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More than any other literary form, contemporary poetry is in transition: interspersed with narrative and dramatic genres, combining prose and verse, and even incorporating other media, such as visual arts, music, film, and digital technology. It shifts the borders between public and private spheres, aesthetic and discursive approaches, and producer and recipient. On the basis of case studies, this issue addresses the challenges of poetry in transition and stimulates new approaches in lyric theory and methodology.
A new genre has emerged in contemporary literature: the ‘novel in poems.’ This genre hybridizes the novel and poetry in order to construct characters and a plot through relatively autonomous poems in series. The ‘novel in poems’ appears in different subtypes, which can be categorized according to the following criteria: (1) the presence of one speaker versus several speakers, (2) the presence of a speaker as lyric protagonist and/or narrator, and (3) the presence of a blend of distinct modes of lyric, narrative, and dramatic representation in various forms of combination. Specific characteristics of the ‘novel in poems’ are: 1) variation of constituent poetic forms with different degrees of semantic autonomy and brevity; 2) hyper-structuring through symmetries, holism, and equivalences; 3) a tendency to differentiate mediating instances within the text; 4) the reduction or elimination of the narrator or of narrative principles and the use of an omnipresent textual subject; 5) the presence of metapoetic reflections on topics such as poetry and creativity; 6) an emphasis on voice, person, and subjectivity; 7) episodic plot construction through montage techniques and a tendency toward chronological order; 8) the predominance of present speech and action; 9) contradictions between the speaker as subject and addresser, via the lyric fiction of performativity, and the function of narration; 10) a necessity imposed upon the reader to reconstruct the plot and characters. This essay establishes three subtypes within the proposed genre: a lyric ‘novel in poems’ with one speaker (Irina Ermakova), a polyphonically narrative ‘novel in poems’ that combines third-person narration with several alterior speakers (Lana Hechtman Ayers), and, finally, a dramatic ‘novel in poems’ with shifting primary speakers (Glyn Maxwell).
Zum Geleit
(2019)
”Poetry and Cognition“ is a topic which could be regarded as paradigmatic for the objective of this journal: Exploring a phenomenon which primarily discloses itself to a transdisciplinary and polyperspectivic approach, extending across research areas defined by disciplines and subjects. The question of knowledge gained by and within poetry neither exclusively falls within the scope of a genuinely literary, philological or even lyricological research area, nor does it entirely belong into various fields of philosophy, such as aesthetics or epistemology, but requires for its discussion both, an approach from the perspective of specialised academic research on poetry as well as from an epistemological point of view.
Walter Benjamin developed his concept of the “aura” on the basis of the poetry of Baudelaire and applied this term to objects of art, nature, and man. Georg Picht transformed Benjamin’s aura-concept into a method of pre-rational knowledge forms, whose mediums includes foremost music, but also poetry and art. In modern nature poetry the varieties of aura cognition can be determined and described with the help of Benjamin’s and Picht’s concepts: Gennadij Ajgi creates poetic equivalents for the experience of nature-aura; Keijiro Suga makes a diagnosis of aura of areas of natural sites or landscapes and their historical transformation through war and nuclear catastrophe (Fukushima); Christian Lehnert translates auratic communication with nature in poetic conversations.
Zum Geleit
(2022)
In contemporary Russian poetry, a special movement has emerged that engages in political activism under the feminist banner. This form of political poetry aims less at criticism and subversion than at making a direct social impact. Poems are written as performative forms of social action and often with a concrete purpose. They aim to resist power and take the side of the oppressed. The poetic subject opens her voice and her body in solidarity with others or courageously opposes the establishment through provocation — even aggression.
Vorbemerkung
(2023)
Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge zum Thema Politik in der Gegenwartslyrik verschiedener Sprachen und Länder. Den Aufsätzen liegen Vorträge zugrunde, die im Rahmen von Workshops und Konferenzen der DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition: Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“ (2017-2023) gehalten wurden. Die Veranstaltungen fanden in den Jahren 2018-2019 statt – in einer Zeit, als weder die Corona-Pandemie noch der schreckliche Invasionskrieg Russlands in der Ukraine oder der Krieg im Gaza-Streifen absehbar waren.
Am 22. und 23. Oktober 2019 fand an der Universität Bergamo ein “Convegno internazionale” über „Europäische Naturlyrik nach 1945“ mit Forscher:innen aus Italien und Deutschland statt. Bei freundlichem Herbstwetter wurden „Gespräche über Bäume“ unternommen, die von Brechts bekanntem Vers über Celans Naturlyrik bis zur Legitimation eines solchen „Gesprächs“ reichten. Der Horizont der Diskussion wurde komparatistisch ausgezogen und erstreckte sich auf die französische, die luxemburgische, die englische, die italienische und die deutsche Naturdichtung. Angesichts der Ideenfülle der Beiträge entschieden sich die Initiator:innen der Tagung dazu, die Beiträge auf zwei Bände zu verteilen: auf einen Themenband über Bäume in der zeitgenössischen Naturlyrik1 und den vorliegenden Band, in den die über das Baum-Motiv hinauswachsenden Beiträge der Tagung Eingang gefunden haben. Die Konferenz sowie die beiden daraus hervorgegangenen Bände sind ein Ergebnis der Zusammenarbeit von Amelia Valtolina (Bergamo) und Michael Braun (Berlin) mit der an der Universität Trier angesiedelten DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe 2603 „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition. Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“.
Die Vorträge dieser Konferenz nahmen das Wechselspiel von Geschichte und Natur im poetischen Wort, die Dialektik von Romantisierung und Dämonisierung der Natur sowie die Doppelfunktion von Modernekritik und Zivilisationsmüdigkeit im Naturgedicht in den Blick. Es ging um die Fort- oder Neuschreibung von Traditionen und Genres sowie um die Poetik und Ästhetik des Naturgedichts im kulturellen und historischen Wandel. Entsprechend rückt der Titel des vorliegenden Bandes das immer wieder in der Diskussion unter den Vortra genden hervorgehobene Transitorische des Naturbegriffes ins Zentrum.
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.
Preliminary Note
(2024)
This volume brings together contributions addressing the intersections of political poetry, performativity, and the internet. The essays are based on presentations given at workshops and conferences organized by the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition: Poetic Forms of Dealing with Boundaries of Genre, Language, Culture and Society between Europe, Asia and America” (2017-2023). The conferences took place in 2018-2019, at a time when neither the coronavirus pandemic nor Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine were foreseeable, and the contributions have not been updated in light of these catastrophes. The articles presented here 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. Dr. Ekaterina Friedrichs and Ms. Lena Rosalin Schwarz were involved in preparing this publication for printing. We would like to thank them both for their careful review and wonderful cooperation.
