Poetry-Show: Lyrikline Late Night

Ryan Van Winkle

Ryan Van Winkle © Sabina Theijs

Ryan van Winkle (b. 1977 in New Haven, USA) lives in Edinburgh, but originally comes from Connecticut. When he went to Scotland for the first time at the turn of the millennium, he lost his heart to the country and its people and stayed.

Ryan is a bundle of artistic energy. He writes poems, conquers stages with his performances, produces podcasts on art and poetry, interviews writers and artists for magazines and translates poems from the remotest regions of the world. He also works as a literature disseminator, developing offbeat formats for bringing literature to his audiences, as for instance cabaret or temporary room installations or through culinary dishes inspired by poems. For the initiative “Highlight Arts” he organises festivals and translation workshops, including to date in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq.

Ryan is a member of various artists’ collectives and works with musicians and filmmakers. He was the first Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library and, in addition to publishing two volumes of his own poetry, he has edited three anthologies of poems from Scotland and Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. These are available as free e-books. Ryan van Winkle was a guest at the 2014 poesiefestival berlin as one of the poets in the Scottish-German VERSschmuggel / reVERSible translation workshop.


Publications:

Tomorrow, We'll Live Here, Salt Publications 2010
The Good Dark, Penned in the Margins 2015

Awards:

Crashaw Prize 2009
Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of the Year Award 2015

Daniel Falb

Daniel Falb © Tineke de Lange

Daniel Falb (b. 1977) is a poet and philosopher. He grew up in Kassel and has lived in Berlin since 1998, where he studied Philosophy and gained his doctorate with a thesis on the Idea of Collectivity. His first book of poems, die räumung dieser parks was published by kookbooks in 2003, with more following with the same publisher.

As well as poetry, Falb works on questions of geophilosophy and poetics. He was a collaborator in the collective poetics project Helm aus Phlox (with Ann Cotten, Hendrik Jackson, Steffen Popp and Monika Rinck, Merve 2011) and appears in the anthology Anthropozän. Dichtung in der Gegenwartsgeologie (Verlagshaus Berlin 2015).

In his challenging poems Falb casts a universal look at life, in which we are all part of a generational chain. Time and again they centre on questions of palaeontology and the climate, with the addition of the element of conservation and archiving. He also develops these themes in his “Svalbard Paem”, written in 2018, about the Spitzbergen seed bank and the sound archive lyrikline. It was published by kookbooks in early 2019 along with three other longer poems in his new collection Orchidee und Technofossil.


Publications:
die räumung dieser parks, kookbooks 2003
bancor, kookbooks 2009
CEK, kookbooks 2015
Chicxulub Paem, Broken Dimanche Press 2017
Orchidee und Technofossil, kookbooks 2019

Awards:
Laureate at the Literaturpreis Prenzlauer Berg Berlin 2001
Poetry Debut Prize of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin 2005
Kurt Sigel-Lyrikpreis of the German PEN 2016

Cia Rinne

Cia Rinne © Aleks Sloka

Cia Rinne (b. 1973 in Gothenburg, Sweden) has Finnish and Swedish roots and grew up in Germany. She studied Philosophy in Frankfurt am Main, Helsinki and Athens and lives in Berlin. Her minimalist and experimental texts are written in several languages including English, German and French and reduce complex philosophical and linguistic questions down to tonal essences. They play with phonetic similarities and sense shifts between languages. Frequently, the starting point is an idea, a word or a quote that is given shape and then in performance develops a tone, a rhythm or even a melody. Cia Rinne’s works are influenced by Fluxus, Dada and the Moscow Conceptualists around Lev Rubinstein. They are playful and at the same time strict and are conceived for various media and formats.

Her visual works and sound installations are shown in galleries and museums including the Berlin Grimmuseum, the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn and in the Artist Book Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her books have been published in Finland, France, Denmark and Germany. Her documentary projects in collaboration with the Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen include a book about the Roma of various countries. With the musician Sebastian Eskildsen she has developed the sound installations sounds for soloists (2012) and leçon du mot [le son du mot] (2018).


