The Vocation of Poetry (Subway Line, 4) - Softcover

Grünbein, Durs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0979582997 ISBN 13: 9780979582998

Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers, Incorporated, 2021

Synopsis

This extraordinary book offers a dazzling personal poetics as well as a sustained engagement with the origins of poetry itself. In tracing an arc from the landfills and forests of an East German childhood to the ‘global air-space of poetry’, it takes in a breathtaking poetic itinerary from the Classics to the present day. Emerging from the heart of the European tradition, every page is packed with insight, wit and linguistic surprises, superbly rendered in Michael Eskin’s supple English. But more than that: this is a volume with a mission. In reckoning with the possibilities of poetry, it sets out to show us a better way of being in the world: ‘a guide to thinking and feeling with precision’. Written by one of the most exciting and thought-provoking writers of the moment, The Vocation of Poetry is essential reading for anyone interested in modern poetry or in modern life

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Vocation of Poetry

By Durs Grünbein, Michael Eskin

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Durs Grünbein
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9795829-9-8

Contents

The Puzzle Master, 
The Vocation of Poetry, 
1. Beyond the Avant-Gardes, 
2. Outline of a Personal Psycho-Poetics, 
3. On the Place Value of Words, 
Parenthesis for Optimists, 
About the Author, 
Selected Works by Durs Grünbein, 

CHAPTER 1

Beyond the Avant-Gardes

The age of literary manifestoes is over. Not only has the word as such gone out of fashion, but the provocation of a certain aesthetic egoism that accompanied it and that once drove the lone adventurer and the conspiring group to grand pronouncements on matters of art has also completely lost its edge. Out of favor with audiences (just like military service and bureaucracy) are the self-serving dictates of artists and literati, who have learned their lessons and retreated into the safety of their own territories. Their noisy battles for hegemony have given way to a professionally-run literary industry that marches to the beat of the day-to-day business of product marketing, book reviewing, and prize juries — a kind of perpetual Frankfurt Book Fair.

I mention Frankfurt because the place from which one who has been invited publicly to give account of himself speaks matters — especially when it's as painfully haunted by the horrors of history as this particular site. What bitter irony that I have been asked to present my views on poetry here, of all places: in the shadow of the former corporate headquarters of IG Farben. (A key player in the Third Reich, the chemical industry conglomerate IG Farben developed, among other things, the pesticide Zyklon B, which was used in the gas chambers. After World War II, the former corporate headquarters of IG Farben in Frankfurt am Main, the so-called Poelzig Building, housed, among others, the headquarters of U.S. European Command and the CIA in Germany. Acquired by Frankfurt University in 1996, it is now home to the departments of theology, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and modern languages. [Translator's note]) Can you imagine a poet like Paul Celan, a first-hand witness to the Shoah, in this situation? There's something perfidious about alerting a poet to his art's distance from reality, its essential futility, by summoning him to a crime scene of such magnitude. Architecture, in its brut materiality, throws into stark relief just how morally inconsequential his poetic flights are even before he has uttered a single word. Can reflecting on poetry be considered anything but sheer aestheticism when it occurs in the very halls where once documents were processed that contributed to the industrial murder of millions? Certainly, there's nothing new about the triumph of matter over life. But in this case, it is brought home to us with postcard-like simplicity. If atrocities like these were possible, then the accusation that poetry is useless and insignificant seems justified. Literature apparently takes place in a beautiful parallel universe that may or may not have an impact on the moral lives of some people while remaining powerless in the face of history's violent routines. In poetry, this powerlessness, which has been the hallmark of the arts in general, finds its loneliest, most articulate expression.

I thought it best to address the issue head-on rather than presenting yet another eloquent instance of memory's silences. How strange to think that this very university's legendary lecture hall number six — whose most renowned occupant, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, once in all seriousness asked whether writing poetry after Auschwitz was 'opportune'— is rumored to be slated for demolition, while a headquarters born of the darkest Orwellian nightmare has been elevated to alma-mater status! No conclusions can be drawn from this, I'm afraid; but anyone who cannot help noticing the irony of history here is already well on his way toward a poetics of sarcasm, which has set the tone for me since my earliest writing attempts.

