The articles presented in this volume deal with recent poetry and focus on the connection between politics, performativity, and the internet in multiple literatures and intercultural relations. Although the majority of these texts belong to the Russophone world, poetry from Serbia, Latvia, and China is also considered. The contributors demonstrate, on the one hand, how newer poetry softens genre distinctions and formally tends towards multimedia hybridization and, on the other, how it transcends or dissolves linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries.

The essay compares Inger Christensen’s (1935-2009) poetry and poetics with the work of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011). It tests the potential of comparison by asking what happens if we compare what might be the two most prominent women writers of Nordic post-war modernism, two writers whose paths have crossed over the years. The first half of the paper traces a shared constellation of motifs (eye/butterfly/death) within two books of poetry, Trotzig’s “Anima” (1982) and Christensen’s “Sommerfugledalen” (1991). The initial comparison of motifs leads to a shared poetics. It offers a trotzig’ian version of Inger Christensen’s version of the condition of secrecy and fundamental parallels in their philosophy of language and the subject. But it also points to a major difference between the real as a mystic category in Trotzig and Inger Christensen’s more seamless, lucid, and dreamlike style. Advancing further into a stylistic comparison the linguistic and visionary abundancy of Trotzig’s “Anima”-poems reveals an overlooked quality in Christensen’s: That Christensen’s poems are also luxurious, albeit, typically, with moderation. The balancing of sense and sensibility appears by comparison to be a key trait in her poetry, highlighting its classical inclination. The paper demonstrates how comparison makes its subject visible by way of the other, and how comparison points out new nuances or flavors in the texts as it opens a conversation between two major women writers of Nordic modernism.

Departing from Roland Barthes’ association of text and textile, and feminist theory on weaving as text production, this article analyzes the textile qualities of Inger Christensen’s “Letter in April” (1979) and Amalie Smith’s “Thread Ripper” (2020). In “Letter in April”, Christensen establishes a connection between writing and spinning or weaving through their shared temporality of varied repetition. In “Thread Ripper” Smith alludes to Christensen and makes of the continuity between text and textile not only the main theme of the book, but also its structuring principle. Through a materialist conception of the text, regarding it as a woven fabric, the article focuses on the textual patterns of the two works (stylistic figures in Christensen, graphic composition in Smith). The connection from Christensen to Smith leads to a further connection to ecocritical conceptions of weaving as no less than a cosmological principle. On a concluding note, the article argues that weaving is not only connecting, but also disconnecting, cutting.

In order to shed light on the important function Inger Christensen had for the German poetry scene in the 1990s and 2000s, the article examines texts by Thomas Kling and Oswald Egger. The central argument is that both Kling and Egger drew on Christensen’s sophisticated nature-philosophical inspired poetics in “det”/“das” to break away from an experimental poetry that is primarily interested in questions of language and media theory. Both seem to be particularly fascinated by Christensen’s attempt to think of the relationship between language and the world in terms of a chiastic entanglement, which shows clear traces of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. But despite this similarity, they react very differently to the poetological considerations of the Danish poet. Both do not adopt Christensen’s reflections uncritically but attempt to utilize them for their own aesthetic purposes.

Inger Christensen, maybe the most vividly received Danish writer in contemporary German poetry, is often discussed in the light of her poetry’s formal innovativeness. This paper will shift the focus on poetry’s relation to the world as another aspect repeatedly addressed by contemporary German poets when referring to Christensen’s work. Discussing three essays by Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, and Uljana Wolf this paper traces their approaches to Inger Christensen’s poetry with a particular interest in personal encounters with nature and real-world sensual experiences as the core and outset of Inger Christensen’s poetic writings. The paper tries to conceptualize this perspective on her poetry by referring to the Haiku as a form of poetry that depicts a sensual and affective experience of nature along with Roland Barthes related concept of tangibilia on the one hand and to the sociological concept of resonance as developed by Hartmut Rosa on the other.

