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C O N T E M P O R A RY G E R M A N P O E T RYA N D AVA N T- G A R D E R E A P P R A I S A L S

I N T H E WO R K O F T H O M A S K L I N GA N D O S K A R P A S T I O R

ARINA ROTARU

ABSTRACT

This article engages with selected poetic and essayistic pieces by Oskar Pastior

( 1927 – 2006 ) and Thomas Kling ( 1957 – 2005 ), whose works testify to theendurance of literary legacies ranging from Antiquity to the pre- and post-Warglobal avant-gardes. The two poets are analysed here side by side and situatedin a common context of influence and reception. Emphasis is given to the waysin which the two authors use avant-garde poetic tools to reflect on the inter-weavings of aesthetics and politics in the wake of 1989 and thereby revampavant-garde practices within the new poetic and political contexts at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. While applying the paradigmof medialization from the perspective of its effects on poetry, the article reflectsupon the status of lyric for these authors after the demise of a poetics of (new)subjectivity.

Keywords: Kling, Thomas; Pastior, Oskar; avant-garde; reappraisal; lyric; subjec-tivity; dissonance; poetic network; sound poetry; concrete poetry; performance;noise

IN HIS History of Contemporary German Poetry ( 2010 ), Michael Braun identifies me-

dialization and self-reflexivity as well as thematizing processes of linguistic,

medial and audiovisual perception as important features of German poetry since

1989.1 With this broad categorization, Braun refers in particular to changes

undergone by German poetry since 1989 under the influence of new media.However, he does not differentiate between formal and thematic transformations

which these mediatic achievements bring about, and distinguishes instead

between politically themed poems and poems in dialogue with the reader. I

argue that a focus both on forms of experimentation and on themes in poetry in

relation to new media would problematize an aspect considered lost by many

critics, namely the relevance of the avant-gardes for the present. Critics such as

Gerhard Falkner ascribe the decreasing impact of the avant-gardes on the

present to the profound shift from a period of technological innovation, peculiar

in the early avant-gardes, to one of information technologies. Whereas the first avant-gardes had been critical bastions of industrialization and reflected the

Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 47, No. 4, doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqr035



fragmentation of every-day life at the hands of technology, the new era of com-

munication as one of connection and information seems no longer to correspond

to the original avant-gardist impulse to reflect a fragmented universe. Falkner

limits his analysis of so-called decay to a distinction between the industrial and

the technological ages and does not analyse the possible implications of German

reunification in 1990 for such divisions.2

The two contemporary poets whom I have chosen for my analysis do not

address the loss of utopian ideologies or the decay of modernist ideals, which

were once part of the avant-garde mystique. Rather, they make use of formal

constraints and cultivate structural experimentation, which are reminiscent in

particular of pre- and post-War avant-garde models of experimentation. By

elaborating on selected poetry and essays by Oskar Pastior and Thomas Kling,

especially ones written after 1989, this article raises a number of interrelated

questions: How do Pastior’s and Kling’s experimental, avant-garde practicesclash with their ostensible choice of canonical lyrical forms and what types of

textual effects are generated by this fusion? Is there a contemporary geopolitical

tendency associated with their references to, and engagement with, avant-garde

techniques from both pre- and post-War times? Does the invocation of

avant-garde authors and their practices in the work of Kling and Pastior form a

contrast to the purported obsoleteness of avant-garde modes of writing in the

digital age?3

In 2010, Text þ Kritik , the well-known Gottingen literary journal, devoted its

first issue to the 2006 Buchner Prize laureate Oskar Pastior ( 1927 – 2006 ), apoet of German ethnicity born in Romania. A victim of the retaliation politics

of the Communist state against German ethnics, Pastior spent five years in work

camps at the end of WWII, and in 1968 decided to leave Romania and settle in

West Berlin. The first symposium on the work of the Rheinland poet Thomas

Kling ( 1957 – 2005 ), known for his literary performances, took place in

Hombroich in 2010. These events from 2010 recognized two contemporary

authors whose reception is still in the making and who, despite receiving

important literary awards, have enjoyed relatively little critical attention and

publicity so far. For example, from Harry Mathews’s testimonies in the recent Text þ Kritik issue, we learn that it was only in the 1990s that Pastior became a

formal member of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle — The

Workshop for Potential Literature).4 Despite sharing many characteristics with

OULIPO, a group which originated in the 1960s in France and famous for its

formal rigour, Pastior was something of a lone warrior until the 1990s. His

association with OULIPO gave him more visibility, as well as offering him

important intellectual collaborations; yet his work retained its peculiar status

among poetic styles. While Kling has been hailed as a virtuoso of dialect, slang

and everyday speech attributed to different voices,5 Pastior got the reputation

of a hermetic poet. Many volumes of Pastior’s work, which are no longer in

print, are now being republished, along with miscellanea and other hitherto

AVA N T- G A R DE R E A P P R AI S A L S I N K L I N G A N D PA S T I O R 3 6 5



If we test Kling’s poetic art against a traditional definition of lyric as the

domain of subjectivity, Kling seems to represent the antithesis of the standard

lyric poet, since he reputedly underwent a paradigmatic shift from the ‘lyric of

subjectivity’ of the 1980s to a poetry focused on its own making and its

performative mediatic character.7 While Kling expressed his polemical

re-evaluation (and negation) of the earlier decade of ‘subjectivity’ as part of his

