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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures featuring talks by poets, scholars, and educators, presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear a conversation between German poet Jan Wagner and the director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Ilya Kaminsky. Jan Wagner was born in Hamburg in 1971 and has lived in Berlin since 1995. He is considered one of the major German poets of his generation and has won many awards for his work. His poetry has been cited for its precise language, harmonious imagery, and effortless play with forms. We'll hear Wagner discuss some of the major German poets of the 20th century, including Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Huchel. He'll read examples from their work as well as from his own poetry. The conversation took place at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in October 2012. Jan Wagner begins with a quick look at the contemporary poetry scene in Berlin, then takes us back to the early 20th century and the young poet Georg Heym.

JAN WAGNER:
Right now it's a very lively time in German poetry. In fact, you can say, and many people have said so, that the poetry scene, the contemporary poetry scene in Germany and Berlin is as rich as it hasn't been for for decades. In fact, since the 1910s possibly. Looking back, I see a great and very diverse tradition of poetry influenced also of course, by by other languages and other poetries from all over the world, which continues today in a younger generation that vibrantly picks up on that century of German poetry.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
I'm glad that you mentioned the younger poets and poets of Berlin. How do you see the old Berlin? What are the great poets of the old Berlin for you?

JAN WAGNER:
Actually, I brought along some poems from the old Berlin. And not all of them were born in Berlin. But many of them, today, and even in their lifetime, are counted as Berlin poets. Starting off with probably one of the most famous Berlin poets who wasn't born in Berlin, actually, but in Silesia, called Georg Heym. Georg Heym, who wrote many lovely sonnets about Berlin. Actually, you find several sonnets entitled 'Berlin One', 'Berlin Two', and so on and so on. Georg Heym was born elsewhere in Silesia, Hirschberg, the city was called, and moved to Berlin when he was 12 years old or so. And Georg Heym was one of the main poets of the so-called early expressionism movement in Berlin. It's actually one of the first avant-garde movements in Germany and very influential. Not only on me, I've been strongly influenced by Georg Heim, who alongside Georg Trakl, who's not from Berlin, of course, and Jakob van Hoddis, who is one of the great exponents of that movement. Heym, you could turn the Berlin poet because he was the one who, with very strong visual images, captured the Berlin of the nineteen tens and twelves in a manner that many people then and even now saw as a visionary.

He really, as somebody put it, was a wandering subconscious picking up on the, well feelings and tensions of his time and forming from that poetry that reading it today really seemed to point toward the great catastrophes following later on. The First World War, starting in 1914, two years after Georg Heym tragically died at a very young age, he only was...

ILYA KAMINSKY:
24 years old.

JAN WAGNER:
He was 24 years old when he died. Yeah, and you can only wonder, as is the case with so many wonderful poets, you know what he might have written later on? What might have become of Georg Heym? He was a very early starter, you could say, writing in his youth, you could call it impressionist verse, very focused on himself and maybe not all that interesting, but then suddenly discovering his own style. And he was about 19, 18-19 when he discovered his own style. As I said, there are great influences from other countries, and Georg Heym is a good person to start with as an example of somebody who got influenced by other European poetries, by other European poets, foreign language poets, and who in fact, discovered his own particular style by reading other poets. Heym famously kept a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in his room, in his bedchamber. He stayed with his parents for all of his life. In his chamber, he never had a mirror because he didn't like to look at himself at all. So, you can only imagine him staring at Rimbaud's picture on which he had written deals.

So, he was the great influence on Georg Heym. In fact, one of his girlfriends once said that he looked like Arthur Rambaud himself, and he was not only called the German Rimbaud but also the German Baudelaire. So, that makes, that you can see where his influence has come from. And like Baudelaire, he introduced the ugly combined with rich imagery and great visual effects into German poetry while still holding true or holding on to you could say, you know, the formal reservoir of of tradition. As I said, he wrote many sonnets on Berlin. He almost always uses an iambic meter, a five-footed iambic meter, rhyming a, b, a, b, and that's his usual common manner so much that he could criticize for it that he's going to, you know, sort of stomping rhythm combined with his strong, apocalyptic, sometimes visual effects. And only at the end of his life, meaning at 23, he started changing that style and writing sort of free verse verse poems, which are completely different from what he got famous for.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Was he quite well known for that poem, 'A Demon of Cities', right? And I can totally see, um, the French influence there as well. The kind of the wilderness, the demonic voice. I wonder if you would be willing to read in German and in English for us, that poem.