Inger Christensen muss vielleicht als die bedeutendste dänische Dichterin der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten, die auch im deutschsprachigen Raum große Beachtung fand. Ihr Einfluss auf die gegenwärtige deutschsprachige und skandinavische Lyrik wird in diesem Band erstmalig untersucht. Die hier versammelten Beiträge folgen den Spuren Inger Christensens in den lyrischen und essayistischen Arbeiten von Thomas Kling, Nico Bleutge, Herta Müller, Oswald Egger, Pia Tafdrup, Mette Moestrup, Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, Uljana Wolf, Amalie Smith, Birgitta Trotzig und anderen. Dabei widmen sich die Studien sowohl Christensens sprachtheoretischen Reflexionen und den formalen Einflüssen ihres Werks und deren Transformationen in der Gegenwartslyrik als auch den thematischen Gegenständen ihrer Dichtung, insbesondere ihrem Naturkonzept und dessen Adaption in neueren ökokritischen Ansätzen.

In 2016, the Bulgarian poet and philologist Plamen Doynov initiated a poetic project called “The New Political Poetry” (NPP). Doynov presented examples of his new political poems at two readings in 2016 and 2019 and published “fragments of a manifesto” in his poetry collection “The Tyrants’ Ball” (2016). The NPP strives to overcome the trauma of politicized ideological writing in the communist era. This article analyzes Doynov’s NPP project against the background of a general tendency towards political engagement in literature that has recently emerged in Bulgaria as well as elsewhere in Europe and beyond. It posits that Doynov’s New Political Poetry, alongside other literary trends in contemporary Bulgaria, paradoxically addresses the political precisely by returning art to heightened cultural autonomy, and rejects the idea of engagement in a narrower sense.

The essay will compare Pushkin’s “Poltava” (1828) and Ivan Volkov’s “Mazepa” (2014), a counterargument to Pushkin’s text. Volkov’s poem not only demonstrates the topicality of Pushkin’s classic but also reveals the latter’s hidden layers of meaning. Both poems renew the tradition of the verse epic. However, they turn the foundation story, typical for the epic, towards tragedy, focusing on the fall of Ukraine rather than the success of Russia’s imperial gesture. Volkov reverses the dominant perspectives and advances the Ukrainian point of view, while Pushkin displays a double-voiced strategy that disrupts the ostensible political message. The heroic panegyric also becomes fragile: in both poems, neither Mazepa nor Peter are ‘masters’ of history. Furthermore, in both texts, the status and function of the omniscient poet as epic narrator is challenged and transformed. Pushkin, in particular, uses his narrator as a mask; yet, in so doing, he also invites the reader to regard the ‘author,’ ‘Pushkin,’ with greater scrutiny and makes him a device that structures the work as a whole. Finally, in both poems, Ukraine’s lost fight for independence in a past age reflects a lack of freedom within the Russian state. Pushkin’s and Volkov’s poems are thus not so much texts about history as they are agents of history. Where they expose that history as constructed, they appeal to a critical position that would interrogate the driving narratives and political forces of the present.

This article examines “China” in contemporary American poetry using the example of Timothy Yu’s poems, titled “Chinese Silence,” which rewrite and / or parody texts from the American literary canon as well as public communication. It proposes a hall-of-mirrors reading of these poems in order to show how Yu’s poems refer to, reflect on, and relocate other authors’ writing of “China.” It argues that Yu’s poems, instead of making claims for an authentic “China,” attempt to bring Chinese Americans’ lived experience into the American literary tradition.

This article gives an overview of the tradition of setting Japanese protest poetry to music since 1945 and examines the relationship between the socio-political movement, poetry and music. In particular, it deals with the origin and development of the Utagoe movement, established shortly after the World War II, as well as the musical adaptation of politically relevant poetry, which has its origin in the tradition of Brecht’s song. These forms of setting Japanese protest poetry to music are associated with the poetic-musical works that were written immediately after the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima in 2011.