aesthetic programme,8 Pastior declared in the first of five lectures on poetry that

he gave in Frankfurt his nonchalant ignorance with regard to lyric: ‘I don’t

know what lyric is.’9 This emphatic negation of knowledge in lyric matters is

doubled, however, by Pastior’s belief in a species of world lyric, which he

defines as a series of repetitive, formulaic phrases that serve as a starting point

for a new principle of creation or autopoiesis. Simple poiesis and mimetic lit-

erary concepts such as onomatopoeia are not among Pastior’s literary

ingredients.10

Dissonance rather than textual music is what he strives for, and yet the forms he adopts such as the sestina or the sonnet are among the trade-

marks of lyric. In terms of genre, Kling cultivates long, narrative poems or

fragments that remind one of works by Sappho or Pindar. For him, the commit-

ment to dissonance articulates itself both as an essayistic tribute to Dadaist

poetic practices, in particular to Hugo Ball’s work in sound poetry and cacoph-

ony, and as poetic enactment, through enjambement and other fractures on the

level of rhythm and verse.11 Kling’s appraisal of Ball is expressed most passio-

nately in his essay ‘On the German-Speaking Avant-Gardes’, where he praises

Ball as an early practitioner of ‘speech installations’ or early live performances.12

Furthermore, Kling makes an unprecedented programmatic effort for contem-

porary German poets by reviving particular avant-garde traditions of

performance in order to tap into new sources for lyric beyond a national

model. These sources range from Hugo Ball, Velimir Chlebnikov, Kurt

Schwitters and Walter Serner to the Wiener Gruppe.

By focusing on experimentation within the very shape and meaning of the

German idiom, Pastior shows a similar interest in deterritorialization. On the one

hand, he relies on fictitious translations, which owe a lot to Tristan Tzara’s early

slaloms among languages and imaginary translations;

13

on the other, he isindebted to the Futurist Velimir Chlebnikov’s glossolalic poetry ( zaum ). Pastior’s

particular technique, evident since his early poetic work in Communist Romania,

mixes present-day languages with their archaic correspondents and brings in dia-

lectal influences as well. The metaphor that gives a title to one of his early

volumes, Der krimgothische Fa cher (‘the Crimean-Gothic fan’), describes an amalgama-

tion of languages reproduced in verse. It is worth noting that ‘the

Crimean-Gothic’ bore at its inception not only a peculiar linguistic connotation

but also a topographical one. Through this ‘peripheral phenomenon’

( krimgothisches Randpha nomen ), Pastior claimed at the time to overcome the constraints

of territoriality.14 He was to get back to the importance of the ‘Crimean-Gothic’

for his work in his Frankfurt lectures. For instance, in the third lecture, the poet

AR INA ROTARU3 6 6



and bureaucratic Romanian, Hungarian, some elements of Russian from the

work-camp, bits of Latin learned in school, some Greek, some reading knowledge

of French and English – in relation to a poem he does not name ( US [ 3 ], p. 67 ).

Textual references point to a piece from the anthology Das Ho ren des Genitivs (The

Listening of the Genitive) ( 1997 ). Here Pastior refers to the Crimean-Gothic out-

pouring as the charade of a polyglot explosion based on an artificial dialect.

The poem alluded to in the third Frankfurt lecture is ‘O-Ton

“Automne”-Linguistikherbst’.15 Its point, as Pastior declares in his notes to the

volume, is a zaum fragment borrowed from the Russian Futurist Chlebnikov:

O-Ton ‘Automne’-Linguistikherbst

O-Ton ‘Automne’-Linguistikherbst

Stick Harvest/Osenj/Toamna/Stick

Stick Lippstick Nota Bene-heuwas da abwest im Dumpel-Sermon:

Zero-Phonem

Der Kurbis wachst

In Eros-Hemden sensen

Tristia

Trestia

Deltageflecht

Da ist (‘Kusnejtschik/Zinziwer’) Synopsis

von Kolchis her ergangen:

Seerosensee/Seerosenbucht

Ost-West-Phantom

Ovids Metamorphosen

am Bosendorfer Luch

[ . . . ]

O Zero Osero-der SeeRien ne va plus-O Zero Stick

O Lambda Entengrutze Haarnest Falfa

hilf Schilf

heu Schelf

O-Ton

Automne

Mir ist so rosident phantom

Semiramis/Sorbonne/Sa-Um-Weh

[O-tone ‘Autumn’-Linguisticfall // O-tone ‘Autumn’-Linguisticfall / Stick Harvest/Osenj/Toamna/Stick / Stick lipstick Nota bene-hay / what is decaying in the




scythe / Tristia / Trestia / Danuberhizome / This is a (‘Kusnejtschik/Zinziwer’)

Synopsis / derived from Kolchis: / Seerosesea/Seerosebay / Ost-West-Phantom /

Ovid’s Metamorphoses / At the Bosendorf bog // [ . . . ] // O Zero Osero-the Sea /

Rien ne va plus-O Zero Stick / O Lambda Common Duckweed Hairnest Wavewave /

help reed / hay shelf / O-Tone / Autumn / I am feeling so rosident phantom /Semiramis/Sorbonne/Sa-Um-Weh]

