Haus für Poesie

Paulus Böhmer (born 1936 Berlin) is the great surmounter of contemporary German poetry, in his linguistic force, a simultaneously declamatory and tender poet. His texts, a “life-affirming vanitas” (FAZ) with ragged edges on both sides around the thought-through axis, converge into a single, forceful long poem. Each thread, pulled from the fabric at random spots, runs through the whole. Regardless of whether the book happens to be called “Kaddish” or “Am Meer. An Land. Bei mir”, his work is a single canto that begins somewhere and ends nowhere, tracing an arc through the whole creation. Everywhere there is “air, desire and haywarmth” and the “primordial dust of the milky way”.

Publications (selection)

Fuchsleuchten, Schöffling 2004
Kaddish I – X, Schöffling 2006
Kaddish XI - XXI, Schöffling 2007
21 Briefe an Froilleins, Verlag Peter Engstler 2008
Am Meer. An Land. Bei mir, Verlag Peter Engstler 2010

He is the “megastar of the megacities”, as The Guardian wrote, a “Brazilian hip-hop superstar” (Radio Eins): the rapper, composer and poet of the metropolis, Criolo from São Paulo.

With his Album “Nó na Orelha” (Knot in the Ear), originally released online as a free download, an astounding career began: the MC from the favelas of the city of millions, with his socially critical, political lyrics, has been equally celebrated by public and critics alike. He plays in the stadiums of the country, tours through Latin America and Europe, appeared at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark and in Central Park in New York. Various concerts were released as DVDs and downloads. Multiple collaborations with the music greats of Brazil are to follow.

Criolo’s parents came to São Paulo from the poor north of the country, landing on the city’s outskirts, in the favela das Imbuias. Criolo worked in his youth in a supermarket, sold clothes in the doorways of apartment blocks. Later he gave art classes for school children, and worked for seven years as a street-worker with at-risk youth.

Today Criolo is known right throughout Brazilian society. When he raps about poverty, about police violence, drug abuse, everyday racism and the injustice of a booming economy out of the reach of many, people from every stratum of society listen in.

At the poesiefestival berlin 2014, Criolo will appear for just the second time in Germany, making two appearances, with exclusive, reduced sets, which will concentrate completely on his lyrics.

 

Discography

Albums:

Ainda Há Tempo (2006)

Nó Na Orelha (2011)

Singles:

Ainda Há Tempo (2006)

Subirusdoistiozin (2010)

Duas De Cinco (2013)

DVDs:

Criolo Doido Live in SP (2010)

Criolo & Emicida ao Vivo (2013)

Nó Na Orelha ao Vivo no Circo Voador (2013)

Criolo & Emicida ao Vivo (2013)

Nó Na Orelha ao Vivo no Circo Voador (2013)

Mariusz Grzebalski (born1969, Łódź, Poland), studied philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and has worked as a postman, museum attendant, court stenographer, and as head of an electrical goods wholesaler. In the 1990s he edited the magazine “Nowy Nurt” (New Current) and “Już Jest Jutro” (It is Already Tomorrow). He currently works with the publishing house of the Cultural Centre in Poznań, as well as with the “Dodatek LITERAcki” publications series, as part of the Gdynia Literary Prize.

Grzebalski made his debut in 1994 with the book “Negatyw” (Negative), which received the Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna Prize for the best debut of the year. His poems are unpretentious and exciting at the same time. Like small stories, they come from a world which almost no one else seems to see. Grzebalski’s poems, writes Alfred Kolleritsch, “puff and pant and are at the same time joyous. They fight in the mud, breathe the stink of an abattoir, rummage in the barbarity of death. Full of strength, they run riot in an inarticulate world.”

Up till now, Grzebalski has published seven books of poetry, a collected poems, and a book of short stories. Among other awards, he received a Hubert Burda Scholarship in 2001, and has been translated into English, Czech, Slovenian and German. Grzebalski lives in Dąbrówka, near Poznań.