JAN WAGNER:
Why not read the first two stanzas in German to give you a taste of the German version, and then read the English translation as a whole? (SPEAKS GERMAN). The first two stanzas in the German original version. This is the English translation. 'The demons of the cities'. They wander through the cities night enshrouds, the cities cower black beneath their feet. Upon their chins like sailors' beards, the clouds are black with curling smoke and sooty sleet. On seas of houses their long shadow sways, and snuffs ranked street lamps out, as with a blow. Upon the pavement, thick as fog, it weighs and gropes from house to house, solid and slow. With one foot planted on a city square, the other knee upon a tower they stand, and where the black rain falls they rear, with blare of quickened pan's-pipes in a cloud stormed land. About their feet circles a ritornelle, with the sad music of the city's sea, like a great burying song. The shrill tones swell and rumble in the darkness, changefully. They wander to the stream that, dark and wide, as a bright reptile with gold-spotted back turns in the lanterned, dark from side to side.

In its sad dance, while heaven's stare is black. They lean upon the bridge, darkly agog, and thrust their hands among the crowds that pass like fauns who perch above a meadow bog and plunge lean arms into the miry mass. Now one stands up. He hangs a mask of gloom upon the white-cheeked moon. The night, like lead from the dun heavens, settles as a doom on houses into pitted darkness fled. The shoulders of the cities crack, a gleam of fire from a roof burst open flies into the air. Big-boned, on the top beam, they sit and scream like cats against the skies. A little room with glimmering shadow billows. Where one in labor shrieks her agony. Her body lifts gigantic from the pillows. And the huge devils stand about to see. She clutches, shaking at her torture bed with her long, shuddering cry the chamber heaves. Now the fruit comes. Her womb gapes long and red and bleeding for the child's last passage cleaves. The devils' necks grow like giraffes'. The child is born without a head. The mother moans and holds it.

On her back, clammy and wild, the frog fingers of fear play as she swoons. But vast as giants, now the demons loom. Their horns in fury gore the bleeding skies. An earthquake thunders in the cities' womb. About their hooves, where flint-struck, fires rise.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you, very much. When Georg Heym was starting out as a young poet in Berlin, one of his friends supported Heym in the same group with him, Gottfried Benn. Benn, unlike Heym, lived a very long life, shared many poetic styles over his career. I wonder if you could speak a little about his work as well for us?

JAN WAGNER:
Well, Benn actually started out in the same literary movement. That's true in Berlin. He wasn't born in Berlin, but moved to Berlin and started out with a short sequence, short in very influential sequence of poems called Morgue. Of course, featuring a morgue and a Benn belongs to this great tradition of poet doctors, like so many others. Like Williams, of course, and others. So, Benn studied medicine in Leipzig, in Berlin. He finished writing a study on epilepsy and then became a doctor for skin disease. Skin diseases, and sexually transmitted diseases in Berlin. So, his whole work, his whole poetry throughout his life is quite influenced by the job he had, being a doctor, a very popular doctor too, and a very kind doctor as they say. And his first sequence morgue was based in that experience as well. These poems came as a shock to the reading audience. He wrote about, you know, dissecting dead bodies. He wrote about disease in a very strong and also in parts disgusting way, shocking for the audience then and in fact, shocking even now, a hundred years later, Benn himself said, looking back on his life and writing about his life, he said that reading his first poems, the morgue sequence, he had to swallow a good deal of cognac before being able to read his own work.

And then he admitted, it's, you know, good poetry and it is good poetry and still quite shocking, one of his most famous poems from that sequence is called 'Man and Woman Go Through the Cancer Barracks', a very famous poem and even more famous, a very short poem with a flower in his name called 'Little Aster', 'Kleiner Aster' in German.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Would you mind reading that for us?

JAN WAGNER:
I'll read the English translation of that poem.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Whose translation is it?

JAN WAGNER:
This one is done by Babette Deutsch. 'Little Aster'. A drowned truck driver was propped on the slab. Someone had stuck a lavender aster between his teeth. As I cut out the tongue and the palate through the chest, under the skin with my long knife, I must have touched the flower, for it slid into the brain, lying next. I packed it into the cavity of the chest. Among the excelsior. And it was soon up. Drink yourself full in your vase. Rest softly, little aster.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Has Benn's poetry changed at all over time?

