Anthologist-Preface: Daniel Rothenbühler
Translator: Sofia Fotiou
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Bettina Wohlfender, Sascha Garzetti, Meret Gut, Ariane von Graffenried, Meral Kureyshi, Simone Lappert, Eva Maria Leuenberger, Martin Bieri, Patrick Savolainen, Eva Seck, Anja Nora Schulthess, Jürg Halter.
Find the book here
“Poetry is the most innovative genre of literary texts”1: thus wrote the Swiss literature theorist Mario Andreotti in 2013, in an article titled “Poetry in search of new forms”. Poetry must prove again and again to each new generation of poets that it remains the most innovative genre; and this it achieves by “being more akin to mental disturbances and judgments”2 compared to novels or theatrical plays.
If this fails to occur, poetry will remain a marginal phenomenon. This was repeatedly the case with the poetry of German-speaking Switzerland during the 20th century. It was very often confined to this position, despite the fact that its intent was to bear witness to the “Swiss spirit […] beyond all other changes in modern history”3, as remarked in the late ‘60’s by the pioneering literature theorist Emil Staiger.
This changed at the onset of the 21st century with the appearance of Armin Senser (Große Erwachen (The Great Awakening), publ. by Hanser, 1999) and Raphael Urweider (Lichter in Menlo Park (Lights in Menlo Park), publ. by Du Mort, 2000). Their poetry encouraged readers to become aware of the intrusions brought by globalization and digitization that were emergent at the time. Their books achieved to bring attention to Swiss poetry not only for Swiss readers, but also for audiences abroad.
The older poets gathered in this anthology began their attempts at poetry during that period. Most of them began publishing their poetry in books only within the second decade of this century, with the exception of Jürg Halter, whose debut and widely acclaimed book “Ich habe die welt berührt” (I have touched the world) was published in 2005. The very title of his book refers to what makes Senser’s and Urweider’s German-speaking Swiss poetry stand out: it is addressed to what makes the world move beyond all national borders.
In this book, Arianne von Graffenried is the one who chiefly represents this turn towards the world. Her poems draw their innovative inspiration from the spoken narrative and the oral language of the author’s performances, which are usually combined with music. The poet envisions faraway places and her words resonate with the language of dialects. The same applies for her own place of origin, due to the fact that she employs words and phrases of bärndütch (the German dialect of Bern) scattered throughout her works. The global and the local become entangled through rapports and alliterations, thus forming an integral and inseparable sonorous whole.
If it maintains this global outlook, contemporary poetry is capable of returning to the use of dialects without being associated with a provincial mentality. The sole poem in this anthology that is written in a dialect belongs to Simon Lappert. In “Gfroreni Beeri” (Frozen Berries), the Swiss-German dialect, through wordplays with the German language, creates a confusion that is both external and internal, allowing the cherry of February to give the lyrical “I” a slight hope that it can be once again rediscovered.
Eva Seck’s “Grenfell Tower”, although locked in the confusion of moral and political contradictions, retains a lyrical “we”. It examines the great fire of London, which killed at least 79 people in June 2017, mostly immigrant men and women with their children “on the flat screen” and afterwards ends in “silence / when we hear their steps / outside the front door of our house”. The verses imply that we, too, also fall silent when we hear the steps of immigrants reaching our countries.
Practically all poets gathered in this anthology “touch” the world by speaking about their flaws and their downturn. Thus, Martin Bieri, in the poetry book “Europa, Tektonik des Kapitals” (Europe, Tectonics of Capitals), draws inspiration from remote places that lead the poetic language to the edge of the Earth, to cities without borders, leaving him to “wait and remain in degeneration”.
The verses of Jürg Halter in “Erdwissenschaften” (Earth Sciences) seem to guide poets born after him:
Everything sinks
to Earth’s center and
back to millions of
years and…
This motion of submergence may also be imaginative and atmospheric, as in the case of Sascha Garzetti, where a child watches pebbles sink below the water and stares down:
As inside a well
where a herd of
white cows grazes,
he sees for himself
how they sink down,
when he lets fall
a pebble
then another one.
In many poems in this anthology, people sinking / to Earth’s center appear as things and objects, as bodies confined to pure matter, as per term of Physics, which defines a body as a “limited quantity of a particular substance”4. In Meret Gut, “the wind blows over our bones / sounding like flutes”. In the poem “Schlaflos” (Sleepless), Simon Lappert talks about the “growing moss / of thoughts”, declaring that “there is something ragged and full of knots / like elbows bending towards the inside and through neuroses / growing internally, like hands kneading towards the inside”. Lastly, with Anja Nora Schulthess, the readers dream that they are “the sea / the salt / the sand”.
Bettine Wolhfender wonders whether the I remains an object of memory when it transforms into a leaf – similar to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, she doesn’t dismiss the possibility for “memory to essentially be a thing made of branch, leaf, grass, stone”:
When a part of me is shattered in the dark, a part of me
is for the hedgehog a roof that waits for him
at night.
When a part of me
dives into the river and slowly sinks – the fuzzy sound
it eliminates reason,
where the current hits a rock, on another rock.
However, Eva Maria Leuenberger, in her poem “Moor”, seeks the immersion of human bodies in plain materiality in a more radical manner:
it is said that, when the body is released in the water
disincarnation through decomposition
in the water, the love, loosens the skin
flesh from flesh
bones from bones
sink to the bottom
of the lake.
Disincarnation is the title of the book in which the poems of the youngest poetic representative of German-speaking Switzerland were originally published. The term disincarnation refers to ancient burial rites from civilizations in which people regarded themselves in an inseparable material unity with the entire nature. In the language of the young poet, the human body’s return to matter becomes enormously intense.
While the innovative strength of the poems represented in this volume is usually expressed with a diversity that goes beyond rules that would be indicative of a canon, their poetic contents demonstrate that anthropocentric humanism is abandoned in favor of a humanity that understands its unity with material nature, through processes of submergence, dissolution and disappearance.
In Meral Kureyshi’s case, this understanding of the materiality of our existence is elevated to the point where poetic writing is restricted to some sort of necrosis. This poetic “still life” reveals its vibrancy only in the awareness that “so quickly everything could end”.
“In the day after, no one will understand us”, says Meret Gut in the poem “Libellengrab” (Grave of the Dragonflies”); Anja Nora Schulthess, on the other hand, concludes her poem with the verse “no word / comes from there”. Nevertheless, these poems will remain, because they manage to give voice to the dark mouth of the body:
everything loses its name
eternity vanishes into the dark mouth
said –
Daniel Rothenbühler
References
- Mario Andreotti, “Gute Zeiten für Gedichte? Die Lyrik auf der Suche nach zeitgemäßen Formen” in: Sprachspiegel Heft 3, 2013, pp.66-82, this quote from p.71.
- cit.
- Emil Staiger, Die Zeit als Einbildungskraft des Dichters, Untersuchungen zu Gedichten von Brentano, Goethe und Keller [1953], Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1963, p. 217.
- Definition from Duden dictionary, entry: “Körper”,3a: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Koerper (16/11/2019)