This essay discusses the relationship between Inger Christensen’s work and contemporary Danish eco-literature. Christensen can seem like a towering predecessor. Yet, the relationship is more complex than a question of anxiety of influence. This essay argues that Christensen and contemporary Danish literature exhibit differing ecological imaginaries, and that this becomes clear when one examines Christensen’s utopian writing, her heliocentric utopianism, of the late seventies and early eighties, and when one examines how ecological threats are depicted in her work. For Christensen, the paradigmatic threat to the world is the nuclear bomb and its excessive use of energy, for today’s literature it is the feedback loops of pollution, exemplified in the threat of climate change.

This article discusses the high regard for Danish poet Inger Christensen in Germany and her connection to the Künstlerhaus [Artists’ Residence] in Edenkoben, located in Rhineland-Palatinate. The Künstlerhaus serves as a cultural institution where international artists from various fields can reside and collaborate. Inger Christensen had strong connections with the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben and participated in its German-Danish poetry project. During her visits to Edenkoben, she wrote several poems. In an essay, the poet described Edenkoben’s landscape as paradise-like. This article, on the one hand, examines these texts in the context of Inger Christensen’s stay in Edenkoben. On the other, it sheds light on “Weg der Gedichte”, a project that stages Inger Christensen’s poem “Erinnerung an Edenkoben” in a public space around the Künstlerhaus, showcasing the role of poetry in rural settings and its ability to enhance the experience of nature and hiking.

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.