Event: Mai 2018
Sun
27/5/18
07:30 PM
2018 Berlin Poetry Lecture: Elke Erb “The poem is what it does”
Reading
The 2018 Berlin Poetry Lecture is being given by the poet Elke Erb (b. 1938 in Scherbach, Voreifel). She is one of the most influential contemporary poets and is held in the highest esteem by the younger generation of poets. Drawing on her diary entries from the past few years, she will be allowing us an insight into her daily writing practice. She tells of the attempt “to write the way one thinks to oneself” and explains how her language of the moment is set off by whatever happens to be caught in the “nets” of her senses. Steffen Popp has said of Elke Erb’s rich work that in it the “autonomy of language encounters the idiosyncrasy of the speaker”. Erb compares the process of writing itself with teasing out a subcutaneous living being that takes over control of the writing game. At the moment of writing down, associations crop up freely and flood the paper with a shower of sparks from the unconscious. For Erb, writing poetry is always a process of self-observation and self-commentary. Her poems are at the same time living observation and reflection on that observation.
Elke Erb, who celebrated her eightieth birthday this February, has consistently found new possibilities for expression, even in her more recent texts, such as the poems in Gänsesommer (Goose Summer) (Urs Engeler Editor 2005), in the 5 minute notations of Sonanz (Sonance) (Urs Engeler Editor 2007) or in approaches to Middle High German through translation. Her close observation of the fleeting moment makes her incomparable in German poetry.
To coincide with the lecture, The Poem Is What It Does is being published in German and English (translation by Shane Anderson) by Wallstein Verlag (€ 13.90).
Akademie der Künste
Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Entrance fee:
6/4 €
Tickets online