JAN WAGNER:
It changed very much from that early expressionist beginning he moved on to poetry, which is rhymed as well. And uses lots of different vocabulary. Uses jargon from the medical world. Uses Berlin slang of the time. Actually, you know, uses you could say jazz elements and mixes all that into a very peculiar mix which has come to be called the Benn sound. The Benn sound, which was so influential that whole generations of German poets were influenced by that Benn sound. He developed that sound in the 20s and 30s, and then after the Second World War, Benn changed his style once again and wrote what many have termed his mature style, which is a lot more relaxed. He doesn't use strong formal structures anymore. He turns to free verse and for the first time looks upon the world in a much more relaxed way. Benn is an infamous figure in more ways than one. He was all his life strongly opposed to, you know, the concept of progress. He didn't believe in progress at all. He didn't believe in, you know, a social meaning of poetry or political poetry at all, which opposed him to many of the poets, of course, writing in the 20s and 30s in a time which was politically so strongly divided into, you know, left-wing and right-wing politics and also poetry.

Many poets writing at the time, for example, Johannes Becker, who started out with Benn in the expressionist movement and then turned to socialism, in fact, became the cultural minister of the GDR in the 50s and 60s. And Becker was strongly opposed to Gottfried Benn. Benn didn't believe in progress. Benn had a concept of, as he termed it, art history. The poet, as an artist. I think you could say that of the major lines in modern poetry, you could say that Benn is the German poet representing a line of poetry, starting with Edgar Allan Poe moving on to Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, and so on. A line of poetry focusing on the well-made poem on the craft of poetry. Benn famously said, and that was in the 50s. He was talking to students at the time, and it's actually one of the most famous essays or speeches on poetry in the history of German 20th-century poetry, started saying to the students, well, that normally people would expect somebody to stand on, you know, on a meadow, having a sort of feeling and that, you know, turning out to be some sort of poetry and said, actually, that is not how poetry is made or poetry comes into existence.

He said poetry doesn't come into existence. Poetry is made, poetry is manufactured. And if you subtract from the poem all sense of feeling and all sense of mood, what remains that might be the poem. And so he was focusing on craft and on the made poem and was strongly opposed to both poetry as a transmitter of feeling or mood and as a transmitter of political message. He said there is no message involved in poetry and famously said that poetry doesn't move things forward, but poetry changes the person who reads the poetry. But therefore was strongly opposed to all social and political movements in the 20s. So, he was infamous for that and of course, for his involvement with fascism, with the Nazi dictatorship in the 30s and 40s. He was possibly due to the fact that he was strongly opposed to all political meaning in poetry and strongly opposed to people like Johannes Becker and Bertolt Brecht on the left scene or left political scene was fascinated by the upcoming Nazi movement and in fact greeted, welcomed the movement.

He played a very unfortunate or rather terrible role in 1933 and 1934 when he supported the Nazi regime and in fact wrote some terrible pieces of prose supporting the Nazi Party. Most infamously writing an open letter to the literary immigrants, as it is called, answering a letter by Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. Of course, who, like many others, was a huge admirer of Benn's poetry and had written a letter to him asking him why on earth an intellectual, a man like Benn, a wonderful poet like Benn, could support such a barbaric movement. And Benn then wrote an open letter to Klaus Mann and to all other literary immigrants, which is a terrible testimony of his urging in those years. He quickly, of course, became disillusioned and was endangered himself and spent the rest of the Nazi time being unable to publish, going back to working as a doctor for the military, which he had done before in the First World War, and being endangered himself. But he had a dubious role, which he, in all fairness, saw himself and he was one of the first months, in 1946-47 writing about his involvement in that terrible time.

Writing a double biography, it's called 'Double Life'. And there quoting the whole of the letter by Klaus Mann and saying, this young man who was so much younger than I was at the time and so much more inexperienced than I was, was right. And He was one of the first to admit readily that he had made a big mistake. But still, he came to renewed fame in the post-war Germany and in fact, was the greatest exponent of German poetry in the 50s and a very influential figure of generations to come.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Would you please read for us perhaps one more poem by Benn that would show us a different side of Benn perhaps?

