Text fabric ahoy: Oswald Egger, poet and professor
Photo: Katherine Hinsberg
Writing poetry is a hard job, because poetry means long work, short texts – and they are then read out very quickly and printed in thin volumes that very few people buy and even fewer know. No, the popular “page turner” for vacation doesn’t come about that way. On the other hand, famous authors like Robert Gernhardt, Peter Hacks or Jörg Fauser are more likely to write poetry than prose (even if they wrote other things). None of them received the Büchner Prize, the most prestigious German literary prize.
And yet the Büchner Prize regularly goes to poets. Oswald Egger, born in Meran, South Tyrol, in 1961, will get it in November, as the German Academy for Language and Poetry has now announced. He is the fifth poet in ten years to receive it. He has received awards several times. But because you can’t make a living from that, he has been a professor of language and design at the Kiel University of Art since 2011 and lives in Vienna and in the Hombroich rocket station near Neuss. NATO missiles used to be stored there and yes, you can live there, no joke.
Egger is primarily concerned with experiencing nature, for which he has developed an artistic mix of poetry, prose and his own drawings. In “Val di Non” in 2017, he described a valley in Trentino complete with alders, grasses, worms; in “Either I only dreamed the trip on the Mississippi, or I’m dreaming now” 2021 various river finds. The jury praised his “textual fabrics,” which continue “the great tradition of a physiognomy of natural forms,” “from the stones to the clouds.” The motto of “Val di Non” at the beginning is: “I sing, therefore I am, I sing.” That is of course beautifully written, or rather: sung.
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