Haus für Poesie

Lection & Talk

With Charles Bernstein USA| Robert Forster AUS | Jorge Kanese PRY | Katalin Ladik HUN | Ketty Nivyabandi BDI | Kerstin Preiwuß DEU | Yoko Tawada JPN/DEU feat. Joachim Heintz DEU composer | Søren Ulrik Thomsen DNK

Host: Insa Wilke DEU literary critic

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is the polyphonic opening of the poesiefestival berlin. Poets from every part of the world read, sing and perform in their own native languages and show the wealth of contemporary poetry in all its diversity of content, approaches and styles. An anthology with German translations of the poems is being published exclusively for the reading.

Charles Bernstein (b. 1950 in New York) is leading The Attack of the Difficult Poems. This radical Modernist takes up arms in his inter-textual montages and polyvalent poems against the images he himself creates. The poems he will be reading include an anti-Trump poem in which he also deconstructs himself.

Robert Forster (b. 1957 in Brisbane) is the ‘Golden Boy’ of international Indie pop. With Grant McLennan he formed the groundbreaking band The Go-Betweens, and along with contemporaries like Aztec Camera and Orange Juice went on a quest for the perfect pop song Nick Cave has called him “the truest and strangest poet of his generation”.

Jorge Kanese (b. 1947 in Asunción, Paraguay) develops in his poems an anti-hegemonic transnational language which is a blend of Portuguese, Spanish and Guaraní. It is a language of self-defence created from the experience of suffering under dictatorship and subversively undermining all power discourses.

Katalin Ladik (b. 1942 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a Hungarian poet, sound artist and actress. In her homeland, she became as legendary as she was controversial with her feminist-shamanistic sound poems and nude performances. In her graphic scores and vocal compositions she breaks down language into its individual components. The amazingly rich frequency spectrum of her singing lecture helped her to the reputation of a "Yoko Ono of the Balkans".

Ketty Nivyabandi (b. 1978 in Uccle, Belgium) had to flee Burundi in 2015 where she had been living since the late 80s. As a poet and activist she had become too troublesome and the protests for human rights, especially the rights of women, that she had organised were too loud. Nivyabandi writes poems in French and English that bring the traditions of her homeland up to date with an awareness of form and strong imagery, and which she charges with political commitment.

The poems of Kerstin Preiwuß (b. 1980 in Lübz) are alive with eelpout, spitting cobras and whirlwinds.  A high tone predominates, into which colloquial language diffuses when “the mutinying word” breaks forth. Preiwuß will be reading unpublished poems in which a Blakean tiger wanders through the night and Lady Death counts her children.

Yoko Tawada (b. 1960 in Tokyo) has been living in Germany since 1982. She works deep in the hidden object game of language, writing in German and Japanese. She strikes sparks from everything, taking the world at its word and looking at it as though it were being looked at for the first time. “The space between two languages is not a gap, but the space where literature is actually written,” says Tawada.

Søren Ulrik Thomsen (b. 1956 in Kalundborg) is one of Denmark’s most popular poets and a master of small gestures. With apparently effortless casualness he makes everyday objects collide with theories – in a diction that merges laconic expression with pathos and humour. Love, dying, mourning and happiness are the great questions that light up Thomsen’s poems like spaceships on a dusty office desk.

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is made possible with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation, the Royal Danish Embassy Berlin, the Rhythmicalizer Research Group, the Swedish Embassy Berlin and The Mandala Hotel.

Location:
Akademie der Künste

Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin

Entrance fee:
13/8€

Tickets online