JAN WAGNER:
I would read a late poem by Benn, a very famous poem, where he actually, he wasn't very fond of humans. And in his poetry in the 20s most of the time depicted people by certain of their features. Writing about a huge belly, for example, or a nose or some peculiar haircut about certain features, but not about the whole person, never about the whole person. And suddenly in the 50s, he had a much milder manner of regarding his fellow human beings. So, there would be an example of the later relaxed Gottfried Benn. I read this in the German original version and then in the translation by Christopher Middleton. (SPEAKS GERMAN) 'People met'. I have met people who, when asked what their names were, apologetically as if they had no right to claim one's attention even with an appellation, would answer Miss Vivian, then add, just like the Christian name. They wanted to make things easier. No complicated names like Popkiss or Umbleby Dunball, just like the Christian name. So, please do not burden your memory.

I have met people who grew up in a single room, together with parents and four brothers and sisters. They studied by night, their fingers in their ears beside the kitchen range. They became eminent, outwardly beautiful, veritable grand dumb, and inwardly gentle and active as Nausicaa, with brows clear as angel's brows. Often I have asked myself but found no answer where gentleness and goodness can possibly come from. Even today I can't tell. And it's time to be gone.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you. That was a beautiful poem.

JAN WAGNER:
It is a beautiful poem.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
I wonder if you could perhaps speak a little bit about a poet completely different from Benn somebody like Brecht, who did in some ways very much believe in a political message.

JAN WAGNER:
I did mention Brecht's name because Brecht and Benn really have always been seen as the great opponents of poetry, in German language poetry, already in the 20s and 30s and then in the 50s. Both of them really saw each other as the opponent. Brecht famously referring to Benn as a drop of slime. Referring to a famous poem by Gottfried Benn where he said, if one only could go back to one's, you know, ancestors and become a drop of slime in the ancient seas. And then Brecht said, well, that's not what I want to do at all. And Brecht obviously believed in political purpose of not only poetry but of literature and art. Brecht, who said that poetry has a somewhat autonomous district but is by no means unlinked from history and from society. Strangely enough, though, as strongly opposed as they were to each other, they share some common features. Brecht was a bit older than than Benn. Brecht was born in 1886, and both were strongly influenced by the Bible, for example, by the Martin Luther songs.

Both of them loved to read crime novels. Both really drew on the more popular side. Benn, as I said, you know, making use of this sort of slang vocabulary, slang vocabulary in Berlin, the Berlin slang of the time, and Brecht, of course drawing on the song tradition. In fact, English songs as well, Brecht making use in his poetry of English terms, and of course, becoming most famous for his work with Kurt Weill, the German composer. The Threepenny Opera was the most famous piece of Bertolt Brecht has ever done. Writing the songs for The Threepenny Opera, which in the 1920s was so popular that people used to sing the songs by Brecht on the streets of Berlin. Of course, due to the wonderful music of Kurt Weill as well. But due also to the very popular song verse that Brecht wrote. I think there's no for myself, there's no poet I know so much by heart of like Bertolt Brecht, he has written the most amazing songs, of course, many political poems which are very much bound to their own time.

Brecht left Germany quickly, had to leave it quickly because he was from the very start. He was on the, you know, red list of the Nazis. And Brecht went to Denmark into exile, went on to Finland, to Russia, and then, of course, to California, where in Santa Monica he spent, along with many other exiles, many years, along with Thomas Mann, along with Leon Feuchtwanger, and other German exiles living in California. And Brecht wrote many poems that he sought to have a political impact directly. He famously said when he was in Denmark, that he was almost ashamed to think of beauty, that only the speeches Hitler gave on the radio forced him to his desk and write. And that's what he did, write. He did write very effective poems against Nazi Germany. Later on in the GDR, when he was living in East Berlin, he went from California back to East Berlin, where he famously founded the Berlin Ensemble Theater and produced his own very popular, very influential plays. But also there he wrote poetry that had what he said, (SPEAKSGERMAN).

You know, something you could use in a way you could use in everyday life and in political life. But he also wrote many of the most beautiful love poems in German poetry. Brecht is an amazing love poetry writer and may be better known for these than for his political poetry. Maybe we should read one of his most popular poems. A wonderful piece in German, having the title, (SPEAKS GERMAN). 'A memory of Mary A'. Which is to be found in almost every anthology of German poetry. It's a poem which many people know by heart and a beautiful piece. The English translation is done by Derek Mahon, the Irish poet. And the title is not, 'Memory of Maria', but in English, 'A cloud' and the cloud is a very prominent feature of this poem. One evening in the bloom month of September, we lay at peace beneath an apple bough. I took her in my arms, my gentle lover, and held her closely like a dream come true. While far up in the tranquil summer heaven there was a cloud. I saw it high and clear. It was so white and so immense above us.