In an appendix to the volume, Pastior provides an annotation to this poem and

explains that he wrote it for a German radio transmission in 1996. In the same

note, he mentions his poetic intention to test how a text designed for broadcast-

ing takes shape; specifically, he wants to explore how a text’s scripturality is

modified by its potential use in the context of another medium. His effort at

poematic medialization focuses on exploiting the full potential of words’ sonori-

ties even at the risk of rendering semantics unnecessary. With Pastior, the themeof potentiality – linguistic, thematic, mediatic and geographic – extends from

homonyms and contaminations such as ‘O-Ton’/‘Automne’ and linguistic

cross-correspondences such as ‘Schilf ’/‘Schelf ’ or ‘Tristia’/‘Trestia’ to O-Toene,

original sounds, once employed to distinguish authentic sounds from the former

GDR in Western transmissions. Pastior also gives a contemporary twist to one

of his favourite verse arrangements, linguistic catalogues of the type ‘Stick

Harvest/Osenj/Toamna/Stick’. A possible reference to a digital medium, the

memory stick, coexists in an ether with other elements of another kind and

genre, which are transformed and ‘stored’ by it. As for the principle underlying the catalogue or the ‘listpoem’, Pastior defines it as ‘montage, collage, potpourri

– the listpoem as a mystical contemplation of ascertainment and de-poration,

wisdom- and survival technique’ ( US [ 1 ], p. 33 ). The listpoem’s reliance on

montage and collage points to an unsettling coexistence of elements of different

kinds, whereas the notion of potpourri adds the nuance of a complete melange

or unrecognizable mixture. The missing ‘t’ in ‘de-poration’ – ‘deportation’ was

a taboo word during the Communist dictatorship – changes the sense of exile

and estrangement to one of poetic play. The generic and material transform-

ations that lie at the root of the linguisticfall compositum are epitomized by the‘zero-phoneme’ and its principle of material reduction. The ‘zero-phoneme’ fea-

tures as an independent unit after the first stanza. In the ‘reading key’ provided

by the third Frankfurt lecture, the ‘zero-phoneme’ stands for potentiality. If we

take another distinction from Pastior’s theoretical laboratory, the phoneme is

opposed to the grapheme as gesture is opposed to hiatus ( US [ 2 ], p. 49 ).16 On

this terrain of the phoneme as gesture of possibility, verses take the physical

shape suggested by their meanings. For instance, a visual delta forms at the site

where the poem mentions the Romanian correspondent of reed, trestia. The

theme of transformation is completed in the next stanza through a reference to

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and through an allusion to the void generated by the

former East/West Communist division, the ‘East–West phantom’. For the rest

AR INA ROTARU3 6 8



tonalities (‘O Zero’) or with phrases of playful liminality and nonsense such as

‘mir ist so rosident phantom’ (I am feeling like a rodent phantom). Multiple

languages mix with possible references to computer language, as in ‘lambda’.

Marinetti’s illusion of a ‘lyric obsession with matter’ from the early 20th

century, which allows one to ‘lengthen and shorten words, to reinforce their

center or their extremities by increasing or diminishing the number of vowels

and consonants,’17 is translated by Pastior into an obsession with non-matter,

culminating in the universal scream ‘Sa-Um-Weh’. The ending in ‘Sa-Um-Weh’

points to a feature of Russian Futurism coded as primitivism: a return to the pri-

mordial and the archaic. According to Aage Hansen-Love, this peculiar type of

Futurism finds its expression in a temporal arch linking an originary past with

the future and differs from better-known varieties of the early avant-garde,

which are characterized by an interest in analysis, technicity and urbanity.18

Pastior’s use of a primordial scream in a text designed for live radio transmissiondocuments the simultaneous revamping of early avant-garde motifs, the pench-

ant for futurity and a belief in technical advancements within a contemporary

setting. However, Pastior is not on an ideological utopian mission or in quest of

advanced technology. Through what he calls an ‘intramolecular cracking’ or

reinvention of the genetic code of poetry, the poet anticipates today’s proliferat-

ing world-wide library where he incorporates the past and prepares it for the

present, not the future.19

Pastior’s ambition to ‘crack’ the poetic code itself and replace it with a

poetic network is echoed by his play with ‘Vokalisen’ from a volume con-ceived between 1990 and 1991. As he confesses in his notes to the volume

Vokalisen und Gimpfelstifte, the ‘Vokalisen’ try to mimic patterns of vowels from

all over the world.20 This irreverent use of vowel combinations that render

words semantically unrecognizable achieves a paradoxical effect. Words

become familiar specifically through their ambiguous meanings that dissolve

linguistic and semantic appurtenance. Pastior’s vision of lyric lets the minstrel

turn the euphonic ‘Ohrwurm’ (earworm) into a ‘URWURM’ ( primordial

worm), in whose composition dissonance rather than assonance governs but

where words rhyme internally, as in ‘turmuhr fuhr’. Thus an odd melos ispreserved where, as Northrop Frye would say, the peculiar dissonant sound

throws the ear forward to the next beat as a sign of musical energy rather

than disruption.21

ZUR KUR FUHR URWURM-KULTUR

pur! zur turmuhr fuhr uhu

drumdrum-stur turnt nun purpur-

knurrwut um sturmschwurschwund;

ruth summt, plumbum spurt krumm, un-

fug flurt dummklug rum-kurzum:nur schwung zum kuskus, nur schwung!




