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Tag : poetry

Foto: gezett.de

18.11. Performance Ross Sutherland – Auftakt

20. November 2014 1 Kommentar Article

Foto: (c) gezett.de

Willkommen in der analogen Welt…

Nach einer mehrmonatigen Laufzeit des Projektes ¿Comment! Lesen ist schreiben ist lesen verlagerte sich am gestrigen Abend der Schauplatz Comment-Blog in das Literaturhaus lettrétage in Berlin-Kreuberg. Die meisten Teilnehmer_innen begegneten sich nun erstmalig außerhalb der digitalen Welt. Aus dem Namen, den man immer wieder in den Kommentaren gelesen hatte, wurde eine Person. Aus Kommentarantworten wurden Gespräche.

Für die Auftaktveranstaltung des Projektes gestaltete Kuratorin Simone Kornappel eine Rauminstallation, die den Übergang von der digitalen in die analoge Welt gestalterisch aufgriff. Betrat man die lettrétage, fand man sich in einer Zwischenwelt aus Text, Wort und Materialität wieder. Die Wände waren gefüllt mit tausenden Post-Its, sowohl handgeschrieben als auch gedruckt in verschiedenen Schrifttypen.

Auf dem Boden lagen zu Haufen geschichtete zerknüllte Papierberge. Gelöschte Posts?
An zwei Leinwänden waren jeweils eine live Twitter-Session und eine Diashow der im Projekt entstandenen Fotografien und Zeichnungen von Schülerinnen und Schülern abgespielt. Zu Beginn der Performance wurden Audioaufnahmen, ebenso Ergebnisse des Projekts, eingespielt.

 

Post-It: Hypertext? What is this? I’ve seen it on tumblr.

Neben dem schottischen Dichter Ross Sutherland saß auf der Bühne der Schriftsteller Konstantin Ames, der Sutherlands Gedichte für comment übersetzt hat. Im ersten Teil der Lesung lasen beide nacheinander ihre Versionen von Jean-Claude von Damme, Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love sowie Zangief. Aufmerksam hörte Sutherland dabei den deutschen Versionen seiner Gedichte  zu, schmunzelte an einzelnen Passagen. Sympathisch löste er zudem vor dem Vortrag einige Fragen auf, die sich die Schüler_innen in ihren Kommentaren zu seinen Gedichten gestellt hatten. Jean-Claude von Damme sei entgegen einiger Annahmen kein Gedicht über Sutherlands Vater, sondern durch den Film Streetfighter inspiriert. Er erkundigte sich auch, wer die Videospielreihe eigentlich kenne. Ein paar Arme hoben sich.

Nude III, A second opinion, Infinite Lives (Try, try, try again) wurden zudem um zwei Google-Translations-Versionen, auch hier wieder deutsch und englisch, ergänzt. Simone Kornappel und Catherine Hales haben in mehreren Schritten Sutherlands Gedichte von Google “manipulieren” lassen. Die Ergebnisse erlauben an vielen Stellen die Zuordnung zu ihrem Original. Begeisterung lösen jedoch vor allem jene Passagen aus, in denen Google unkonventionelle, innovative Bedeutungsräume schuf:

Und das ist nur, weil Gott die Kulturerbe-Forschung tröstet. (Richard Branson, Sutherland & Google)

 

Poetry is what gets lost in translation…

… hat Robert Frost einmal gesagt. Wenn man Lyrik wie ein barockes Gemälde betrachten möchte, kann man Frost nur zustimmen. Jeder Versuch, es abzuzeichnen, erscheint im Vergleich als billige Kopie. Doch wird der Raum um “das Gedicht” geöffnet, werden Übersetzungen als Interpretationen betrachtet, die Gedanken der Lesenden als Erweiterung des Gedichts; wenn begonnen wird, Texte weniger statisch und mehr dynamisch zu denken, so wird dieser neu-entstandene Text-Raum unendlich weit.

Im Projekt ¿Comment!   sind Sutherlands’ Gedichte gewissermaßen gewachsen. Zunächst digital. Und gestern Abend war es möglich, ihnen live beim Wachsen zuzuschauen.

Nach dem Ende der Lesung wurde von Frau Kornappel zum anschließenden Gespräch eingeladen. Sehr schade, dass die Anwesenden so schnell auseinander stoben. Ein paar mutige Schülerinnen sammelten sich jedoch nach der Lesung um Dichter Ross Sutherland. Was da wohl gefragt wurde?

 

von Susanne Klimroth

Tags: comment, Lettrétage, Performance, Poetry, Raum, Ross Sutherland, Simone Kornappel, Text
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100 Fragen an die Lyrik, Stefan Mesch

“Dogs are so tricky!” Does poetry matter? [Essay. Stefan Mesch]

10. November 2014 4 Kommentare Article

In September of 2014, Literaturhaus Lettrétage invited me to write about 7 poems of British author Ross Sutherland for “comment – lesenistschreiben”, a Berlin-based project that encouraged students and whole school courses to react to contemporary writers.

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Once I was done with my initial 7 statements, Literaturhaus Lettrétage solicited another, final text:

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Over three weeks in September and October, my assignment grew into this essay.

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It is written for (German) high school students and it has some links to Ross Sutherland and the “comment” project.

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Still: You don’t need to know anything about Ross or the project to enjoy my text. I worked with similar lists in the past (link 1, link 2, link 3), and if you want to syndicate this text and / or publish a German translation of it – please get in touch: smesch@gmx.net   

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“Dogs are so tricky!” Does poetry matter?

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Stefan Mesch

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01_I don’t know any people who read poetry… that aren’t poets themselves.

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02_Have you ever spent money on a poetry collection?

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03_Did you ever copy, photograph or forward a poem? They’re easy to pirate / collect / archive / spread around. Why aren’t we doing that – all the time?

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04_Why aren’t there poems in Happy Meals? On street corners? In every issue of Der Spiegel? Poetry doesn’t take much space: Why isn’t it more present in public life?

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05_What’s the use of studying poems in school?

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06_What’s the use of learning poems by heart?