* * *

To get back to my topic. No one writes poetic manifestoes anymore. The very genre of the normative, authoritative treatise on poetry is a thing of the past. Over the course of the last one hundred and fifty years, the ancient discipline of poetics, chafing under the conditions of modernity, had gradually been supplanted by the literary manifesto, its abbreviated, accelerated and, above all, lobbyist avatar: poetics as pamphlet and strategy brief. And now the literary manifesto, too, just like its venerable precursor, appears to have run its course and become obsolete. What created a stir once, turning all perception on its head, has entered the neutralizing annals of art history and can be viewed on display in anthologies and retrospectives. Symbolism, Expressionism, Imagism, Acmeism, Surrealism, and Lettrism (to name only a handful of literary movements) have ossified into magic words of yore — brand names of discontinued products that would surely go to the highest bidder at Christie's and Sotheby's if they were paintings or drawings. The hard core of classical modernity is dead. The last '-ism' gave out sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. Didn't the great scholar-critic Hugo Friedrich already observe in the 1950s that twentieth-century poetry had nothing essentially new to offer, "high-quality though some of its poets may be," as the loving connoisseur conceded? We cannot fail to be astonished time and again by this kind of verdict. Paul Celan's legacy alone suffices to reveal the crude ignorance of such generalizing. There have been and always will be high points in poetry, singular lyrical œuvres beyond the avant-gardes. Nonetheless, the critical dilemma articulated by Friedrich was never fully to be resolved: on the one hand, admiration for classical Modernists and their works coupled with unabated amazement at their shock value and formal revolutions, which have retained their freshness to this day; and, on the other hand, the reduction of even their most undeniably spectacular innovations to their shared debt to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, the three apostles of Modernism in European verse. How did this go together?

* * *

Certainly, anyone who began writing poetry in the second half of the twentieth century couldn't care less about such assessments, if only because literary evolution had made such obvious leaps in the meantime that there was simply no time left for questions of lineage. The Structure of Modern Poetry — Friedrich's bold account of the buccaneering role of Modernism in poetry — had no sooner been published than its threefold diagnosis of poetry's stagnation, traditionalism, and epigonism was blown away by an international upheaval in the arts. Under the pace-making influence of photography, auteur cinema, Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, multimedia, conceptual art, and contemporary criticism poetry changed beyond recognition. Its tone cooled to a level of sobriety and matter-of-factness that made the pathos of the New Objectivity cultivated by the Weimar Republic's metropolitan poets look Romantic at best.

The complete rhetorical disarmament advocated by war veterans like Günter Eich and Peter Huchel gave way to an emphasis on the communicative aspect of poetic language on the part of a new generation of poets such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Peter Rühmkorf in the West and Heiner Müller and Volker Braun in the East. Under the spell of the omnipresent Bertolt Brecht, metaphor turned into a function of poetic algebra. Once and for all poetry had been calibrated to the body's normal temperature. This trend swept across all of Europe — from Scandinavia to Sicily, from East to West — transgressing political boundaries and echoing a similarly sweeping international trend in architectural style marked by the predominant use of steel, glass, and concrete. The spirit of those years is emblematically captured in a line from Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetic self-portrait "Poet of Ashes," where it is repeated several times, almost like a mantra: "so that you don't read me the way one reads a poet." The bard of the industrial age was an avowed anti-Orpheus and didn't like being mistaken for a songbird, angel's tongue, or bel canto tenor. The technological revolution brought about by the electronic media made him aware of his work's use value. He joined the international team of "language engineers" (to use Stalin's term), subscribing to a purely technical use of poetic language stripped of any trace of sublimity. The well-wrought, intricate styles of Europe's international poetry elites were replaced by the average person's self-reflexive parlando: a chemically-cleansed idiom that made the murky reveries, the melancholy, and the arch aestheticism of the grandparents' generation look like relics from a distant past. Who would have now dared, in good conscience, to echo Baudelaire in calling poetry the antidote to the sin of banality? In hindsight, one could speak of an impoverishment of expression. At the time, however, this impoverishment was hailed as a democratic achievement, a substantial increase in reaction speed, political savvy, and intellectual vigilance. Poetry had broken into the world of current affairs and was suddenly open to virtually any subject, a repository for all social ills. It had become a daily fast-food item that helped to digest and metabolize banality into permanence. Once a noble pleasure of the soul, born of the desire to pique, shine, and provoke, poetry now stooped to the level of whatever came its way. Therein lay its new hardiness and perhaps also its greatest shortcoming. If there was anything metaphysical left in poetry at all, it would soon be systematically wiped out in the verbal experiments of the concrete poets. Poetry as testimony to a person's singular existence was sacrificed on the altar of linguistic know-how and the clever language game. The sway of poetry as "supreme fiction" (in Wallace Stevens' and Stefan George's senses) was forever broken, and nothing stood in the way of its becoming an inconsequential social distraction for dilettantes. Since then, it would have been asking too much for a person to change his life only because certain passages in a work of literature may have penetrated his soul. Literature again became a most beautiful pastime with poetry as a quaint sidekick. Hardly anyone would have now underwritten T. S. Eliot's dictum — the sum total of a bold poet's life scarred by crisis and catastrophe: "The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime."

