Poetry: Compose ten lines against them

Poetry doesn’t have it easy. The narrow volumes from small publishers without a complete understanding let alone guarantee of entertainment are not the ideal beach reading. You have to be careful when you read poetry, take your time, and endure the resistance of the words. And in the fall, the idiosyncratic, original poet Oswald Egger will receive the Büchner Prize. Enough has been written about him – today we recommend three other publications of very different kinds from the last few months.

“The Night of the Hunger Putti” sounds like a horror B-movie from the glaring seventies, but it is now the third volume by Georg Leß, published by the renowned kookbooks publishing house, which is, by the way, very attractively designed as a kind of elegant chapbook . The poet is interested in the theme of horror films, which is not exactly common in verse art, but does not create fan fiction with line breaks, but rather creates peculiar poems that shift perception in a playful and precise way with complex syntax and thus poetize the absurd in everyday life contribute without romanticizing lyrically.

A high but never sedate tone, absurd physical observations, the morbid and the political come together, often with funny twists. In »Against The Ten Lines«, perhaps a subtle criticism of the pressure to measure and the urge to routine, it says at the end: »In the future I will be part, I will be the majority and take the majority, full to the brim / with donor organs that manage the abundance / through the Red Cross bonus system receive a cutting board.” These verses from the poem “Against the Autobiographical” sound more loving: “the day before yesterday, in the fall / two hailstones froze together and arrived in one piece.”

Dinçer Güçyeter’s Elif publishing house published “An Observatory in the Bathroom,” a volume by the Chilean poet Tomás Cohen. Three are currently available in Spanish, and Louisa Donnerberg has now presented a German translation that reads very well. Cohen studied painting – and also practices it – and he also learned musicology and Sanskrit. He is serious about poetry. His informants include Novalis and William Blake, a poem is dedicated to the composer Bela Bartók, and Beethoven’s 6th Symphony is quoted elsewhere.

In four chapters, which are a selection from decades of writing between Chile, New York, Tibet, Hamburg and Berlin, we get to know a poet who, in contrast to many contemporaries, addresses the major themes of love, death, birth and deep introspection . He allows language, poetry, and existence to be affected. That’s why there’s no chatter or furtive arguments in the poems, but rather you get the impression that gods of the moment move through the world, if your gaze allows it. Cohen’s poetry is formally strict, the rhythms are not bumpy. We are not dealing with massive monoliths, but rather fragile structures: “He rubbed his eyes / because it was difficult to see them / And when he opened them again / he never saw them again”. There are also tender poems about parenthood: On a playground in Hamburg there is “no one who pretends to be a finished person.” Cohen opens worldly eyes through language. When you get very close to things, “I open up worlds in the world. / What a paradise for”.

It feels like ninety percent of literary producers live in Berlin, but Franz Dobler and Fabian Lenthe live in Nuremberg, whose debut “Matchsticks” was published by XS Verlag – and reading the texts can actually take as long as it takes a match to burn. In academic terms, Lenthe’s poems could be called epigrammatic epiphanies. Everyday life is not the magical, confusing one we read about here. The violence of society presses against the windows. Nevertheless, someone looks and writes about it, talks about disappearing, but doesn’t do it, holds out in a hostile space: “Naked on the edge of the mattress / Ash and pain on the floor // Nine fifty / Expect the worst.” Clocks keep ticking in these poems.

These poems don’t need titles. Lenthe’s poetry is reminiscent of one of the few poets widely read outside of school: Charles Bukowski. It’s not quite as hard with him, but the short lines, where neither too many words nor too noble, extra-poetic ones are allowed to appear, are reminiscent of a time when poetry was still popular in America, even outside of the creative writing university seminars was written. “The rising of the sun / Is nothing more than an average performance // I split a tablet / In half // And watch her do it.” Small miracles if you just take your time.

Georg Leß: The Night of the Hunger Putti. kookbooks, 32 pages, br., 16 €.
Tomás Cohen: An observatory in the bathroom. Translated from Spanish by Louisa Donnerberg. Elif, 128 pages, hardcover, €20.
Fabian Lenthe: Matches. XS-Verlag, 96 pages, br., 18 €.