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07_Would you rather read 10 poems by 10 people… or 10 poems by one poet? What’s the difference between reading the first poem by Ross Sutherland and the 7th? Does reading the 7th make you want to read another 7? Or buy one of his poetry collections?

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08_Would you rather meet someone who wrote poems – or someone who read them? Would you rather be known as a poet… or as a reader of poems?

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09_Where can you go to find new poetry? Where can you get specific, personal recommendations? What prizes, festivals, literary magazines, experts, curators, critics, websites and poetry publishers do you know… and trust / like?

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10_Why isn’t there a Netflix- or last.fm-like poetry recommendation streaming service that helps you curate a personal poetry stream?

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11_Why isn’t there a social cataloging site that lets you rate poems? And if there was: What would end up as their best-rated, most popular one? Plucky, affirmative, hopeful poems like Hermann Hesse’s „Stufen“? Christian / religious wisdom? Love poems? Limericks and comedy? Nostalgic rhymes for children?

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12_Imagine you wanted to learn about Japan. Or Poland. Would you learn more by reading 100 Japanese (or Polish) poems – or 100 pages of a novel? By looking at 100 adverts? Or 30 music videos? 100 pieces of photojournalism? What different things could you learn from each format?

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13_The more you know about a culture and a language, the better you’ll be able to understand the nuances of their poems. That being said: Would you rather read poems written by your cousin – or by someone with a completely different home, culture, background?

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14_If you had never heard of Ross Sutherland: Would you have noticed that these poems were written by a man? A young person? A Brit? A white person?

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15_As a German: When you read Ross Sutherland, are you reading “a poem” or “something British”? What stands out: Ross’ British-ness or Ross’ poems-as-poetry?

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16_Name three famous poets… who are still alive.

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17_Name one famous poet still alive… who is famous for his or her poetry: no novelists or playwrights or Bob Dylans who publish poetry on the side!

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18_Close your eyes. Imagine a male poet. Imagine a female poet. Who is younger? Funnier? Sexier? Smarter? More widely-read? Angrier? Dorkier? More confident? More serious? More respected?

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19_If poems are nowhere in our culture – why bother with them in the curriculum? Shouldn’t we study video games, instead?

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20_Are poems “nowhere in our culture”? If not: Where ARE they, actually?

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21_My poet friends seem angrier, more political and disenfranchised than my novelist friends. Maybe because they are used to getting the short end of the stick? Less recognition? Less money? Less respect?

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22_Why are novels more popular than poems, and why are the media more eager to praise and feature novelists? Has it always been that way, historically? Is there a way this could change?

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23_Are movies “more inviting” than novels? Are novels “easier” than poems? Why is poetry considered such a “difficult” and “problematic” format?

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24_Are “difficult” and “problematic” the same thing?

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25_Imagine a poetry reading at Literaturhaus Lettrétage: What would need to happen for you to buy a ticket? (Bilingual would be good. Verses on a projector would be good. Some sort of discussion and Q&A would be great! Also: guests with different positions and backgrounds. Diversity!)

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26_Poet Sabine Scho asks: Why do people enjoy dissing poetry?

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27_I’d counter: Why does poetry leave nearly everyone cold?

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28_It’s time-consuming to pick a favorite movie director, because sampling even one director’s work will take you 90+ minutes. It’s easy to buy a collection like „Lyrik von jetzt“ and start finding favorites. What are you waiting for?

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29_Are poems less present because they are hard to market and commodify? 10 years ago, “personal” cell phone ring tones were a gold mine. Could something similar happen to poems? A digital poetry gift service? A WhatsApp subscription store? Are poems on the fringe because no one has found a way to make quick money from them yet?

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30_But then: Hardly anyone makes money from webcomics, either. And THEY have a huge online presence and millions of passionate fans.

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31_This webcomic audience is pretty young, though: many tweens, teenagers and college students. Do poets reach these audiences? Is poetry TRYING to reach these audiences? Are there poems on Instagram? Poets on Vine? Are there tumblr-famous Young Adult poets I’ve never heard of?

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32_Sabine Scho loves that, because poetry is little-read, she can get crap past the radar: “There is no place you can go wilder, get ruder than in a poem. Their punk potential is enormous! To me, that is enough.” How can poets “go wild”? How would you “go wild” in a poem?

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33_Traditionally, poetry has often been a way to voice dissent and be political. Would poems be more popular if states forbid and outlawed them?

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34_If you had an urgent live-or-die message that had to reach many readers, would you sit down and write a poem? I can see how poetry is essential in regimes where no one can talk openly. But today? Here and now? Can’t we all be blunt? Write down what we really mean?

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35_Where’s the fun in NOT being blunt?

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36_How can poetry disrupt / object / challenge?

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37_Are there people who pirate poems? Should poems be free? Are there copyright fights over poetry? I know that there are fierce legal battles over every word Karl Valentin ever published: His heirs and copyright holders sued many, many people. If you help spread Karl Valentin’s work, chances are good that you will be sued. (Rightly so?)

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38_Are poems elitist? Are poems too complicated? Are poems like posh, sneaky parties in a room that takes 10 keys (and 20 years of education) to unlock? Does poetry get dissed because it’s not inclusive enough? IS poetry inclusive enough?

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39_German readers can compare Ross Sutherland’s original poems to their German “Nachdichtungen”. Personally, I felt that the original poems sounded harsher, more abrupt or less sentimental than their German “Nachdichtungen”. Why? Because to Germans, English often sounds like the “edgier”, less sentimental language?

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40_How does translation change a poem’s tone and atmosphere? As a poet, would you be okay with these tonal changes to your texts? As a reader, do you prefer all original versions to their German “Nachdichtung”?

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41_Would you rather be talented enough to write excellent poems… or have the talent to understand other people’s poetry?

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42_Imagine a magician that sells talent: What should be his price range for a „If I write poems, they will turn out great“ talent? Which other talents would be near that range? What would you sacrifice or invest to create great poetry yourself?