CHAPTER 2

Outline of a Personal Psycho-Poetics

For me it all started with a noise — a not at all harmless noise — more of an acoustic irritation. The strange thing about it was its suddenness and the rift it left in my overall perception. In those days, I used to roam the fields and woods on the northern outskirts of Dresden, where my parents and I had moved into affordable housing. Throughout my school years and beyond, Hellerau — a model suburban picket-fence community since long before World War II — was the place from which I would strike out, alone or with friends, to explore my small world. Immediately behind Hellerau's low, picturesque row houses with their prim gardens, there began a rugged, artificial wilderness made up of landfills, sand dunes, and fir groves — a stretch of hill country largely used for military exercises, such as extensive maneuvers with tanks and other machinery; that's why the locals referred to the forest bordering on Hellerau as the 'Russians' copse'. We used to spend whole afternoons there, oblivious to the past glory of the crumbling and widely-mourned baroque city down in the valley. Then, one day, as I was wandering though those desolate fields, a pigeon darted up out of nowhere so close to me that I literally felt its wings flapping in my face. I can still remember the moment in all its vividness, trivial though it may seem. It set something in motion that hasn't stopped working to this day and became a template for many a future (and much more consequential) moment of epiphany. For that's what it was, this brief, unexpected encounter that had illuminated my entire being in a flash: an epiphany. The poem inspired by it was soon forgotten and disappeared in one of my many folders, until I rediscovered it in my early twenties — surprised and almost saddened by its lost simplicity — when I decided to write for a living. It began with a sense of bewilderment, a subtle confusion of the soul, and ended with a mild elevation stripped of all rhetoric and completely unconscious of itself and its hidden symbolism:

Again, it seems, anything's possible.
I'm rubbing my coarse, waxen hands.
High, as of old, looms the sky,
Over all-around cordoned-off lands.

The wings of the pigeons are rattling —
Like those of an aircraft, I say.
In cornfields my childhood is hiding,
A maze of forbidden terrain.

"At Field's Edge" was the title I gave it later — poor thing, initially it didn't even have a name — in the Appendix to a collection of mine under the rather self-deprecating category 'Early Poems'. I suppose I wanted to play down the initiation experience it was based on in the name of sober professionalism. Today I believe that with these eight indigent lines I had gained access to a hoary secret society. Without seeking official permission and empty-handed, I had entered an invisible institution, the global airspace of poetry — it was that simple. Besides, who could those permission-granting officials possibly have been? There was no more Parnassus, nor, far and wide, a brotherhood or bohème. I heard of a poetry scene for the first time when I enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin. That the former East-Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg with its run-down buildings would later become my very own Montparnasse, my drab Salon des Indépendants, populated by similarly idealistic stragglers as I, was unplanned. The muses, I soon realized, while taking courses at the local adult education center, were nothing but a worn-out Greek allegory. This line had long been disconnected; you might as well try reading your poems to the ladies at the municipal registry, or the tellers at the post office. No, no, there was no formal accreditation process. You had to begin from scratch, cut off from both the classical and the modern traditions, in the vacuum of a society that tolerated literature only as a mouthpiece for ideology. Even if you couldn't see yourself that way: You were the young barbarian who undertook to carry the burden of a discarded culture on his frail shoulders in defiance of all evolutionary logic.

You inserted a blank sheet of paper into the typewriter, hit the keys, and read what you deemed original and worthy of public display to a small circle of like-minded fellow travelers. If the thing was well received you knew that you belonged and that you were virtually made as an author, songwriter, poet, or underground publicist. Samizdat was a word I heard for the first time in a radio broadcast on Deutschlandfunk. This Russian term perfectly captured what we, in East Berlin, had been doing all along: running a tunnel-like network of publishing venues under the radar of the state-controlled official presses.

Petitions, official requests of any kind have never been my forte, and I have rarely had to write a job letter. This once, however, everything depended on being heard. Amidst the like-minded, you developed a keen sense of what makes a poem. Here you could test whether the magic trick of making your words levitate worked, or whether they would crash immediately after take-off. I have chosen "At Field's Edge" today — this caricature of a nature poem — because I think that it poignantly documents, in its own callow way, the mystical initiation experience I just described. It wasn't much, and that's why it was subsequently discarded. Yet for all its naïveté, it already contained a motif that could be tracked. Surely there was more to the rattling in the second stanza than meets the eye, keeping in mind that whatever else poetry may be, it is also a craft, which cannot do without some rattling at the very least, and that poems come in all sorts of awkward shapes without being any less beautiful or true for all that.

Arthur Rimbaud was the poet who single-handedly set the wild shenanigans of Modernism in motion by maliciously assaulting French verse and charging it with his sang-froid. Many a young poet has since followed him in taking up poetry cold, skipping all preliminaries, in the manner of those who fall into painting without formal training. If it hadn't been for Rimbaud, I would have probably never had the courage to try my hand at poetry: "Verse was a special illness of the ear," W. H. Auden wrote in 1938 in his sonnet on Rimbaud; "Integrity was not enough," he continued, "that seemed / The hell of childhood: he must try again."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Vocation of Poetry by Durs Grünbein, Michael Eskin. Copyright © 2009 Durs Grünbein. Excerpted by permission of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers, Incorporated
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0979582997
• ISBN 13: 9780979582998
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 102