19th poesiefestival berlin: Weltklang – Night of Poetry 2018

21.03.2018

Poems from all over the world – ‘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.

With Charles Bernstein USA | Robert Forster AUS | Maryam Hooleh IRN | Jorge Kanese PRY | Ketty Nivyabandi BDI | Kerstin Preiwuß DEU | Yoko Tawada JPN/DEU | Joachim Heintz DEU composer | Søren Ulrik Thomsen DNK | Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki POL | host: Insa Wilke DEU

Save the date!
Weltklang – Night of Poetry as part of the 19th poesiefestival berlin
Friday, 27 May 2018, 7 pm
Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin


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 which deconstructs itself.

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”.

Maryam Hooleh (b. 1978 in Teheran) left Iran, illegally and on foot, when she was 17. 23 days later she arrived in Athens. Today she lives in Sweden and is one of the most important Iranian exile poets. Hooleh’s poetry celebrates a punky feminist Surrealism. Her poems feature civil societies posing headless in uniform for black-and-white photos and balloons as small as the 21st Century.

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.

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 was 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.

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (b. 1962 in Wólka Krowicka near Lubaczów) is a poète maudit par excellence. He grew up on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and his poems poach linguistically on the margins, telling of his mother’s schizophrenia and the death of his friend, of the mouths of rent boys and of the Lublin brothels.

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is supported by kind assistance from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Royal Danish Embassy, Berlin, the Embassy of Paraguay in Berlin, the Berlin Polish Institute, the Swedish Embassy, the Embassy of Japan and The Mandala Hotel.

Press photos for download: www.haus-fuer-poesie.org/de/presse

Accreditation at: presse@haus-fuer-poesie.org
Please state your name, medium and contact address.

For enquiries and information:
Haus für Poesie
Mira Lina Simon
Press & Publicity
Tel: 030. 48 52 45 24
E-Mail: presse@haus-fuer-poesie.org

The 19th poesiefestival berlin is a project by the Haus für Poesie in co-operation with the Academy of Arts and acknowledges the kind support of the Capital Cultural Fund and Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin, and is presented by kulturradio vom rbb, tip Berlin, taz, BÜCHERmagazin and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.