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43_Few people have the money and the resources to finish a movie. Few people have the time and energy to finish a novel. A lot of people can try and write some poems: Why do most of them stop in their 20s?

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44_A publisher friend once lamented that if all people who had written poems as teenagers would be buying new poems today, poetry would be mainstream. Do people love writing poems more than they love reading them?

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45_How would you pick your own poem’s images and topics? Would you research? How? What do you think has been the kernel of most poetry: an idea? A feeling? An impulse? I feel like Ross Sutherland wants to amuse and surprise / astonish.

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46_Do you think classic poems, the ones you read in school, were „more universal“, „aged better“?

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47_On Amazon and rating sites like Goodreads, poetry collections get very high scores: People give more stars to nonfiction, experimental books, “difficult formats” than to novels. But if these “difficult formats” are so much fun – why is hardly anyone reading them? Is there prestige in posting high ratings for “difficult” books? Do you feel rewarded when you read “difficult” poems? If you told everyone in your life that you loved poetry: Who would react? How?

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48_Imagine you could be known by every school kid for the next 100 years for one poem that will be taught everywhere: What would your poem be about?

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49_What’s the best age to read Ross Sutherland’s poems? Does it help to be male? Does it help to be British? Does it help to be born in 1979, be white, know video games etc.? Do his poems have a target audience?

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50_”Why is poetry seen as a problem child? You won’t get rich from dogwalking either – and still, no one says: ‘Dogs are so tricky! There’s something wrong with dogs.’” (Sabine Scho)

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51_How can we be sure that Ross is a true, “professional” poet? What sets him apart from a hobby poet? Is that a valid distinction – is it important?

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52_In an interview, Ross recommends the “big poetry clubs” of Great Britain. “Nights such as Book Slam, OneTaste and Homework in London, Hammer and Tongue in Brighton, Big Word in Edinburgh.” Do places like that exist in Germany? Where can you go to discover young poets? Is there a difference between “poet” and “poetry slam contestant”?

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53_There is a lot of humor in Ross’ poems. I love that – because if you pay for comedy, you want to laugh. Throughout a comedic performance, you might ask: “Is this funny enough? Am I getting what I came for?”. Ross can afford to be more elegant, relaxed – because his humor comes as an extra, an unexpected bonus: It’s not the “main attraction”. Are Ross’ texts funny because it’s not their main goal to be funny?

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54_What is their main goal? Do they achieve it?

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55_Is this a question that should be asked? Can it be answered by readers?

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56_I wish that lots of poetry had links and footnotes – like the ones Simone Kornappel used to complicate and remix Ross’ “Richard Branson” poem.

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57_Poets might reply: “But poetry has links already! The title ‘Richard Branson’ makes you think of Richard Branson! Katharina Schultens’ ‘gorgos portofolio’ poems recall the gorgons of Greek myth. There are huge semi-hidden references in nearly every poem: Try to uncover these connections yourself! You want ‘hyperlink literature’? Poems are hyper-hyperlinked!”

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58_My reservation here is that I can easily recognize a reference like “Zangief” because I grew up playing “Street Fighter II”. I have huge problems with a reference like “Hyperion” because I’m not a scholar of ancient Greece – or an upper-class school boy at a humanistic private school in Vienna, ca. 1880. What is the difference between poems named “Menelaus” and “Lindsay Lohan”? Can I love one – but feel bored and excluded by the other?

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59_If Katharina Schultens wrote a “Gorgos Portfolio” NOVEL, I’d buy it. Because novels taught and reassured me that most background facts I’ll need to know in order to enjoy them are right there on the pages – like toys that come with batteries included. Poems often seem like reactions, comments, references and replies: meta-narration, second-degree writing, texts that needs other text, frustrating on its own. Beiträge zweiter Ordnung.

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60_When I started reading Ross Sutherland’s poetry, I didn’t know about his goals or personal history, his self-image or the standards to which he holds his work. In my analysis, I approached his poems as carefully constructed, deliberately literary texts; delicate strings of words where every nuance matters. How else could poetry be approached? Are we more careful and nervous around poems? Are we too careful? Frightened?

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61_I’m much less respectful with (…or intimidated by) songs: Once I hear music, I feel confident enough to say „These are smart lyrics. These are trite lyrics!“ To me, this comes easier because music brings so many extra layers of information – especially online: the instruments, the album artwork, musicians and their stage personae, the videos and live performances. I feel competent around songs. They are easy to scrutinize. Poems, on the other hand, often seem distant, hermetic, guarded, solipsistic or opaque. They make me turn away and shrug: “Why bother? Who am I to criticize?”

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62_Do you want to know what Ross looks like? If he sleeps with men or with women? If he wins awards? Had a happy childhood? If he’s a not-very-rich poet – or a starving one? Does all this help you understand (and appreciate) his work?

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63_Do you want to know Ross’ intentions? Each poem’s backstory and making-of? His insecurities, personal verdicts and the walkthroughs, user’s guides, interpretations and cheat codes he has been handing out to explain his work?

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64_Should poems “work on their own” – or is that kind of extra information half the fun? Do you wish each poem came with a text about the author’s intentions? Or does that show that Ross’ poems are too meek to stand for themselves?

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65_Why should poetry “stand for itself”? A lot of poets are excellent at writing about their work: Much better than most novelists (…or singers). I love reading poetry-related essays, analysis and discourse in places like Lyrikkritik.de or BELLA triste. In fact, I love these poetry essays much more than I love most poetry!

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66_Compared to journalists and novelists, poets often seem more social, open, more professional and eager-to-network: They are doing performances and discussions, translations and curating work, they write essays and give workshops. Is it because they HAVE to – in order to make a living? Because a community as small as the poetry scene needs strong bonds and a carefully maintained system of give-and-take? Or is their work as poets giving them skills to branch out, connect, experiment, adapt?

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67_Name five things you value in a poem. Here are mine:

1. ambivalence

2. ambition

3. emotion

4. curiosity

5. imagery that, for a while, won’t leave my head

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68_Is it okay if they aren’t there? Some of them? All of them?