Publications

Negatyw (Negative)
Ulica gnostycka (Gnostic Street), Obserwator 1997
Drugie dotknięcie (Second Touch), Biuro Literackie 2001
Słynne i świetne (Famous and Fabulous), Biuro Literackie 2004
Człowiek, który biegnie przez las (The person who runs through the forest – Stories), W.A.B. 2006
Pocałunek na wstecznym (Kiss in Reverse), Biuro Literackie 2007
Niepiosenki (Not-songs), Biuro Literackie 2009
Kronika zakłóceń (Chronicle of Disturbance – collected poems 1994-2010), Biuro Literackie 2010
W innych okolicznościach (Under Other Circumstances), Wydawnictwo EMG 2013

Les Murray (born 1938 Nabiac, New South Wales/Australia) belongs among a group of poets like Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. He is a master of the emphatic celebration of nature, his work is dedicated to the “repoeticising of the world” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). An inexhaustible reserve of poetic resources enables Murray to follow bats in their “tonal hunting zone above highest C”. In this way, even the most fleeting of things become linguistic events in his texts: be it a beanstalk in the afternoon slants, the crop of a cattle egret, or an emerald dove flown mistakenly into the back room of a house. In one of his most stirring and famous poems, Murray describes a killing day from the perspective of a herd of cattle. His work possesses an abundance of that mysterious quality, which Murray himself describes as “sprawl”: awkward in spirit, always with “one boot upon the rail of possibility”.

Publications (selection)

Freddy Neptune, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999
Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press, 2002
New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003
Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing, 2011
Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

The poet Alice Notley (born 1945 Bisbee, Arizona/USA) was for a long time an insider’s tip of the avant-garde, admired and praised primarily by other poets: a poets’ poet. She was part of the so-called New York School, from which such important poets as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan emerged. Her work is marked by its transgression of boundaries in every direction. Every new book – by now more than 30 – is a radical contribution to the expansion of the poetic form today, and what it is capable of achieving. For Notley, poetry is not simply an instrument that serves the representation of experience. For her, poetry becomes an instrument of this experience itself. Her texts create large oscillation frequencies through resonances from high and popular culture: influences span from the Divine Comedy (“The Descent of Alette”) through the black series (“Disobedience”) up to country and folk music (“In the Pines”).

 

Publications (selected)

The Descent of Alette, Penguin 1996
Mysteries of Small Houses, Penguin 1998
Disobedience, Penguin 2001
Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005. Wesleyan University Press 2008
In the Pines, Penguin 2007
Culture of One, Penguin 2011
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Wesleyan University Press 2011

The poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen (born 1970, Copenhagen) studied Musicology and Philosophy, and from 1997 to 1999 attended the renowned Danish Authors’ School. The tension between music and poetry is present in all of her work, not just in the chamber operas “Miki Alone” (2002), Kunsten at vælge“ (The Art of Choosing, 2005) and “Alverden god Nat“ (Good Night to the World, 2014), or the cabaret concert “Himmel-Havn“ (Heaven-Harbour, 2007).

Even when Olsen’s poems appear in print, they are conceived fundamentally musically – sonically as well as graphically – in her open, precise, and often plurivocal form. Olsen’s texts transgress genres, open up a linguistic landscape between prose, verse and sound, that extracts its beauty out of the very fragility of those who speak within it. Olsen is interested at every level in the performative elements of poetry, the voice of her poems, their corporality. A reading from Ursula Andkjær Olsen is always more than a reading.

Since her debut in the year 2000 Olsen has published eight books of poetry, the majority with the influential Gyldendal publishing house, including an anthology of selected poems, but also collaborations with visual artists and a play. Together with her sister Julie Andkjær she also created the poetry app “Jeg pynter mig” (I’m getting dressed up).

Alongside numerous other awards, Olsen received for her work the Nordic Council’s Music Prize (2008), the Otto Gelsted Prize from the Danish Academy (2010), and the Montanas Literary Prize (2012).

Publications (selected)

Lulus sange og taler (Lulu’s songs and Speeches), Arena og Lindhardt & Ringhof 2000
Syndfloder (The Floods), Basilisk 2002
Atlas over huller i verden (Atlas of earthly holes), Gyldendal 2003
Ægteskabet mellem vejen og udvejen (The Marriage between way and way out), Gyldendal 2005
Skønheden hænger på træerne (Beauty grows on trees), Gyldendal 2006
Havet er en scene (The Ocean is a Stage), Gyldendal 2008
Have og helvede (Garden and Hell), Gyldendal 2010
SAMLET, (COLLECTED), Gyldendal 2011
Det 3. årtusindes hjerte (3^rd millennium heart), Gyldendal 2012
den bedste af alle verdener (the best of all worlds – play), Korridor 2014

Ko Un (born 1933, Korea) is “a demon-driven Bodhisattva of Korean poetry, as Allen Ginsberg wrote, “exuberant, abundant, obsessed with poetic creation”.

