poetry

There are people who sense a revolutionary situation like this again. People tend to be misled by shouting in all sorts of channels. It cannot be overlooked that some people want a violent overthrow. Only they don’t look like revolutionaries, but more like grumpy old white men who no longer know where their heads are. And what do the poets say? Are they otherwise like seismographs?

Are you too. And as a rule, if they are a little older, they have not forgotten what a real revolution feels like. And the fact that a revolution ever broke out out of concern for the well-deserved prosperity of the angry citizen would be something new. The well-provided are far too afraid that “no stone will be left unturned,” as Holger Brülls writes in his poem “revolution etude II.”

A revolution in which this is not the case “is not one but / like moving from a moldy apartment / to a new building at the other end of the city”.

This is the perspective from below, the perspective of “injustice, poverty and hardship” that Wolfgang Thierse addresses in the foreword, deeply hoping that democracy will manage to overcome the multiple crises that are shaking our society. Although he – like many authors in this volume of poems – knows that the parties do not dare to tackle the real monster that has pushed our world to the limits of its resilience: “Globalization with its economic, technical and scientific boundaries.”

This is the elephant in the room that is not being talked about: a completely unleashed capitalism that – because of its lack of boundaries – endangers our livelihoods, political stability and peace anyway.

No place for revolution

No wonder that many poets feel powerlessness rather than a rebellious spirit to revolt. And even if someone once cultivated the attitude of the barricade fighter, the “revolutionary of the neighborhood,” he has long since returned home from “his many years of war / Between the igniting words,” Gisela Herman states in “From Far Away.” What remained were the “adorants”.

You’re only too happy to listen to them, the fiery cheerleaders who then turn into well-behaved couch potatoes. Or switch sides. Find a comfortable place. Because if you want to change the world, you would have to risk more than false applause.

Can this world even be changed? “Between the climate and the atom, / is there still room for a revolution?” asks Hanno Hartwig in “Revolution”. This makes this beautiful, polished term questionable in the area. And the question is: What actually is revolution? Does it start with the guy who made the first hand axe, as Wolfgang Stock suggests in “I made a new prototype”? “Forget the stones you found by chance…”

But prototype is also reminiscent of the large corporations that are only too happy to sell their new consumer temptations as prototypes. Every newly styled product – a revolution. A word that has degenerated into marketing nonsense and can no longer be taken seriously when managers and advertising hoaxes use it in their mouths. And therefore perhaps dead right now. Mouse dead. And the would-be revolutionaries are left with disco like in Gerald Marten’s poem “We’re just playing you”. Expressed to the core in the lines: “Hair long, life short / most people don’t care about politics.”

Silenced anger

You can act like a revolutionary at the beer table, knowing everything better and having no idea about anything. Revolution, so to speak, as a solution to all the problems of men who have no desire to deal with the grind of daily politics – to paraphrase Thierse. In the speeches of the revolutionary apostles everything is very simple taste buds done, cleaned up. An “iron broom” sweeps and a fever-eyed “guide” gives the route.

Those who have once hoped know that things can go completely wrong. As in Grit Kurth’s poem “I wanted to”: “My child, I am tired. The weapons are lowered / My anger is silenced. It was no use.”

A poem that makes you stumble, because the Leipzig poet is like so many parents who have had to realize that their children are now facing a future that they did not want: “There the eternal stars are amazed and blinking. / I would have liked to have protected you better.” Lines that correspond to the hopes that were once there: “My child, I wanted to fight great battles / against poisons in the heart and greed in the brain.”

There it is, the defeat against the elephant in the room. Who tramples on the children’s feelings just as lustfully as he tramples on the last piece of green. Jochen Stüsser-Simpson also addresses it: “Put aside the over-the-top economic concepts, stand aside.” Because they destroy our livelihoods.

You can already tell: these poets doubt that now is the time for a revolution. Who should do it? With what competence? When it’s not even clear who it would be aimed at?

After us the flood?

If democracy falls victim, it will be a catastrophe. And a betrayal of our children even more so. “We have to stop lying,” says Carmen Jaud. We should stop lying to children in particular. Because change is coming. Either way. Sometimes quietly and gently when people change themselves. Sometimes with force and as a flood, because human stupidity refuses to be taught.

Just like in Carsten Stephan’s “Flood”: “The citizen’s good pants get wet / Well-kept cars are found in the streets …” in 2023 everything was seen several times on news channels. Near and far. If anyone is revolting, it is the climate. And it hits hard. He doesn’t care about the suffering of the soaked citizens. Like all of our lies and excuses.

All these invocations of the “moderate course of things” that Eline Menke takes aim at.

As a rule, female poets do not use a revolutionary tone. You won’t find a Freiligrath or Majakowski in this volume, but rather ironic references to Brecht. And the justifiable reminder that it’s probably better not to call for a great revolution if you haven’t even managed to get your own life together.

As Manfred Moll sums it up in “over”: “It’s not bad / that we weren’t / what we could have been,” he writes. To make it clear at the end: “but the fact that I wasn’t / what I wanted to be / that’s bad.”

That’s what the poets do – when, as in the first part of the issue, they don’t look at the failed revolutions of Germany’s past, here and there with compassion, but also with a lot of skepticism. Because the question always remains: what remains? And what’s coming? And what do we actually do with our own lives?

Or will all we be left with is laughter, as Gisela Verges writes in “Peaceful Resistance”? Because no one can stop us from laughing?

Stock prices are crunching

This reads coherently in the poem. But the sum of the poems makes you think, because the description of the state of our reality doesn’t promise a revolution, just a huge embarrassment. As Jürgen de Bussman describes it in “Otherwise”: “The sky flies supersonic / The stock prices are crunching / A president has vomiting diarrhea / He can’t control himself …”

Then one sighs with Wolfgang Thierse, who so justifiably demands: The “modernization and reform policy” must “not be a clientele policy or appear as such.”

It’s just stupid when it appears exactly like that and the clients’ enforcers are making noise because they would like to have the power back. This golden thing that speakers get drunk on while they lie and deceive their deeply religious audience. And even plant images of the wildest revolutions in his brain so that when the bellwether calls, they all follow.

Revolutionary times?

Probably not.

The vision of a better world

Probably better not. Or asked with the beautiful lines by Olaf Rendler: “Or am I free / when / my fuses blow out? / All I know is / meaningful resistance / makes light.”

Because those who refuse to make noise don’t cloud everything with phrases and empty phrases. He will probably then discover the big elephant in the room that has turned even the once stubborn word revolution into marketing slime. Because when everything revolts, everything stays the same and those in the dark do their best business.

Remaining: memory (à la Andreas Reimann) and “not taking things for granted”, as Erich Pfefferkorn thinks about it in “quietly revolutionary”. Because that is where changes begin: the reflection with which history happens – “here / and / now”.

What people tend to underestimate. Changes start small. With ourselves. With the not insignificant question of whether we have ever actually tried to be who we wanted to be. Or just ran after the bleating sheep. The question remains. Very small. But honestly. Only then does it begin that we give “space to the vision of / a better world /”, as Eva-Maria Berg writes in “at any time”. Or Rüdiger Strüwe in “Always again”: “The little courage / doesn’t grow on the / trees …”

Society for Contemporary Poetry (ed.) “Poetry album new: Revolution”Edition art & poetry, Leipzig 2023, 7.80 euros.

2023-12-25 04:21:55
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