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69_Can a poem be too short? Too long? Are two words a poem? One? To me, Ross’ “Experiment to determine the Existence of Love” felt too long – but more because it wasn’t strong / complex enough to hold my interest through all these stanzas.

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70_Is there something a poem shouldn’t be? Didactic? Ignorant? Racist? Branded / commercial? Boring?

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71_I can imagine a dangerous book, a dangerous movie. But I have trouble picturing a dangerous poem – besides ones that reproduce or make light of intolerance: propaganda, hateful or cruel slogans.

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72_That being said: I feel like Ross’ poems are extremely harmless.

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73_Music has rhythms. Paintings have color schemes. But modern poetry mostly did away with rhymes. Are rhymes too banal? Playful? Were they essential to poetry before? Until when? What is essential to today’s poetry?

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74_What makes a text qualify as a poem?

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75_Poetry collections are rather thin. Poems are rather short. Neither have to be: There are reasons that most feature films are long enough to warrant a trip to the cinema. That most paintings are smaller than a garage. That most albums take less than 80 minutes to play. But is there a reason that most poems fit on one or two pages?

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76_I’d love to see poems use pictures, not words. But I guess that would be too… expensive? Hard to stage? Anyone all over the world can write „a sad, pale pink shirt on a frozen riverbank“. But it would take lots of resources to find the ideal shirt – and place it on the ideal riverbank. Still: If there are graphic novels – why aren’t there graphic poems? Sequential images, structured and layered like written poetry?

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77_Because no matter how clear and simple a poet’s words – it’s hard to make people see the “correct” pale pink shirt: Is it frustrating to describe a shirt and have your readers picture 1000 different ones?

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78_I lost a lot of faith in Ross-the-Poet when I saw his poetry films on Youtube: They seemed much simpler, flatter, easy to dismiss – like student projects finished in a rush because everyone involved wanted to go and play air hockey instead. Our standards are rising: It’s often excruciating to manage Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, to blog and be camera-ready and professional if you’re a single artist / freelancer. Still: Ross’ videos looked so haphazard and careless that I wondered how much care this same person invested in their poetry. (Is this a fair question, though? How many poets should we judge by their Youtube accounts?)

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79_”The poems are the bricks, the performance is the mortar”, Ross writes about his career on stage: “Poetry comes alive for me in those situations. To see my poems dead on the page… they look a little lost.” Do you agree? How “dead” and “lost” are Ross’ poems?

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80_What are we missing if we discuss Ross’ work as nothing but text? Imagine that someone stole Madonna’s song lyrics and posted them online, without any context or musical cues: If we talk about these words but stay ignorant about their performer, the stage, their delivery… how much can we really understand?

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81_And what if I’m wrong: What if Ross Sutherland’s biggest goal IS the laughter? The applause? What if he writes poetry to make college-aged crowds in bars cheer and laugh? Would that still be “poetry”? Why wouldn’t it?

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82_I expect poets to place each word with care (…but then: maybe I’m too conventional: it must be okay for poets to be rash, silly and careless, too!). Still – I love texts, essays, novels, translations, tweets by poets because they pick better, more thought- and colorful words than anyone else – and I wonder if this is becoming more important for many non-poets, too: How? Where? What can poets teach us?

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83_All German children spend 9+ years in school. They have more than 9,000 hours of classes. How many of these classes should be about poetry? Poetry writing? Poetry history? Poetry analysis?

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84_I don’t remember if, in 13 years of Deutschunterricht, we ever saw a poem by a non-German author. Even today, I could not name 5 to 10 French, Spanish or Italian poets. We had no Milton in school. No Dante. Plath, cummings, Dickinson and Blake only showed up in my A-Level English class / Englisch-LK.

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85_Because poets know so well how to craft colorful, intelligent, suprising and precise sentences… what kind of jobs or university courses could profit from a poetry-writing class or workshop? Who could learn? And what? Teachers? Copywriters? Journalists? Anyone talking or writing?

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86_Once I google „Why is poetry important“, I get these points and ideas:

language awareness

critical analysis

creativity and enthusiasm

and, in ALL German results: “to talk about the feelings that you can’t express otherwise”

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87_You meet an interesting person. Now… you might want to take a portrait. Do an interview. Write a novel! Once you hear a song, you might want to sing your own version. I understand how people say: “I saw something. It challenged me – and made me want to create a play, a movie, a game, an essay, an intervention.” But what needs to happen to make a poet say: „Oh! I want to take this stimulus… and describe it in ambivalent language in an ambivalent way“…? Poems seems like a more indirect, long-winded, complicated way to react to the world than most other artistic responses.

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88_Because despite all well-picked words, poetry often seeks ambivalence: Words can mean two or three exclusive things. There can be friction and frightening gaps. Where else is that kind of paradox, unclear language possible – and encouraged?

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89_If there’s not one single correct interpretation to a poem… why bother interpreting at all? If anything can mean two or three different things… why go play detective? With most poems, we will never find out the murderer’s motif. Or the poet’s “intention”…

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90_Fantasy literature is much more popular in rural areas: The German publisher of “Lord of the Rings” said that most of their fan mail came from remote German villages. If fantasy is a “country thing” – is science fiction a “city thing”? What about poetry: Are the classic poems (Nature! Romance! Weather!) more popular with rural people? Is modern poetry a “city thing” – colder, fractured and dense?

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91_15 years ago, when German journalist Else Buschheuer started writing about her love for “Sex and the City”, a lot of horrible women approached her and cheered “Yes! I love that show, too! We have so much in common”. Buschheuer says that she has never felt “in worse company” than after she championed “Sex and the City”. Do you know someone who loves poetry? What are they like? Would you enjoy their company? Become “one of them”?

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92_Do you think Ross Sutherland loves poetry? I studied Creative Writing – but many students around me didn’t love books and read very little. What they loved was being a writer. The heroism. The rebellion. The scrappy underdog allure.

