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The relationship between poetry and cognition appears, at first glance, as hardly compelling as that of art and science, of feeling and thinking, or even of intuition and analysis. For this reason, its analysis is fundamentally concerned with questions from philosophical and literary criticism perspectives: Which forms of “cognition” are possible in poetry? In what way and in what forms can poetry also be a medium of generation and/or mediation of cognition, experience or even knowledge and truth? And which processes, matters, or “information” are thereby privileged? Are there subgenres of poetry, for example historical poetry, reflective poetry or didactic poetry, that are especially relevant as regards cognitive functions? And can cognition also be mediated through aura, Stimmung or experience?
Literature and thus also historical poetry want “not only to convey factual truth and to exhort subjective truthfulness, but also to give orientation for the – in whatever respect – correct or appropriate world behavior” (Lamping 2013: 65f.). The question of this paper is to what extent and how the 9/11-poems of Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein offer a specific counter-historiography beyond the dichotomies of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, in order to achieve a different level of knowledge. Due to the exhibited self-relatedness Grünbein presents not only in his essayistic pretext but also in his poem „September-Elegien“ mainly a subjective truthfulness rather than any certain orientation-knowledge. Kling’s historiographical-wrapped and complex instrumented poem „Manhattan Mundraum Zwei“ offers over-temporal, metaphysical-existential (counter-)truths and gives orientation beyond media-presented “facts” about 9/11.
This paper investigates how and to what extent the literary genre of the idyll lives on as part of the ‘new nature poetry.’ Following a conceptual, historical, and generic classification of the idyll, Thomas Kling’s „geschrebertes idyll, für mike feser“ is read to show, on the one hand, how skillfully and knowledgeably he unpacks the tradition. He not only plays in extenso with the genre’s characteristic features but also, on the other hand, includes in his “allotment garden idyll,” which can be read as an early example of Anthropocene poetry, astute and sharp-tongued ecological, social, medial, and historical critique. Despite his critical sensitivity to socially relevant themes, however, Kling presents a decidedly patriarchal self image, which today’s readers would probably find less readily acceptable and which distinguishes him from the most recent contemporary poetry.