Ko Un masters the fine art of adorning small, utterly concrete images with possible meanings that go well beyond the ‘said’, and nevertheless take it seriously. His poetry is open and precise, personal and timeless, exploring poetics and politics at the same time. It balances between classical forms and unpretentious everyday speech. In it, the scenic and the aphoristic, the contemporary and the traditional, culture and nature, all interlock.

Ko Un’s life is marked by biographical breaks, all closely related to recent Korean history. In the war against Japan, Ko Un was conscripted into the Korean People’s Army. His traumatic experiences in the war led to a suicide attempt. He entered a Buddhist monastery, where he quickly rose from a mendicant monk to a member of the central committee of the National Association of Buddhist Monks, and in 1957 he founded a newspaper in which his first poems appeared. In 1962 however, he decided to give up his monk’s life and founded a non-profit school for socially disadvantaged children.

In the mid-60s however, a phase full of self-doubt began, which culminated in a second suicide attempt, and which only came to an end in 1973, as Ko Un took on a leading role in the Korean Democracy Movement. He fell under the spotlight of the Secret Service, was taken into custody, tortured, prosecuted for high treason and in 1980 was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. He was only set free after two years because of a general amnesty, and has lived since then in South Korea.

He has been awarded numerous international prizes and honours and is today one of the most important poets in Asia. Ko has published over 130 books: poetry anthologies, novels, essays, translations and criticism. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Bibliography (Selected)

Ten Thousand Lives, Green Integer 2005
The Three Way Tavern, UC Press 2006
Flowers of a Moment: 185 brief poems, BOA Editions, 2006
Abiding Places, Korea North & South, Tupelo 2006
Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1961-2001, Green Integer 2009
Himalaya Poems, Green Integer 2010

Awards (Selected)

Korean Literature Prize, 1974
Manhae Literary Prize, 1989
Joongang Literary Prize, 1991
Daesan Literary Prize, 1994
Manhae Poetry Prize, 1998
Buddhist Literature Prize, 1999
Danjae Prize, 2004
Cikada Prize, 2006
Cikada Prize 2006
Griffi Poetry Prize 2008

Anja Utler (born 1973 Schwandorf) is an exceptional talent of the younger German-speaking poetry scene. Her poems – at the heart of which is the shifting relation between body and voice, breath and memory – draw their tension from contradictions: they are sparing and sensuous, considered and playful. The poet Thomas Kling spoke of “calm images which lend themselves out to body and nature”. Utler’s texts come into being in proximity to music, they are poetic braces, in which some passages are set parallel to one another; a virtuous dialogue in the type area, which finds its correspondence in a plurivocal performance. Writing is, for Utler, always a shaking of the world, which is made visible and audible as a deformation on the body of language. In her poem “jana, vermacht” (jana, bequeathed), which is about repressed memories, she illustrates this through a process of silencing, in which she erases the initial vowels. It is a staging of the “words up to the limits of the sayable. Speech stumbles and breaks – but still Utler creates a completely new world, a world made of language” (Stuttgarter Zeitung).

Publications (selected)

münden – entzüngeln, Edition Korrespondenzen 2004
brinnen, Edition Korrespondenzen 2006
jana, vermacht, Edition Korrespondenzen 2009
ausgeübt. Eine Kurskorrektur, Edition Korrespondenzen 2011

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (born 1966, Johannesburg, South Africa), daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, was adopted into a white family in Apartheid South Africa, a fact she first learnt at the age of 20.

“I felt as if the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain”, she says in an interview. But also: “as a mixed race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free”.

Sharpened through this paradoxical biography, her work raises questions of ethnic heritage, of exclusion and identity, in the most urgent and personal way. Her poems are enraged and melancholic, but also funny, and are often ironically self-reflexive in their social criticism: “Freedom Songs” that are easy neither on themselves nor the reader.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers studied journalism in Grahamstown, and in the late 90s studied acting in Paris. She spent some time in Los Angeles before returning to Johannesburg, where she did street theatre and completed a screenplay. Since then she has written numerous scripts for TV series, and in 2005 also wrote a play, “Where the Children Live”.

In 2006 her first book of poetry was published, “Taller than Buildings”, and in 2010 she followed up with “The Everyday Wife”. In 2009 she was Writer in Residence at the Villa Vollezele in Belgium, and in 2011, along with other awards, received the South African Literary Award.

 

Publications

Taller Than Buildings, Centre for the Book 2006
The Everyday Wife, Modjaji Books 2010