And as I watched it was no longer there. Since then, so very many different evenings have drifted blindly past in the general flow. Perhaps the apple orchard has been flattened. And if you ask me where the girl is now, I have to admit I really don't remember. I can imagine what you're going to say. But even her face I truly can't recapture. I only know I kissed it there that day. Even the kiss, I would have long forgotten if that one cloud had not been up there too. I see it, and will always see it plainly so white and unexpected in the blue. Perhaps the apple boughs are back in blossom. Maybe she holds a fourth child on her knees. The cloud, though, hung there for a moment only, and as I watched, it broke up in the breeze.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you very much. You know, W.H. Auden once told the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky that he had met three great poets in his lifetime, two of them being Yeats and Auden. And the third one was Brecht. I wonder if you could take a few minutes to tell us a little more about other poets who lived in the GDR. I'm thinking particularly about Peter Huchel, who began as a poet of the GDR, but then lived under surveillance and had to move away to the West. What would be your take on him?

JAN WAGNER:
Peter Huchel actually started out in the 20s and 30s as a nature poet. He belonged to a group of poets along with Günter Eich and others who wrote nature poetry. Who in fact, in the 30s did not emigrate from Nazi Germany but stayed there and turned to something which became famous, the inner emigration. They continued to write their poetry didn't really participate. They didn't utter their political opinion but continued to write nature poetry. Then, in fact, he lived in East Germany and quickly became known. Well, he had been known as a nature poet. He was famous as a nature poet and continued in that vein in the 40s and 50s, but also became known as the founder and first editor of the most influential magazine literary magazine of the GDR, called (SPEAKS GERMAN) and or meaning and form would be the literal English translation. He was an editor who really got many careers in eastern Germany going. He was cooperating with Bertolt Brecht on that magazine and supported, for example, the young Bobrovsky and many other young poets.

He continued to write nature poems but became more and more hermetic in a way. He had started out with poems true to meter and to rhyme poems that really focused on his home country. He was born close to Berlin, in a landscape in a well, the flat landscape surrounding Berlin full of, well rivers and lakes and beautiful sort of harsh country, which he turned into his own mythological or mythic landscape and which features strongly in his poetry. And he continued to write about that, also about the people of that landscape, writing about maidens or maids, about farm life, about people working in stables, and so on. He was heavily criticized in the GDR for his imagery by another great nature poet, for forcing nature into something which was not natural. For using imagery that is less descriptive of natural phenomena, but trying to strike something new, a new imagery, a new effect in a metaphorical way. And that is true in a way. He really developed a strong metaphorical way of writing becoming darker and darker in the GDR also because he wanted to, you know, smuggle some political meaning into his poetry at the time becoming more hermetic.

He's really famous for developing a great way of simile and metaphor in his writing. Always based on nature, natural images, and on landscape, but also on the works of Jacob Zuma, the mystic and philosopher as well. He himself said that nature in itself does not interest him in itself, but that he was interested in nature as a historical place in the traces that history and mankind left in the landscape, in nature. So, in all his natural images there's always a sense of history and of nature as well, and of war, of course, of the traces that war has left in nature. Maybe it would be a good idea to read a poem, a short and quite, quite famous poem by Peter Hooker, to give an impression of his imagery and of the very strong simile he uses in his poetry. I'll read this one, maybe only in English. It's translated by Michael Hamburger. The English title is 'Roads', in Germany is called (SPEAKS GERMAN). 'Roads.' Choked sunset glow of crashing time. Roads, roads. Intersections of flight. Car tracks across the plowed field that, with the eyes of killed horses saw the sky in flames.