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93_I really don’t know anyone who LOVES poems the way many of my friends LOVE novels: Only publishers of poetry… who say that poetry is important. And many poets writing about their poetry friends. But everyone has skin in the game – and everyone seems more passionate about the “importance of poetry” than they are about actual, living poets: “poetry” is beloved. Actual, living poets, though? They are treated like rare birds. Or whales. You want them to survive. But you don’t want them to stay on your couch.

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94_As a reader and literature critic, I often roll my eyes when I discuss publishing: like many readers and critics, I think that there are too many bad or overhyped books – while the good ones are hard to find. On pages like Lyrikzeitung.com, most poets sound equally exhausted about poetry – but while I feel that there is too much [overhyped fiction], most poets feel overlooked. Stefan: „Don’t we spend too much time talking about books that might not be worth that attention?” Poets: „Poetry needs more attention! Now!” I feel like most poets love „all of poetry“ while I definitely don’t love „all of literature“. My aim is selection. Their aim is… promotion? Protection? Survival?

[In German, “Selektion” is a phrase that has strong Nazi implications. If you’re a critic, please don’t talk about “Selektion”.]

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95_How would this discussion, the whole perception of poetry, change if poems became popular again? If there was money for poets and publishers and more people interested in reading and listening to poetry? Would the poems change? Would the discussions change? Would happiness increase?

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96_How can you support poetry? How can you help make poems more visible?

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97_Many authors write down new and little-used words. What would happen if you kept a file and updated it for a full year? How would it change you? Would it be worth your time?

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98_Why would Ross partake in the “comment”-project? Would you enjoy reading hundreds of comments, responses, critiques and conflicting ideas about your work?

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99_I can imagine Ross saying „Wow. There were three German scholar guys [Kristoffer Cornils, Konstantin Ames and me: the Profileser] who immediately started googling shit like ‘School of Broken Necks’ like THAT was the most important aspect of my poetry.” I think that Ross would enjoy a more relaxed, less scholarly approach to his work. Any ideas?

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100_Are poems inspiring? Movies and TV shows make me empathize with difficult characters. Video games inspire me to work hard – or explore. Novels inspire me to shape a story, connect the dots and focus on bigger pictures. Poems, if anything, inspire me to reflect the way I have been using words.

Because every one of these little fuckers… matters. So much.

Tags: 100 Fragen an die Lyrik, English, Essay, Poetry, Ross Sutherland, Sabine Scho, Simone Kornappel
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balpbek zu: A Second Opinion

2. Oktober 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Loving both of you
is killing me.

Thinking about both of you at the same time
destroys me.

I don’t know
who I am loving.

Mum says that
the second one is the right one.

But when the second one
is the right one…

Why do I still love
the first one ?

(Berna)

Tags: a second opinion, Advices, comment, Gedicht, love, Lyrik, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland
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Jean-Claude Van Damme 2: Now Days Unawareness

2. Oktober 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Refering to the poem Jean-Claude Van Damme:

 

Years after having watched
this way too cheesy movie

for the very first time,
I ask myself

is it really OK to lose?
To get your victory stolen

away only a second
before achieving it?

In fact, my dad back then
just taught me
to wait for the sequel
when the black screen

fades into the colorful,
brutal world, where he
once had lost his fight.
Because, in case you lose:
Normal boring guys may
never get their own story,
but J-CVD can’t always
spawn straight out of nowhere
and wipe out every
little effort with a split.

Speaking of spawning,
my kill/death ratio has
noticeably suffered.

Better get back
focusing on my console
and yell at my new ”dad”.
Call of Duty.

 

by Johannes

Tags: comment, Gedicht, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lettrétage, Lyrik, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland, Schüler
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Ross Sutherland – notes on “Richard Branson”

29. September 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Hello this is Ross Sutherland. I’m here to give some thoughts on my poem “Richard Branson”. Though they are just thoughts! Please feel free to ignore them if they contradict your own thoughts.

This is a poem about money. As you can imagine, most people who call themselves a poet don’t take home much of a salary. For work, I teach poetry freelance in schools, prisons, community centres, etc. Work comes in fits and bursts, punctuated by long periods of poverty.

I lived for many years in Cambridge England. Cambridge is a very affluent city. Sometimes it’s hard to live in a place like that. My poetry notebooks are full of passive aggressive comments about money.

In this poem, I collaged together a series of these notebook pages into a single poem. There’s not really an argument here. I’m just trying to get across that feeling of stasis & powerlessness that comes from being broke.

Recently I’ve become interested in the ‘Flarf’ movement, which uses a cut-up technique to violently switch between conflicting registers of language. The music that drives Flarf tends to be sharp, punky. There’s humour in the violence as well, but it’s the kind of laughing that rises from the stalls of horror films. Laughter from shock.

I’m trying to use a bit of the Flarf technique in this poem. My thoughts are jumbled up, mixed in with quotations and snippets of television. I’m not trying to confuse the reader, I’m just trying to use collage to create a feeling.

This poem postulates a problem, but it offers no solutions! Then again, I’m suspicious of any poem that tries to offer a solution to an argument. A poem is a great way of explaining a problem (after all, a poem can hold two contradictory opinions without collapsing them!). But poetry feels like a terrible way to solve a problem. Poetry is too slippery, too manipulative!

ps. I loved Simone Kornappel’s hyperlinked version of the poem! It felt like the perfect response (another collage, no less). I also kinda prefer it to my original. I know very little about the Internet Poetry movement and the use of hyperlinks in poetry, but I’m all for it.

Man I sound old.

Finally, the title is a reference to the line, “a millionaire’s hairstyle / is trapped in the era / they first made their money.” To prove my point, here’s a tumblr of Richard Branson over the ages. Some things never change:

http://richardbransonpickingupwomen.tumblr.com/

If you have any thoughts on the poem, I’d love to hear them! Good, bad, indifferent. Fine! I can take it I promise.

Tags: comment, Gedicht, Lettrétage, Lyrik, Poetry, Richard Branson, Ross Sutherland
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Ross Sutherland- notes on Nude III

29. September 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Hi this is Ross Sutherland! The poet. Not to be mistaken for Ross Sutherland the rugby team.