[THE ORIGINARY CULTURE-WORM DROVE FOR A CURE / pure! The owl flew

to a clock’s tower / drumdrum-obstinate trains violet- / moaninganger for a stormoath-

dissapperance; / ruth is buzzing, plumbum feels bent, mis- / chief resides stupidsmart

all-around: / only a swing to couscous, only a swing!]

This pattern of word re-assemblages, echoic combinations (as in ‘fug flurt’ or

‘knurrwut ruth’) and consonantal impetus (see the elaborate composite

‘sturmschwurschwund’) is not new. The first sound poems played with it before

the turn of the 20th century and the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire adopted it

as part of their aesthetic agenda. What for the Dadaists was a protest against

war or a consumer culture becomes for Pastior a strategy to envision networks

between countries in the shape of a consonantal rebellion that transcends any

notion of a pure culture. Here words are not entirely dissolved as in Dadaist

rhetoric but rather gain a new semantic status through chance associations.

A further look into Pastior’s method of assembling and disassembling words

and contexts is necessary. In his first Frankfurt lecture, Pastior describes Berlin

in 1990 as a new ‘test arrangement’ ( Versuchsanordnung ) governed both by ‘exam-

ination and discharge because unfit for military service’ (‘Mustern&

Ausmustern’) or ‘units and resistance’ (‘Einheiten& Aushalten)’ ( US [ 1 ], p. 16 ).

These contradictions seem to point to Pastior’s belief in a balance of forming

and deforming forces to reflect the beginning of German reunification and the

end of the Cold War. Pastior’s contradictory formulations are just a prolongation

of his earlier disbelief in any dialectal binarisms and his attempt to dissolve regi-

mentations of form by both optical and visual means.22 This refusal of

dialectics, which seems both to preserve and to transgress convention, is part of

any avant-garde’s own mode of existence, as Wolfgang Asholt notes.23 In the

1990s, Pastior’s defiance against any binarism gains momentum through his

adoption of the long sestina form. This form ( 6 x 6 þ 3 ) is for Pastior a

self-generating machine that reproduces, as he declares, the pattern of

thought-generation ( US [ 2 ], p. 48 ). The last fragment from Pastior’s ‘fliegen

eintag polyglott’ (fly one-day polyglot) sestina reads as follows:

long live the english-rumanian sestina!traiasca sextina romıno-italiana!

evviva la sestina italiano-russa!

da sdrastwujet russke-nemezkaja sestina!

es lebe die deutsch-franzosische sestine!

vive la sextine francaise-francaise!

la sextine francaise-anglaise est morte

long live the english-italian sestina

ma la piu bellissima e la sestina-sestina-sestina

Beyond the pattern of the sestina lies not just a solitary process related to the

generation of thoughts but also a musical improvisation that unites countries

AR INA ROTARU3 7 0



‘long live the english-italian sestina!’ With this sestina, Pastior confesses to

having violated the strict rules to which he adhered for the rest of the

volume, namely the rhyming pattern 123456 / 615242 / 364125 / 532614

/ 451362 / 246531 / 123 (Pastior uses numbers to designate rhymes). The

‘fliegen eintag polyglott’ instead dissolves the classic sestina pattern and

rhymes by giving the whole verse a linguistic unity. In his notes to the

volume, the poet compares the sestina principle to a Mobius-strip, which

compresses and dilutes time upon request; his comment emphasizes the

potentially virtual character of the sestina mechanism, which can expand ad

infinitum in multiple combinations ( US [ 4 ], p. 86 ). If Eugen Gomringer’s

constellations and the inversions, tautologies and repetitions of the Wiener

Gruppe were aiming for absoluteness and were targeting the removal of time

from the poem,24 the purpose of the sestina is, according to Pastior, just the

opposite – to release time in the ear ( US [ 2 ], p. 49 ). This focus on tempor-ality in Pastior’s design of the sestina might echo the primary tension within

the avant-gardes themselves, originally torn between critiquing the present

from within modernity itself and escaping from the present into the atem-

poral.25 Pastior renders this tension actual for the digital age, through a

well-kept balance between the classic finite lyric form of the sestina and the

voicing of a desirable world beyond a national space. Thus Pastior takes over

Gomringer’s desiderata about poetry’s function in society from ‘vom vers zur

konstellation’ but without its ingredient of absoluteness and atemporality.

Pastior’s time machine is represented instead by the concrete form of thesestina intoned in multiple simultaneous voices.