Nights with lungs full of smoke. With a hard breath of the fleeing. When shots struck the dusk out of a broken gate, ash and wind came without a sound. A fire that sullenly chewed the darkness. Corpses flung over the rail tracks, their stifled cry like a stone on the palate. A black humming cloth of flies closed their wounds. So, this will be an example of the latter Huchel not rhyming anymore. Not using strict formal patterns, but using a sort of free verse. Sometimes only one word per line. And as I said, making use of very strong imagery that really sticks in the mind, the humming cloth of flies that is closing the wounds. Similes like a stone. The stifled cry like a stone of palet. A very strong imagery that is playing a prominent role in tha poetry. He was a slow writer and then publishing only three slim volumes of what has come to be called hermetic poetry, but full of marvelous imagery. In general, I think the great duo of German poetry in the 50s and 60s, of course, were Brecht and Benn.

Everybody turned to them favoring either Brecht or favoring Gottfried Benn in the 60s, and 70s. No one really could write poetry without referring either to Gottfried Benn or Brecht. But then Peter Huchel and Bobrovsky, both from the GDR, I think were maybe more, you know, poets, poets, very influential on the younger generation and certainly on myself as well. But others, like Lutz, a wonderful German poet who is some years older than I am, he's very influenced by Peter Huchel. In fact, he's living in Huchel's house in Wilhelmshorst nowadays and taking care of the estate of Peter Huchel.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Let me ask you a question. The 20th century was rather a dark time for German poetry. All these poets you mentioned, but also, of course, Trakl and Celan. And yet, even though you spoke with so much admiration for all these poets just now, in your own work, to my mind is amazing, almost radical turn from the darkness to something else. And I wonder where it is that you see German poetry going. And perhaps as you answer this question, you could share some of your own poems with us that you would like Americans to hear.

JAN WAGNER:
Sure, yeah. I could read some poems in maybe one or two in the original version to give an impression of how it sounds. And then in an English translation. Talking about 20th-century German poetry, there are some names you have to mention. And apart from Rilke, of course, Paul Celan. Paul Celan would be one of the names you cannot get around. One of the most influential and greatest poets writing in German in the 20th century. Both of these, Rilke and Celan, of course, are great influences also on the younger generation writing today. For us, those born around 70, it was less Brecht and Benn. They have been influential on the poets born in the 40s and 50s, who in turn influenced us. But I think there are two poets born in the 60s, in the early 60s that have been role models, as it were, for many younger poets writing today. And those are Durs Grünbein, I think was born in Dresden in the GDR, and who might be the representative poet of his generation, and Thomas Kling, who died seven or eight years ago, too young as well.

He was 48, I think. And who picked up on the more avant-garde tradition of, you know, Austrian poetry and representing a vein of poetry focusing on language as material? Probably the language poetry in America would be the equivalent. What I think makes the younger generation so very lively is that they can, without having to say I am part of the avant-garde or language movement, or on the other hand, part of the traditional poetry or more narrative strain can pick up on the best of both traditions and create from that a very own style. The younger scene writing today, which is focusing on Berlin, really. Most of the younger poets are living in Berlin, which is a good spot for poetry and featuring a very lively scene. Pick up on the best of both traditions, which really results in a poetic landscape which is not homogenous at all, but picks up on nature poetry, on political poetry, on language poetry, and on the narrative strain, as well as on poetic traditions from the United States, from England, from Poland, Russia and the Scandinavian countries.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
How do you see your own work in that scene? What poems of your own do you think you could share with us that would best represent that scene?

JAN WAGNER:
For myself as well both these traditions are important. I do like to play around with the traditional aspects of poetry, you know, traditional forms that came upon us. I like subverting forms like the sonnet or the sestina or the villanelle because, for me, it's really a way of experimenting with language as well. Those strict forms can result in a very playful approach to language and can force you in a way, to discover strains of imagery and of thought unknown to yourself. As John Ashbery once said, I think when he was asked why he writes Sestinas, he said that it's like going downhill on a bicycle and not the feet move the pedals, but the pedals move the feet and you do not know where you will end up. And I think that's the great beauty of using those forms and using them in an experimental manner can result in a very new and playful approach to language. So, I do love to play with that. I do at the same time love the use of narrative or the allusion to a certain kind of narrative, which the reader then is left to continue.

I do love strong imagery, which is maybe clear from my love for Peter Huchel and for Georg Heym, who are both strong visual poets, and I do love that strain. And I'm very fond of metaphors of visual imagery. And at the same time, as I said, you know, to subvert tradition.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
This embrace of various traditions that you're speaking of, this ability to be, you know, the camps and the no camp at once is very meaningful I think. Especially for new, younger poets to be able to take from various traditions and to create something new. Would you share a poem with us, perhaps?