Publications (selection):
l’usage du mot / notes for soloists / zaroum, kookbooks Berlin 2017

Skal vi blinde os selv og forlade Theben, Forlaget Virkelig, Copenhagen 2017

sentences, Forlaget Gestus, Copenhagen 2019

i am very miserable about sentences, NO Press, Banff 2019

Awards:

2010 Bukdahls Bet-Award for Experimental Literature

Tom Van de Voorde

Tom Van de Voorde © Silvestar Vrljic

Sketches of contemporary landscapes feature in Vliesgevels filter, the 2008 debut collection of Flemish poet Tom Van de Voorde (b. 1974 in Ghent, Belgium). Microscopically fine snapshots and reflections on political and economic themes form the heart of his second collection Liefde en aarde (2013), which was nominated for the Herman De Coninck Prize for the Best Poetry Collection. His latest collection, Zwembad de verbeelding followed in 2017, and in 2016 a selection of his poems in Swedish translation appeared in Rámus förlag.

He translates American poets including Wallace Stevens, Michael Palmer and Ariana Reines as well as, in collaboration with Staša Pavlović, the Slovenian poets Katja Perat and Tomaž Šalamun and, with Shaalan Sharif, the poems of Ghassan Zaqtan into Dutch. Tom Van der Voorde has been Poet Laureate of the Versopolis Project, a European platform for emerging poets, sponsored by Creative Europe.

Since 2010 Tom Van de Voorde has been the curator of the literature programme at the BOZAR Centre of Fine Arts in Brussels. In this capacity he has developed an interdisciplinary series in which writers enter into dialogue with music and fine art. From 2005 to 2010 he worked for the Flemish Literature Fund was involved in the promotion of poetry, recording 46 Flemish poets for lyrikline during that period.


Publications:

Vliesgevels filter, poëziecentrum 2008

Liefde en aarde, poëziecentrum 2013

Zwembad de verbeelding, poëziecentrum 2017

Awards:

Poetry Award of East Flanders 2017

Marie Kaiser

Marie Kaiser © Ralf Schuster

Radio journalist Marie Kaiser (b. 1981 in Potsdam) studied Cultural Studies in Weimar and Lyon. Since 2008 she has been working for Radio Eins (RBB) where she has her own art column, “art aber fair” in the “Schönen Morgen” programme. For this she scours through the galleries, museums, back courtyards and streets of the region. On Sundays she and Thomas Bohm look at literature on Radio Eins. As a “literary agent”, she discusses in a charming and entertaining way what is currently happening in the world of literature and presents the best new titles.

In 2010 Marie Kaiser was awarded the Kurt Magnus Prize, given by the ARD to young radio journalists.

Maxi Pongratz

Maxi Pongratz © Helle Tage Fotografie

Maxi Pongratz commutes between Obergiesing and Oberammergau and is the accordionist, lyricist and songwriter of Kofelgschroa. From 2019 Kofelgschroa has gone into hiatus and Pongratz is taking his accordion on a solo tour. His first album is due for release by Trikont on 22 May.

At his parents’ insistence, Maxi Pongratz trained as a gardener, but as a teenager he swapped his rake for an accordion and in 2007 founded the band Kofelgschroa with the brothers Martin and Michael von Mücke and Matthias Meichelböck (the “Kofel” is the local mountain of Oberammergau). Their version of traditional (brass band) music caused a sensation (Auf-“schroa”) at home as they made a name for themselves even beyond Bavaria. The idiosyncratic accordion playing of Maxi Pongratz, his compositions and what he calls Dadaist and “Valentinesque” lyrics were a prominent feature of the band’s sound and stage presence from the very beginning. Pongratz‘s charmingly eccentric dialect pieces are deeply rooted in his Upper Bavarian homeland and yet represent inner liberation from social coercions and the darkness inherent in traditional costume societies.

Pongratz has released three albums with Kofelgschroa, all of them produced by Micha Acher (“The Notwist”). He appeared with the other Kofels in the documentary film frei.sein.wollen (by Barbara Weber) and can be heard on the soundtrack of Josef Bierbichler’s film Zwei Herren im Anzug (Two Men in Suits).


Publications:
Kofelgschroa, LP/CD, Trikont 2012
Zaun, LP/CD, Trikont 2014
Baaz, LP/CD, Trikont 2016

Maxi Pongratz Solo-Album, LP/CD, Trikont 2019
Awards (with Kofelgschroa):
Förderpreis Musik of the State Capital Munich 2013
Kulturpreis Bayern 2014