In fact there are quite a few other Ross Sutherlands. I follow their activity closely. To begin with, I did it by accident (mostly searching for my own name on Twitter). Then I began to follow them deliberately. It’s hard to separate my name from my ego- I can’t help but imagine that these Ross Sutherlands are other versions of me, almost as if I reached a crossroads and split myself onto parallel timelines. One of me became a pastor in Australia. Another version became this guy. The dullness of a name hides multitudes.

This is similar to the thought that starts “Nude III”. My university (UEA in Norwich) was one of three identical buildings, made by the same architect. All three are brick-for-brick identical- what else connects those buildings?

Nude III was part of a sequence of twelve poems. I was interested in re-imagining the concept of ‘the nude’ in art. The nude is often used as a metaphor for the paradox of ‘writing honestly’. I wanted to suggest that “the more layers we remove, the more complicated an object becomes.” – we do not reach a pure, natural centre, but something denser, more difficult.

To quote myself from ‘Nude I’:

A teacher once told me that poetry aspires

to the simplicity of the nude.

To be naked, he said, was to speak without footnotes.

Though in my opinion a naked person

usually has more explaining to do than anyone.

The first poem of the sequence was about a nude person, but after that, the sequence begins to drift off to imagine other nude objects/scenes: an audience, a hospital, a skyscraper, etc, all with their ‘outer layer’ removed. Nude III was my attempt to apply this process to my old university. To try and see what is going on beneath the surface.

The subject of the poem is the university itself. I’ve tried to imagine the university as if it was a person (or more accurately, a brain). The small scenes that I included were supposed to feel a little like ‘dreams’ – small memories, floating down the empty halls.

But these little thoughts don’t add up to a whole. There’s no message to be gleamed from the end, except for a sense of pleasant disintegration. Once the surface/purpose of the university is removed, the people inside it become lost, pointless, dreamlike.

This sequence of poems was really inspired by David Berman. In particular, The Charm of 5:30. I’ve aped Berman’s style a lot here. I love the type of world that Berman creates. Sometimes it feels like he’s just freewheeling lines from his notebook, but then I think -so what? A poem doesn’t have to go somewhere. It just has to exist, in a singular moment, and own that feeling.

If you’ve got any thoughts about this poem, I’d love to hear them! I’m here for the good and the bad :)

Tags: comment, Gedicht, Lettrétage, Nude III, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland
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Ross Sutherland- notes on Jean Claude Van Damme

29. September 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Hello this is Ross Sutherland, the author of Jean Claude Van Damme. I’m here to talk a little more about it.

It’s quite satisfying writing these notes! I’m enjoying it a lot. Usually, if I was performing these poems onstage, I would give an introduction that would cover quite a lot of this information.

Agh, but maybe that means that the poems themselves are incomplete! If you need notes to enjoy it, then that looks like a failure of the poem itself! The poem should have found a way to *include* the notes!

This is extremely difficult. Because writing poems is only part of the craft. The poems are the bricks, the performance is the mortar. Whenever I am thinking about poems, I’m thinking about them as part of a live performance, which comes with notes, asides, anecdotes, etc. Poetry comes alive for me in those situations.  To see my poems dead on the page… they look a little lost.

I wrote JCVD when I was a teenager. Maybe 16 or 17 years old. That was just a first draft, and I have reworked this poem many many times over! But the end has always been exactly the same. I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to write a poem that helped me apologise to my dad.

I used to demonise my dad. Things happened in our family and I held him responsible. I made him the villain. When I discovered that my dad was taking drugs, I wanted to lay every blame at his feet. It took time to forgive him, to realise that every parent is human. We all make mistakes.

I wanted to write about this in poetry, but didn’t feel comfortable telling such a personal story onstage. In fact, I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself in my art. My new theatre show, Standby For Tape-Back-Up, is the first time I’ve really ever talked about myself honestly and personally onstage. And even then, I’m STILL using a cypher of pop culture. It’s a security blanket, I guess. It’s also a way to lower people’s guard- to discover a mutual safe territory, before attempting to poke beneath the surface.

I remember when Raul Julia died. His last acting role was as the villain M Bison in Street Fighter the Movie (it’s a terrible film). I found myself wondering what it was like to be Raul Julia’s child. I imagined a shelf, containing all of his father’s films, including Street Fighter The Movie at the end. In Julia’s last onscreen minute, he gets kicked into a wall of televisions by Jean Claude Van Damme (who chirps, “you’re off the air- permanently”). How could Raul Julia’s child bear to watch such a moment?

Over time, these two stories merged: Raul Julia as M Bison as my father. This was my inroad into discussing my own life. How father/son relationships can become a pantomime. How we learn to forgive those that seem unforgiveable. How real life and fiction are intertwined, and how we can use this to find solace.

Re: the poem’s title. Why call it Jean Claude Van Damme?  What does Van Damme symbolise in this extended metaphor? It’s not me fighting my dad, that’s for sure. I’m just watching the action on TV. Van Damme is the unstoppable force that’s coming for all of us. He’s the reason we have to make our amends before it’s too late.

I rewrote this poem over and over again, until finally publishing it in 2009 in my first collection. It’s probably the oldest poem in the book, and again, it’s another key to understanding all the writing I’ve done since. I use pop culture as a mechanism to deal with the most upsetting parts of my life. But pop culture is nothing more than a set of rules that we all know- a structure upon which to pitch our own ideas. Take away our shared language of culture and these notes would get way way longer.

Stefan Mesch had made some comments about my writing being kitsch, and I don’t have any problems with that term really. I really can’t respond any further because the article is in german and I’m reading it through Google Translate! Happy to talk about this more if it arises.

Sometimes this use of pop culture can make my poems feel childish. But then again, poetry is a very childish thing for me – it’s a place to experiment, to break rules and make others, to play games, to act without fear of judgement. When I forget that childishness, writing becomes impossibly hard.

Any thoughts you have on the poem, please add them below and I’ll try to respond. When it comes to poetry, I’m not much of an academic, but I’ll try my best! Art is a conversation, above all. Even if you didn’t like it, tell me why you didn’t like it, and I’ll try to respond.