Kling distinguishes his art from concrete poetry as he does not avail himself of

the permutations peculiar to concrete poets, but rather of narrative textual struc-

tures and palimpsest-like constructions. But just like Pastior, he takes over the

performative impetus of the Wiener Gruppe and their Dadaist predecessors and

cultivates the mannerism of collecting (and preparing) voices.26 With the volume

brennstabm, published in the early 1990s, Kling announces a shift from a 1980s

aesthetic of subjectivity. This intended shift is a double polemic with the politi-

cally uninvolved aesthetic of the so-called new subjectivity of the 1970s and1980s on the one hand, and the notion of subjectivity implied in the Adornian

aesthetic of a historicized lyric on the other. Kling thematizes poetry rather in

the shape of a peculiar type of dissonant song set within the new mediatic and

poetic panorama of the 1990s. In two essays from Itinerar , he sets his poetic

project, the ‘brennstabmhafte der sprache’ (sectioning of language), against a

formula from Chebnikov’s arsenal, ‘Zerlegung der Worter’ (disassembling of

words).27 The poem ‘knirsch!’ (grind!), dedicated to Oskar Pastior, from brenn-

stabm, exhibits some peculiarities of this turn from ‘a lyric of subjectivity’ to one

of pure performance, where words start dispersing into atoms without entirely

losing their semantic meaning, unlike Chebnikov’s trans-rational language:




knirsch!

ratternde platte. wind-tape in

den kron, flekkiges huschhusch das

durch bander zirpt: ein schadelge-

flakker, gestober im anflug, stellen-weise blindflug durchgefuhrt.

ARCHIVE

GEPLUNDERT/GEPLUENDERTE PLUENNEN!, þ

1 GAUCH NACH DEM ANDERN! split

tergraeem im unzerstortn aug: balkn-ba-

lkn-balkm. im augn-, im-schauerraum

ein hin geplatschtes licht, schon

wieder zugeschattet: fott. ein zugeschu-

ttet, ausgeschlurft; ein-totes-paestum

das da rattert; -glifnplan, glifmplan oor, organisazzjon TOTH, o GOtt 28

[grind! / rattling disk. wind-tape in / the light, bespotted hushhush that / through

chords resounds: a chranioji- / ttering, drifts flying, par- / tially driven in blind flight /

ARCHIVES / RANSACKED/RANSACKED THINGS !,þ / ONE FOOL AFTER

ANOTHER! split / graeem in the unspoiled eye: beam-ba / lcn-balkm. In the eye-,

looker space / splashed light all around, already / adumbrated: gone. fil- / led, slurped;

a dead-paestum / that rattles; -summit, vilified summit o / or, organizzjation THOTH,

o GOd]

The poem starts with a provocative onomatopoeic explosion, ‘knirsch!’,

which can be translated approximately as ‘grind!’. The poem’s invocation of

dissonance is perpetuated by gerunds such as ‘ratternde platte’ (‘rattling disk’,

with its double meaning, material and digital); double onomatopoeia written

idiosyncratically (huschhusch); elided vowels as in ‘balkn-ba-lkn-balkm’; enjam-

bements, and unconventional orthography as in the variations on ‘-glifnplan’ /

‘glifmplan’ (the composite word ‘glifnplan’ and its variation ‘glifmplan’ are

semantically close to ‘gipfel plan’, which means ‘plan for a summit’ and also

echoes ‘Verunglimpfung’, ‘libel or slander’). Taking off from these possibledouble meanings engendered by switching consonants and eliding vowels, the

poem thematizes the fractures between oral and written articulation, between

recitation and script. Further, contortions of vowels and consonants are phys-

ically highlighted through the fractured light in the eye: ‘[ . . . ] im augn-,

im-schauerraum / ein hin geplatschtes licht, schon / wieder zugeschattet: fott’

(in the eye-, in the looker space / fallen light already / adumbrated: gone).

The dialectal form ‘fott’ (Cologne) accomplishes one of Kling’s poetic prin-

ciples: to incorporate dialect, colloquial forms and even slang in poetry.29 At its

centre, the poem exhibits unconventional typography such as the capitalization

of ARCHIVE, as well as assonances that are phonetically but not semantically

close: ‘geplundert’ (ransacked) echoes ‘plunnen’. Concrete arithmetic also

AR INA ROTARU3 7 2



the numeral 1; they give the poem a very tangible material and visual dimen-

sion. The poem’s ending, through its ode-like quality and invocation of the

Egyptian God Thoth, is torn between formal lyric constraint and experimen-

tation.30 Patron of script and orality, God of time-measurement and science,

Thoth seems to have migrated into a possible archive, digital or otherwise. The

lyric impetus is expressed as mediated experience across archived sounds, com-

pressed vowels and consonants, which have been ransacked from the archives

of a divine patron of organization, temporality and commerce. The gesture of

ransacking archives establishes a self-referential connection between Kling and

Pastior, who is well known for his poetic interpretations (‘Ubertragungen’) of

classics such as Petrarch, Charles Baudelaire and Velimir Chlebnikov. Although

Kling does not work with this model of free translation, he certainly sees a link

between Pastior’s way of translating his predecessors into the present and his

own manner of revolving around models of script and orality.In ‘knirsch!’ and elsewhere, Kling uses the pattern of dense consonant associ-

ations both to celebrate a lost avant-garde aesthetics at the end of the 1980s

and as a tribute to the new significance of noise in a globalized acoustical

world.31 Whereas in ‘knirsch!’ the poetic focus was on lyric transmission,

poetry’s lifespan and mediation, the ‘Hombroich Elegie 2’ addresses a wider

spectrum of historical transmission, anchored in a past situated after German

reunification. Here Kling foregrounds the metaphor of the bee, a popular one

with bucolic writers, to present a possible linguistic and territorial confluence in

the wake of reunification, an event that perhaps does not count ‘minor’ sounds.The ‘bee-speech’ ( bienenrede ) at the end of the poem warns against intolerance,

doing so through associations of vowels and consonants that belong to a

language hard to understand and possibly codified as ‘wild’:

die bienen, von den graugesehenen wiesen,

heimwartsbretternd, zu der bienenbude,

um dort einlabkontrolle zu passieren. um

tanze aufzufuhren, was bienensprachlich,

honigalphabetisch etwas ubermitteln soll.

