He gets up early, says Michael Lentz: "Around five." And write: "Actually, a good time." The work on his new book of poems, however, was difficult for him. He confessed to the literary critic Michael Braun before his death at the end of 2022 that he could only manage two or three words a day. "That's a lot," Braun replied. He, a central mediator of contemporary German-language poetry, was often remembered at the Frankfurt Poetry Days.

Florian Balke

Culture editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

On the third day of the festival, which the city hosted with more than forty participants for the first time since 2019, Lentz mixed lions, fathers, olive trees and chimeras, the Lord, rocks and rivers into a raging stream of text. He was interested in the "ambiguous", he said, the becoming, which is contained in the ambiguous title of the volume, "Chora", as well as the matter, the gradual flourishing of the language, the work of art and this time explicitly also of the poet: "One must not forget that it is about something autobiographical." In the "driving and thrilling" of his river poem, Lentz saw Julia Kristeva's semiotic and symbolic at work, the sayable and the unspeakable, the manifest outside of language, understandable to everyone, and what nourishes it and keeps it alive: "What is the pulsating principle? Can something be left there? That would be the symbolic order. But what remains is also swept away."

Bad news for romance writers

Artificial intelligence cannot play off the semiotic and the symbolic against each other in this way. Nevertheless, Hannes Bajohr saw the emergence of human and machine mixed art. "Authorship is reduced to a curatorial function," said the media scholar, who had an intelligence fed with Monika Rinck's poems write texts. They are bad. But you learn something about the program. It is currently writing a novel after being filled with new German-language prose. Again, he observes, "It can only correlate, it can't be causal."

This is bad news for the writers of romance novels, who had been predicted that all they had to do was press the button to have the next book spit out by the machine. Especially in genre literature, a causality that may love to surprise the reader, but above all must be present, is not entirely unimportant. The author Jörg Piringer therefore immediately declared the Turing test to be done: "No one will believe that ChatGPT is a human or really intelligent." There was a serene consensus that "cooperative practices" with chatbots would emerge.

Political and personal

Meanwhile, Maria Stepanova still writes alone. The invasion of Ukraine was the subject of repeated discussions during the festival, from Anja Utler to Yevgeniy Breyger, and Stepanova thought back to the path to war. The Berlin-based Russian poet, who was recently awarded the Book Prize for European Understanding in Leipzig, presented her "Winter Poem 20/21", written near Moscow in the torpor of the pandemic, as crammed with allusions from the very first lines as the wardrobe leading to wintry Narnia, to which Stepanova also seems to refer.

Within a few words, the drift of snow turns into the sand of the desert, Pushkin's "Prophet" is replaced by Nikolai Gumilyov's "Lost Tram", texts from the iron Russian literary reserve on the relationship between artist and state power, citizens and revolution. Even before the conquest of Crimea, she had the feeling of an approaching catastrophe, Stepanova said. Everyday life in Russia is marked by repression: "I think it's impossible to distinguish between the poetic and the political." In this way, she revives the Aesopian language of the Soviet era: "When we talk about snow, we also talk about violence."

Political and personal, pure art, topics of the time: "For God's sake, I don't want to give the poem a task," Nico Bleutge said at the opening of the festival, which was well attended reading after reading, with numerous sold-out book tables. There was something to be felt of the "grassroots enthusiasm" for poems that continues to exist among readers, to which Gregor Dotzauer referred on the same evening. The fact that C.H. Beck sold half of the twenty thousand copies of the new edition of the "Eternal Fountain" by Dirk von Petersdorff in the first three weeks alone shows this, as do such festivals.