Tags: comment, Gedicht, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lettrétage, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland
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Ross Sutherland – Notes on “A Second Opinion”

29. September 2014 1 Kommentar Article

Hi this is Ross Sutherland, providing some extra notes on my poem “A Second Opinion”.

I think this is one of the most straight-forward poems I submitted! It’s a pretty heavy-handed metaphor, but at the same time, the poem is a pretty useful key to understanding my other poems.

In it, you get the story of a couple going through the ‘biopsy’ of a relationship. The author shows his girlfriend an x-ray of his heart, then begins to wax lyrical about the diagnosis.  The x-ray is full of dark patches, signifying the ‘sickness’ of the relationship, but the author tries to transform each one into an elaborate, pointless metaphor.  Metaphor used as a band-aid on reality.

A lot of my work is about the limitations of language. I’m interested in the places where words break down. Almost all my poems have a moment where the poem breaks down or calls attention to itself – I think I’ve handled the subject with more skill as I’ve got older, but I like this poem because it’s a very simple articulation of that idea.

I can almost hear people shouting “so what? Boring postmodernism 101. Tell us something we don’t know!”

I wrote this poem in the middle of the worst break-up I ever had. For me, it’s not just a piece of literary grist, but a very personal poem as well. In the final couple of lines, I’m trying to grapple with the end of the relationship. Perhaps if this poem wasn’t so personal, I could abandon it. But my life is tied to this poem, whether I like it or not. I’m still learning this lesson- that you can’t use poetry to win the hearts of others. You can only use it to change yourself.

If the x-ray is supposed to symbolise my relationship, what about the light that passes through it? I’ve not really thought about it before. The ‘september light’ coming through the window is the symbol of the outer world. It’s the world I can’t control. At the end of the poem, my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend will exit the house, walk into that white light and vanish. But this same white light is what ‘powers’ the x-ray. The dark parts of the x-ray are the poems I write, the white parts are the space around them. Poems are defined by the space around them. Like the empty gap on the page beneath a poem. But also – the space inside poems. The things you can’t say or can’t control. The space between words. These are the things that shape a poem, just as much as the dark masses of text we produce.

 

I really liked the Heiner Muller poem, posted by Kristoffer Cornils in response. A lovely poem on a similar subject.  Here’s another favourite of mine: “The Six Times My Heart Broke” by Luke Kennard.

I’m here online to absorb all your misgivings. So whether you loved it / hated it / felt no human emotion whatsoever, let me know through the comment section below.

Tags: a second opinion, comment, Lettrétage, Lyrik, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland
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Ross Sutherland – Notes on Zangief

29. September 2014 Keine Kommentare Article

Hi this is Ross Sutherland- just thought I would add some contextual notes for my poem “Zangief”.

I wrote the piece back in 2007, as part of a book of sonnets. I wrote a sonnet for every character from Street Fighter 2. There were twelve in total. I began to imagine the book as a kind-of alternative zodiac. There was even a “personality test” so you could see which street fighter character you were most like.

There’s tremendous amount of contemporary poetry that references greek mythology. However, Greek mythology is no longer taught in British schools. Previous generations were raised to know the stuff off by heart. That leaves modern readers at a little bit of a disadvantage. “Street Fighter Sonnets” was my ironic solution to the problem.

The two-dimensional characters of Street Fighter are empty vessels. They feel like vague caricatures , each reduced to a single personality trait. There’s Zangief, a Russian wrestler fighting for a crumbling republic; Chun Li, an Interpol agent determined to avenge her father’s murder; Vega, a masked bullfighter who believes his strength is in his beauty.

Pride, vengeance, vanity: that’s all they are. Just like the Classics, they’re empty cyphers.

 So…if this is true… why not substitute some of our old canonical heroes for these (relatively) new ones?

Obviously Zangief feels pretty ridiculous when translated into the pomposity of the sonnet. In all of these poems,  I tried to make the character reflect on their lack of substance. E Honda sits in his bath-house, endlessly writing out his fathers haiku (steam hides the bather / yet it condenses into / ladles of water); Ken finds himself staging empty Hollywood rewrites of his own life story; Dhalsim sits and meditates at the fire temple of Baku, as the flame is switched from natural to mains gas. They are small, pithy portraits of heroes reflecting on their past.

As well as fitting into the tight constraints of the sonnet, I only allowed myself to use details found within the SNES guidebook. These poems were written in 2007 and (although less funny than some of my other stuff) were written with teenagers in mind. I wanted to find a way of connecting to young people that wouldn’t traditionally read poetry.

Love it or hate it, I’m here to discuss the poem further! Happy to answer any questions left below.

quiz1

quiz2

Tags: comment, Gedicht, Lettrétage, poem, Poetry, Ross Sutherland, Zangief
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Ross Sutherland – Notes on “Infinite Lives”

29. September 2014 4 Kommentare Article

Hello! This is Ross Sutherland. I’m going to talk about my poem Infinite Lives. I thought I’d tell you the story of how and why I wrote it.

The poem was written in 2012 (published in my collection ‘Emergency Window’). It was inspired by this sentence:

“A poem tries to escape it’s own subject matter”

I don’t know who said it originally. I heard it from the poet Billy Collins.  We start off on line one of the poem, in one place. Then, by the end of the poem, we’ve moved somewhere else entirely. When the poet sat down and wrote that first line, they had no idea where they were going to end up! I like this description of poetry. It really speaks to the me personally and helps explain the reason that I write. I want the poem to surprise me- to move me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Writing a poem is a voyage of discovery (I know that sounds cheesy). You just go on your nerve.

I often find myself standing in front of classrooms yelling, “Poets are fakers! They want to pretend that they have all the answers, but they don’t! They’re making it up as they go along!”

I wanted to give an exercise to my students to explain this process. Here’s what I said to them:

“Find a memory. Go deep into your past and find something. It can be anything. Write down all you can remember. Keep describing that memory, until you find an object *inside* that memory that makes you think of *another* memory. As soon as you think of that object, transport yourself through time to that new memory – now repeat the process! Repeat again and again, creating a chain of memories that has you jumping back and forth through your lifespan.”