sang. beruhrt zuletzt, yakutischer schamane,

das rote eisen mit der zunge. zunge aber-

irgendetwas lauft schief – erstrahlt nur kurz und

ist verbrutzelt – stinkt vor sich hin, erbarmlich.

von winter-vitaminen, motorschlitten, kann

wilde rede, bienenrede, -ie, -ede

-ein. vielleicht von schwarzem rachen.32

[the bees, returning from the gray fields / homewards to the bee barrack / in order to

pass border controls. in / order to dance, which, in bee language / should transmit something honeyalphabetical. / sang. at last impressed, the yakutean shaman // the red

iron with the tongue tongue though- / something goes crookedly – flashes only briefly




/ sizzles-stinks, pathetically / of winter vitamins, motor sledges, can speak / wild speech,

bee speech, -ie, -ede / -ein. perhaps of throat scorched by smoke.]

The episode of the bees bombing down the roads is a possible allusion to the

period immediately following the fall of the Berlin wall, when access by GDR citizens through the checkpoints of the Federal Republic was still controlled,

despite the official opening of the borders. The strident sounds of this transgres-

sion of internal German borders turn the last part of the poem into ‘wild

speech’ and word fragments, with bee speech dissolving into its components ‘ie-

ede- ein’. Against the obtuseness of borders and custom controls, Kling sets up

his intonations of vowels and an overcoming of borders inherited from Kurt

Schwitters’s idea of ‘Ubernationalismus’ or from Hugo Ball’s protest against

nationalism. Not by chance, Kling’s primary model of inspiration is Dada. As

Martin Puchner observes, this movement sought to establish an internationalism

best described by the figure of the network, a web organized not by nation

states or languages but by connections among cities.33 In his 1994 interview

with Hans-Jurgen Balmes, Kling underlines his ties to the Rhineland but also

his interest in a melting pot of voices and sounds that goes beyond his national

German territory and beyond one cultural historical reference.34 He achieves

this effect of transcending national linguistic frontiers through dialectal refer-

ences and a so-called ‘break of linguistic flux’ (‘Sprachflussunterbrechung’).

Instrumental for his lyric, these interruptions denote caesuras created through

rhythm as language, music and dance. A poem such as ‘Ach je!’ (in the volume

Auswertung der Flugdaten ) connotes by its very title onomatopoetic elan. Throughdialectal inflections, symmetries and chiasmus, the poem conveys a sense of

fatality but also playful resignation:

So war dat aber

bestemmp! Schwester!

Haar Dokteer!

Aber so war dat-

Dat war so-so war dat-

Zu Neuss am Rhein.35

[So was it meant / for sure! Nurse! / Mrrr Doctor! // So was it meant / Meant was to

be-so was it- / At Neuss on the Rhine.]

With this performative chiasmic poem Kling draws on a model of audience par-

ticipation that he delineates closely in ‘Wiener Vorlesung zur Literatur’.36 In this

lecture, he focuses on H. C. Artmann’s poetic practice in post-WWII Austria

and his cultivation of public forms of expression despite the trend towards soli-

tary poetic monologues. Inspired by Baroque and Surrealist practices, Artmann,

a prominent member of the Wiener Gruppe, composed poetic texts that resembled processes of ‘transmutation’, transcending through sound and move-

AR INA ROTARU3 7 4



old alchemical technique, where the poet serves as a ‘languages expert’

( Sprach(en)fachmann ) or word magician. This definition recalls Kling’s earlier

engagement with Hugo Ball and his play with paradoxical combinations of

sounds in an effort to retrieve the ‘inner alchemy of words’.37

With the volumes Fernhandel and Sondagen, Kling transfers the alchemical pro-

cesses of composition on tape and thematizes both the nature of the poetic

medium and its possibility of transmission. In this sense, he expands his explora-

tion of the history of the pre- and postwar avant-garde practices by re-valuating

their meaning for the 21st century: from processes of vocalic and consonantal

transmutation to a play on voices encrypted on a CD, designed for an even

wider audience. Whereas Pastior’s play with media had limited itself to poems

conceived for the radio, poems on cassettes such as the Horichte, and audioplays

such as ‘Beiss nicht in die Birne’ (Sudfunk, Stuttgart 1971 ) and ‘Reise um den

Mund in 80 Feldern’ (WDR, 1971 ), Kling brings the mediatic engagement astep further as he takes advantage of the possibilities offered by the ‘burned per-

formance’, the CD.38 Kling’s speculations about the nature of the poetic

medium are part of his aesthetic praxis as well.

‘Gaumensegel’ (Soft Palate) from Sondagen reads:

die welle dagegen schlagt

ins komplizierte ohr. fluten. gedicht ist: kennungsdienst;

das sagst mir du, mein brandungsgehor. tondokumente

der wind, der wind/das himmlische kind.39

[the wave beats instead / against the complicated ear. flutes. the poem is a service of

information / that is what you tell me, my aural rock. audio documents // the wind, the

wind/the godly child .]

