by Christian Filips, begins, in keeping with the nature of the series, with a poem on the front cover: “Querfeldein (…) about a shoe by Hans Sachs and immortality in view,” and it continues “over hill and dale”, without any hassle, right into the middle of the stylish word field of herbs and beets, butterbur and moss, broken glass, ash, morning glass, gutters, housing complex and water treatment plant, into “what trickles out of the language” when “the words fly (…) to the meaning”. And that’s exactly what they do in these 65 texts, aphorisms, organic additions – but none of them should be confused with nature poems!
The nature around which the lines revolve here is that of exploring things and events that are not placed next to or above one another in an object-like manner, but whose interconnectedness is expressed in vital connections. Struzyk’s poetry is concrete, sensual, saturated with experience and somehow always a more or less silent, yet clearly articulated rebellion against being dominated – be it through “the happy misfortune”, through passports and passwords or through the “tyrants (…) poverty, inequality, fainting.” Because “poetry is,” as she once found out together with Elke Erb, “everything that cannot be managed.” Furthermore, “language is the immediate reality of thought,” or vice versa, better yet brought together… see “Counterweight lifting mechanism «, p. 27!
This means that the baton has been handed over to Stefan Döring – at eye level, so to speak. Regarding his “roughbook 064”, “WENN WELT”, it can be said that this four-part poetry collection consists in the second section of the “Three Etudes” with 33 verses each, which were already published in 2009 as “Distillery 33” in the “Thirty plus” series. Published by Alexander Krohn, but have been out of print for a while and are now finally, on the advice of Thomas Kapielski, available again “here in a slightly modified version”. If you open the book in the middle, you will see the 3rd etude “could we smoke the air”, which was written by Döring for the funeral of Bert Papenfuß in October 2023 in the chapel of the Georgen-Parochial I cemetery, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , was presented.
It should also be said that the ladder theme of the 2nd etude, “I will buy myself a ladder,” appears to be based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sentence 6.54 in the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”: “(one) must (…) throw away the ladder after (one) climbed up on it.” With a slight transformation of the well-known final sentence from the same work, one arrives at one of the obvious original motifs of Stefan Döring’s poetry: “What you can’t talk about, you have to write about!”
A sequence of four poems, the first of which is called “ABOUT WAKING AND SLEEPING” with a reference to a work by Michel Foucault, points out that the strict form and system of verbal reflections, reversals, reflected reflections in verse structure do not depict reality poetically, but create poetic reality. The cycle that concludes the book, “MONATES YEARS,” is a “commissioned text” from the author’s partner and contains what are probably the most recent of his poems, which also have a new sound. In “JULI TON” it sounds like this: “The clouds stand still/ everything is prepared/ we are air fish/ never in our element/ we glide along in disbelief.”
That’s roughly what happened to Brigitte Struzyk when she wrote her poem “Avoid the queue in front of the test center”: “There on the bank they lie/ In each other’s arms, the opposite bank/ Dripping with people, they drink/ And look: the pure Adventure/ (…)/ Roll into the gutter/ To resurrect!”
Stefan Döring: IF WORLD. Roughbooks/Engeler, 90 pages, br., 12 €.
Brigitte Struzyk: Counterweight hoist. Ed. Christian Filips, Roughbooks/Engeler, 72 pages, br., 12 €.