Through this process, time becomes fluid- we’re jumping through time based on the tiniest things: the smell of petrol, the sound of a klaxon, a dog bite, etc, etc.

I tried out this exercise myself. Here’s my notes:

 

I remember the first time I watched Star Wars. (1980) It was on TV. I was at a friend’s house. It was Easter. I remember eating a Yorkie egg and the burning remains of the Death Star. Those two images are connected in my head- easter eggs and a burning spaceship!

Which reminds me of playing space invaders. (1983) I loved the video arcade so much that I would play it in my head, even when there was no one else around. I remember hallucinating Space Invaders on the wall of my grandma’s lounge. On holiday (usually a campsite in France), I would spend all my money on the arcades, then go back to the tent to play dominos with my family.

Which reminds me of the rough edge of the dominos. Another strong memory from childhood. I associate that texture so powerfully with my family. We never felt more of a single unit than when we were playing dominos. 

Which reminds me of the dashboard of the family car: same texture as a domino. But this is a much later memory (1996). By this time, I am 15, working as a salesman for Dixons- an electrical retailers. My job involved selling kettles and toasters to old ladies. I used to rest my head against the dashboard when my Dad drove me to work on a Sunday morning. I used to have fantasies about the car crashing. I would try to steer the car off the road with my mind, similar to how I used to play space invaders in my head. This was the start of a difficult period of my life – I would find myself imagining my death almost constantly. It became an unhealthy obsession.

Which reminds me of an actual car crash I was in, two years later. (1998)No one was injured. But I’ve never been a good passenger ever since. I fell out the door of a car that was going about 25/30 miles an hour. My body hit the pavement and slid down the road until it hit a postbox…

Which reminds me of that bit in Westerns, when the bartender throws a beer along the edge of bar. You know? The beer slides perfectly along the whole length of the bar and into the waiting hand of the thirsty cowboy. I watched those films when I was little, and I thought the trick was was done with special effects. Years later, I watched a Western on DVD – one of the extras on the DVD was a compilation of glasses smashing – all the times that the barman messed up the trick. I finally understood how it worked – all the mistakes are hidden from the viewer. We just see the one perfect take. 

***

Having finished this exercise, I looked back over the material I’d collected. I’d started with a memory of Easter, age 4, and ended up in the DVD extras of a Western. In that sense, I’d fulfilled the brief. I’d been drawn by my subconscious- I’d escaped my own subject matter.

However, there was definitely a theme going through my journey. Almost every memory had focussed on “crashes” – most of these crashes were simulated crashes- playing videogames in my head, the deathstar exploding, fantasising about my car crashing, etc. I was surprised to discover this. It had not been my intention to talk about this. This was a present day anxiety finding its way into my work.

I think about death a lot. I’m one of those people that constantly asks themselves, “what if?” What if I stepped off this train platform / high ledge / etc. I don’t feel suicidal. I’m just running simulations. But this behaviour seems to be troubling me on a subconscious level. The poem was telling me this.

This is why the final part of the poem becomes so important. The “OK I finally get it” moment is a memory of me (as a child) realising how cinema is made! We hide the bad takes, we only show the good. And this is perhaps a lesson I can take into my own life. We all have negative thoughts. We all simulate bad things in our heads. And all these simulations are like out-takes from a film- we needed to work through them to get to the “good” take. We try try try again, until we get it right.

I suppose this poem was my way of saying to myself, “Ross, if you think you’re crazy. You’re not alone.”

…And it’s hardly an original idea. Quite boring really. But it was a necessary thing for me to write and go through.

Confession time- I think this poem was damaged a bit in the edit. I worked with my editor at Penned in the Margins, on editing the poem down to the final version. It was a much longer piece that we condensed down. Together, we blurred the edges of each memory, made the poem feel more dream-like. The idea was to recreate the way that humans connect memories in  their head- synapses move fast, the connections come and go quickly. However, I think that the poem loses some of it’s sense in the process.

I really agree with this comment from Kristoffer Cornils:

“I don’t like to consider those two concepts – »reality« and »virtuality« – as opposed entities, but rather as complementary to each other, if not completely indistinguishable.”

It pains me that this did not come through in the poem. Cornils hits upon the point that is just beyond the reach of the poem. It’s an idea that I was striving towards, but the poem ends too soon. Fantasy and memory intertwine- we cannot separate one from the other, and our worldview is built from their synthesis.

 I would like to comment on Stefan Mesch’s reading, but I can only read it though Google Translate, which is pretty hard! (If there is a version in English, please post it below and I’ll add some comments).

It’s clear Mesch didn’t like it but it’s hard to respond further. Reading Mesch’s criticism through GT is a bit like hearing your neighbours insulting you through the wall. You find yourself straining extra hard to hear it, but all you can gather is a feeling!

Ah, in that sense. It’s a bit like reading poetry.

Anyway, whether you liked it or hated it, I’m happy to respond in the comments below :)

Tags: comment, infinite lives, Lettrétage, Poetry, Ross Sutherland, try again
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Performances

DI, 18.11. | Lettrétage
Ross Sutherland & Simone Kornappel

DO, 20.11. | Lettrétage
Vincent Message & Gerhild Steinbuch

DI, 25.11. | Lettrétage
Fiston Mwanza Mujila & Jörg Albrecht

DO, 27.11. | Lettrétage
Christian Prigent & Christian Filips & Aurélie Maurin

COMMENTS

  • Moritz bei Live-Blog zu Christian Prigent / lamentationen in lametta [zwei rd]
  • Stefan Mesch bei Live-Blog I (cvb) / Performance Fiston Mwanza Mujila
  • Konstantin Ames bei 18.11. Performance Ross Sutherland – Auftakt
  • stonch bei Fiston Mwanza: Be-pop dans une nuit de beuverie
  • Christian bei Christian Prigent: l’âme – tomber du jour #1

Lettrétage | Impressum

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