JAN WAGNER:
Sure. I will read a poem which is based on the ordinary. Which is another aspect, of course, which is important for me, that every day yields so much poetic material, which then suddenly, you know, all those things that seem so small and are so easily overlooked in everyday life have the potential to yield great poetical energy. And so this will be an example both of subverting a tradition. It will be a sonnet or a sonnet subversion. And the title refers to a very stubborn weed, which every German gardener knows and hates. You can eat it, you can turn it into soup and sell it, but you can't eat so much of it to get rid of it completely. The German name for this weed is (SPEAKS GERMAN). The translators have chosen a different weed in English because otherwise, the poem wouldn't make sense. The poem plays with the word (SPEAKS GERMAN) as well, so they chose a different weed altogether. I will read the German version first. (SPEAKS GERMAN). Now, the English title would be 'Spurge'. Not to underestimate spurge, the urge already in its name, and hence the blossoms so floating, white, virginal as a tyrant's dream.

Always returns like some old debt sends its secret missive. Through darkness, under the grass, under the field. Until somewhere else renewed a white resistance cell emerges. Behind the garage by the crunching gravel, the cherry spurge as frothing as surf that without sound or cars until it creeps to the gable top until spurge surges over everything in the whole garden spurge thrusts itself over spurge, submerged by nothing but spurge. That was translated by the Canadian Poet Daniel Janis and the American Poet Julian Smith Newman.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you. You mentioned the subversion of the forum, and it made me think of an American poet, Thom Gunn, who said that every sonnet is a plot against the sonnet.

JAN WAGNER:
That's a lovely way to put it.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
I love the attentiveness to detail in the poem. You mentioned Celan earlier, and of course, Celan had this notion of attentiveness as a natural prayer for humans. So, could you perhaps share one more poem with us?

JAN WAGNER:
Yeah, sure. So, this poem was translated by David Keplinger. I'll read only the English version. It's an homage to the Roman mosquito. 'Essay on Gnats'. As if every character had fled all at once from the newspaper and hovered as a swarm in the air. They hover as a swarm in the air, transmitting from the awful news. Nothing prudent muses, emaciated pegasus humming nothing but themselves into the air. Born of the last band of smoke when the candle is snuffed. And so weightless, it's hardly possible to say they are. Appearing more as shadow from an alternate world now cast into ours. They dance limbs now so thin as if drawn with a pencil. Tiny sphinxes are their bodies. Rosetta Stone without the stone. And well, the last one may be in German and English, but it's a very short poem. Playing yet again with a form, of course, with the most popular Japanese form, the haiku. This is a sort of double haiku in German it is called, (SPEAKS GERMAN). And the English translations by Ian Galbraith, the Scottish poet and translator.

T-Bag, one. Draped only in a sackcloth mantle. The little hermit in his cave. Two, a single thread leads to the upper world. We shall give him five minutes.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Thank you so much.

JAN WAGNER:
Thank you.

ILYA KAMINSKY:
Would you like to share one more poem if you have any more then?

JAN WAGNER:
I'll read one short poem in German and in English. (SPEAKS GERMAN) This is another poem playing around with the also with rhyme and slant rhyme. And it's the translations by the English poet Simon Armitage. 'Seesaw'. Make yourself heavier, they shout. With my eyes closed, I conjure bags of cement and iron foundries. Think of elephants, the anchor, rooted in mud as a rumor of whales, slides past of the bull-headed anvil. And all the while holding my breath. But nothing ascends or sinks except for a pheasant's screech and the falling leaves. The ground always too far from assured dithering legs to reach my head. Almost in the clouds.

ED HERMAN:
That was Jan Wagner reading the original German and an English translation of his poem 'Seesaw'. The conversation with Ilya Kaminsky was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on October 19th, 2012 as part of International Poets in Conversation, and was sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. English translations of Jan Wagner's poems are included in the anthology 20th Century German Poetry, published by Macmillan. Several books of Wagner's poetry have been published in German. Keep up with the world of poetry by visiting the Poetry Foundation website, where you'll find articles by and about poets. An online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Poetry Learning Lab, the Harriet blog about poetry, the complete back issues of poetry magazine, and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herman, thanks for listening to poetry lectures from poetryfoundation.org.