Durs Grünbein and the vocation of poetry

Durs Grünbein: "One moment the street poet of Berlin, the next … all marble and ancient philosophy."

Hello, this is me speaking to you from Sunday evening, which should now, by my calculations, be three days ago. I am putting up a little post on Durs Grünbein now, so that if I have a second at some point after the reading or on Wednesday afternoon I can come in and add something quickly. How organised is that? And if I don’t, well, you get the flavour.

You can read this nice description on the Poetry Foundation site, and click the link to Grunbein’s essay, Why Live Without Writing? (It’s good, but it’s not my favourite of his prose. There is a selected volume now out in English, The Bars of Atlantis. I’m hoping to run a review of it in the next Horizon Review.) And there’s a clutch of poems on the Poetry International Web:

Here, from Vita Brevis:

In a rotten nutshell, I grew up amid the barrenness and confusion
That lie in wait for anything that mistakes itself. Among stoolies and spies,
I risked my neck on the empty parade ground, kept shtum in the silent masses,
A clown with seven tongues, a choirboy with an ear for cynical jokes.
Unasked, I spoke as others might spit, out of the side of my mouth,
And masked my own shocking helplessness with black humour.
History was no use to me, all it showed was human failings anyway…

Editing in: Durs was wonderful. We all love him. The tiny book of essays and pensées, The Vocation of Poetry, written by Grünbein and published by a small press in the USA called the Upper West Side Philosophers Inc., is my new favourite book; he and its translator, Michael Eskin, read from it in both English and German, as well as a good variety of poems, all suitable for an informal evening. There were Q&As. And now I must sleep: very early start tomorrow. (In fact, by the time this publishes I’ll  be long gone & well into my working morning.) More anon…

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