On the CD, the voice of the poet mimics the various tonalities of voices in the

poem. Kling’s poem begins in the palate and from there transfers its listening

data to an interested audience. The same preoccupation with the process of

poetic creation and reception can be found in Pastior who, in his third

Frankfurt lecture, emphasizes the various degrees of correspondence betweenthe larynx and the ear, the poem’s letters and the eye, the auctorial intention

and reception by the reader ( US [ 3 ], p. 77 ). A concern with the physical side of

reader reception unites the two poets through a joint performative intention.

Kling’s and Pastior’s poetry does not just illustrate processes of perception, dia-

logues on poetry or political themes. Their poetry also mimics these processes

through a recasting of the lyric subject as medium of transmission. Ultimately,

the two poets embody what Haraldo de Campos calls a ‘post-utopian’ poetry,

which represents the chance of poetry to dig into the resources, promises and

contradictions left behind by the historical and post-War avant-gardes and culti-vate them while focusing on the present day and its new media.40 A vigorous

i l f th t d f th t t d it i h d




in current German poems as well as in sounds located on the peripheries of

language and space.

Department of German StudiesCornell University

Ithaca, NY 14853

U.S.A.

[email protected]

N O T E S

1Michael Braun, Die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur. Eine Einfu hrung (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:

Bohlau Verlag, 2010 ), pp. 141 – 76.2

See Gerhard Falkner, ‘Baumfallen. Zur Phanomenologie des Niedermachens in derdeutschen Literaturkritik am Beispiel Michael Brauns und des Bandes “Lyrik von Jetzt”’, Ndl , 2

( 2004 ), 121 – 31.3

Kling and Pastior have corresponded on the subject of poetry and paid tribute to each otheron several occasions. For reasons of space, however, this article restricts itself to their poetry andpoetic affinities.

4Harry Matthews, ‘Oskar oulipotisch’, Text þ Kritik , 186 ( 2010 ), 47 – 49.

5See Hermann Korte, Deutschsprachige Lyrik seit 1945, 2nd edn (Stuttgart and Weimar:

J. B. Metzler, 2004 ), p. 260.6

Four volumes have been published so far: Vol. 1: ‘. . . sage, du habest es rauschen gehoert’,ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006 ); Vol. 2: ‘. . . Jetzt kann man schreiben

was man will’, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003 ); Vol. 3: ‘. . .

Minze Minzeflaumiran schpektrum’, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004 ); Vol. 4, ‘. . . wasin der Mitte zu wachsen anfaengt’, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008 ).

7Following in Jorg Drews’s steps and his article on ‘Selbsterfahrung und neue Subjektivitat in

der Lyrik’, in Lyrik-Katalog Bundesrepublik Gedichte: Biographien: Statements, ed. by Jan Hans, Uwe Hermsand Ralf Thenior (Munich: Goldmann Verlag, 1979 ), pp. 453 – 62, Korte sketches a succession of phases in German poetry, where he distinguishes a lyric of subjectivity in the 1970s and a return totraditional forms in the 1980s. He attributes the development of a lyric of subjectivity to the need of the poet, or creator, to withdraw into a private sphere after the turmoil of 1968. Korte does not con-trast the notion of subjectivity in the 1970s with the notion of mediality or the publicization of thepoet through performances and CDs in the 1990s, but distinguishes rather between the concept of subjectivity and the notion of engagement with language as defining features of poetry since 1989.Since I think that this engagement with language or reflexivity is terminologically very close to alyric of subjectivity, I prefer to use the terms ‘mediality’ or ‘medialization’, which render moreclearly the purported overcoming of the ‘lyric subject’ through media. See Hermann Korte, Deutschsprachige Lyrik seit 1945, 2nd edn (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2004 ), pp. 168 – 293.

8Thomas Kling, ‘Zu den deutschprachigen Avantgarden’, in Botenstoffe (Cologne: DuMont

Verlag, 2001 ), pp. 9 – 32.9

For Oskar Pastior’s series of five poetry lectures presented in Frankfurt between 11 Januaryand 8 February 1994, see Das Unding an sich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994 ). The lec-tures are untitled but numbered and dated. All translations are my own. Further references will begiven in the text as US followed by lecture and page numbers. This quotation, US ( 1 ), p. 16.

10In US ( 3 ), Pastior expands on the impossibility of reducing the text to music or the music to a

conceptual frame (p. 76 ).11

See Thomas Kling, ‘Hugo Ball. Fruhe Performance’, in Itinerar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,6) Th Kli ‘Z d d t h hi A t d ’ i B t t ff

AR INA ROTARU3 7 6



12Kling, ‘Zu den deutschsprachigen Avantgarden’, p. 19.

13See ‘Vom geknickten Umgang mit Texten und Personen’, in ‘. . . was in der Mitte zu wachsen

anfangt’, pp. 341 – 50 ( p. 349 ).14

Oskar Pastior, Der krimgothische Fa cher. Lieder und Balladen. Mit 15 Bildtafeln des Autors (Erlangen:

Verlag Klaus G. Renner, 1978 ), pp. 103104. In US ( 3 ), Pastior also points retrospectively to hisnotion of the Crimean-Gothic as a parody of East–West relations (p. 68 ).

15Oskar Pastior, Das Horen des Genitivs (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1997 ), p. 10.

16Pastior’s reference to zero versus hiatus differs from the concrete poets’ focus on zero as

‘object of concentration minus its disturbing past inheritance’. See eugen gomringer, ‘konkretepoesie und zero’, in theorie der konkreten poesie. texte und manifeste. 1954 – 97, Vol. 2 (Vienna: Spitter, 1997 ),pp. 115 – 18 ( p. 116 ). Pastior’s focus is not on the historical burden of the past but rather on its sonicpotential and articulation.

17Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1972 ), p. 87.18

Aage Hansen-Love, ‘Neoprimitivismus a la russe’ (unpublished paper distributed at the sym-

posium ‘Das literarische Primitivismus im fruhen 20. Jhd.’, Freie Uni, Berlin, 19 – 20 November2010 ).

19See in particular US ( 2 ), p. 40. Here Pastior talks about the genre he invented,

‘Gedichtgedichte’ (poemspoems) as self-generating lyric machines that anticipate the logical andsyntactic patterns of web networks (emphasis added).

20Oskar Pastior, Vokalisen und Gimpfelstifte (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992 ),

p. 107.21

Northrop Frye, Sound and Poetry (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1956 ),p. xiii.

22Oskar Pastior quoted in Christoph Meckel, Ausku nfte von und u ber Oskar Pastior. Fussnoten zur

neueren deutschen Literatur , Vol. 5, ed. by Wulf Segebrecht (Bamberg: Arbeitsbereich der neueren

deutschen Literatur, 1985 ), p. 13.23

Wolfgang Asholt, ‘Avantgardistische Selbstkritik’, in Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer. Avantgarde-Avabtgardekiritk-Avantgardeforschung , ed. by Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fahnders (Atlanta,GA: Rodopi, 2000 ), pp. 97 – 120 ( p. 115 ).

24See eugen gomringer, ‘Vom Vers zur Konstellation. Zweck und Form einer neuen Dichtung’

( 1954 ), in konkrete poesie (Ingolstadt: Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, 1992 ), n.p. Members of the Viennagroup (Gerhard Ruhm, Konrad Bayer, Friedrich Achleitner, Oswald Wiener, Hans Carl Artmann), aliterary group formed in the 1950s, experimented with different, non-literary media (the white page,images of the body in performance or montage patterns from everyday language). Central to theirliterary practice is the question of reference; language ends up pointing self-referentially at the veryprocess of reference, while revealing the bare grid of paradigmatic, syntagmatic, phonological ormorphological differences. See Bianca Theisen, Silenced Facts: Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003 ), p. 5.

25See Bernd Huppauf, ‘Das Unzeitgemasse der Avantgarden. Die Zeit, Avantgarden und die

Gegenwart’, in Asholt and Fahnders (eds), Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer , pp. 547 – 82.26

‘Ein schnelles Summen. Thomas Kling im Gesprach mit Hans-Jurgen Balmes und UrsEngeler’ (April 1994 ), in Botenstoffe, p. 203.

27Cf. Kling’s essay ‘Hugo Ball, Fruhe Performance’ and his ‘Sprachinstallation 2’, both in

Itinerar , 33.28

‘knirsch!’ in Thomas Kling, Gesammelte Gedichte 1981 –1993 (Frankfurt am Main: SuhrkampVerlag, 1994 ), p. 127.

29See Botenstoffe, pp. 28 – 29.

30

In Botenstoffe, Kling writes a special tribute to the god Thoth (pp. 128 – 29 ).31

Karen Leeder characterizes the 1980s as motivated by a tendency towards stagnation andl d id di ti i thi d Al d B ’ d fi iti f th




1980s as a return to form in the context of an ‘Anti-avantgarde’ impulse. See Schaltstelle. Neue deutsche Lyrik im Dialog , ed. by K. Leeder (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007 ), p. 5.

32‘Eine Hombroich-Elegie ( 2 )’, a poem in 21 parts, in Sondagen. Gedichte, with CD (Cologne:

DuMont, 2002 ), p. 95.33

Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avantgardes (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2006 ), p. 136.34

‘Ein schnelles Summen’, in Botenstoffe, p. 203.35

‘Ach je!’, in Thomas Kling, Auswertung der Flugdaten (Cologne: DuMont, 2005 ), p. 19.36

‘Totentanz, Fotomaterial. Wiener Vorlesung zur Literatur’, in Botenstoffe, pp. 70 – 93, esp.p. 76.

37Hugo Ball, entry from 24 June 1916, in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (New York: Viking

University Press, 1974 ), p. 71.38

For the Pastior reference, see Heute kann man schreiben was man will , p. 340. Here Pastiorexpands on his audioplays and his cycle of poems Ho richte (Listening Reports), which were primarilyconceived to be spoken. In this sense, the Horichte anticipate the Ho rbuch praised by Kling as the new

instrument for publicizing poetry. For the Kling reference, see ‘CD. Die gebrannte Performance’, in Botenstoffe, p. 102.

39‘Gaumensegel’, in Kling, Sondagen, p. 40.

40Haroldo de Campos, ‘Post-Utopische Poesie: Das Engagement der Gegenwart’, in Minima

Poetica, ed. by Joachim Sartorius (Cologne: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003 ), pp. 145 – 50( p. 146 ).

AR INA ROTARU3 7 8



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