Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 47, No. 4, doi: 10.

1093/fmls/cqr035

C O N T E M P O R A RY G E R M A N P O E T RY A N D AVA N T- G A R D E R E A P P R A I S A L S I N T H E WO R K O F T H O M A S K L I N G A N D O S K A R PA S T I O R
ARINA ROTARU

ABSTRACT This article engages with selected poetic and essayistic pieces by Oskar Pastior (1927 2006) and Thomas Kling (1957 2005), whose works testify to the endurance of literary legacies ranging from Antiquity to the pre- and post-War global avant-gardes. The two poets are analysed here side by side and situated in a common context of influence and reception. Emphasis is given to the ways in which the two authors use avant-garde poetic tools to reflect on the interweavings of aesthetics and politics in the wake of 1989 and thereby revamp avant-garde practices within the new poetic and political contexts at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. While applying the paradigm of medialization from the perspective of its effects on poetry, the article reflects upon the status of lyric for these authors after the demise of a poetics of (new) subjectivity. Keywords: Kling, Thomas; Pastior, Oskar; avant-garde; reappraisal; lyric; subjectivity; dissonance; poetic network; sound poetry; concrete poetry; performance; noise

IN HIS History of Contemporary German Poetry (2010), Michael Braun identifies medialization and self-reflexivity as well as thematizing processes of linguistic, medial and audiovisual perception as important features of German poetry since 1989.1 With this broad categorization, Braun refers in particular to changes undergone by German poetry since 1989 under the influence of new media. However, he does not differentiate between formal and thematic transformations which these mediatic achievements bring about, and distinguishes instead between politically themed poems and poems in dialogue with the reader. I argue that a focus both on forms of experimentation and on themes in poetry in relation to new media would problematize an aspect considered lost by many critics, namely the relevance of the avant-gardes for the present. Critics such as Gerhard Falkner ascribe the decreasing impact of the avant-gardes on the present to the profound shift from a period of technological innovation, peculiar in the early avant-gardes, to one of information technologies. Whereas the first avant-gardes had been critical bastions of industrialization and reflected the

# The Author (2011). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

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fragmentation of every-day life at the hands of technology, the new era of communication as one of connection and information seems no longer to correspond to the original avant-gardist impulse to reflect a fragmented universe. Falkner limits his analysis of so-called decay to a distinction between the industrial and the technological ages and does not analyse the possible implications of German reunification in 1990 for such divisions.2 The two contemporary poets whom I have chosen for my analysis do not address the loss of utopian ideologies or the decay of modernist ideals, which were once part of the avant-garde mystique. Rather, they make use of formal constraints and cultivate structural experimentation, which are reminiscent in particular of pre- and post-War avant-garde models of experimentation. By elaborating on selected poetry and essays by Oskar Pastior and Thomas Kling, especially ones written after 1989, this article raises a number of interrelated questions: How do Pastiors and Klings experimental, avant-garde practices clash with their ostensible choice of canonical lyrical forms and what types of textual effects are generated by this fusion? Is there a contemporary geopolitical tendency associated with their references to, and engagement with, avant-garde techniques from both pre- and post-War times? Does the invocation of avant-garde authors and their practices in the work of Kling and Pastior form a contrast to the purported obsoleteness of avant-garde modes of writing in the digital age?3 In 2010, Text Kritik, the well-known Go ttingen literary journal, devoted its first issue to the 2006 Bu chner Prize laureate Oskar Pastior (1927 2006), a poet of German ethnicity born in Romania. A victim of the retaliation politics of the Communist state against German ethnics, Pastior spent five years in work camps at the end of WWII, and in 1968 decided to leave Romania and settle in West Berlin. The first symposium on the work of the Rheinland poet Thomas Kling (1957 2005), known for his literary performances, took place in Hombroich in 2010. These events from 2010 recognized two contemporary authors whose reception is still in the making and who, despite receiving important literary awards, have enjoyed relatively little critical attention and publicity so far. For example, from Harry Mathewss testimonies in the recent Text Kritik issue, we learn that it was only in the 1990s that Pastior became a rature Potentielle The formal member of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Litte Workshop for Potential Literature).4 Despite sharing many characteristics with OULIPO, a group which originated in the 1960s in France and famous for its formal rigour, Pastior was something of a lone warrior until the 1990s. His association with OULIPO gave him more visibility, as well as offering him important intellectual collaborations; yet his work retained its peculiar status among poetic styles. While Kling has been hailed as a virtuoso of dialect, slang and everyday speech attributed to different voices,5 Pastior got the reputation of a hermetic poet. Many volumes of Pastiors work, which are no longer in print, are now being republished, along with miscellanea and other hitherto unpublished pieces.6

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If we test Klings poetic art against a traditional definition of lyric as the domain of subjectivity, Kling seems to represent the antithesis of the standard lyric poet, since he reputedly underwent a paradigmatic shift from the lyric of subjectivity of the 1980s to a poetry focused on its own making and its performative mediatic character.7 While Kling expressed his polemical re-evaluation (and negation) of the earlier decade of subjectivity as part of his aesthetic programme,8 Pastior declared in the first of five lectures on poetry that he gave in Frankfurt his nonchalant ignorance with regard to lyric: I dont know what lyric is.9 This emphatic negation of knowledge in lyric matters is doubled, however, by Pastiors belief in a species of world lyric, which he defines as a series of repetitive, formulaic phrases that serve as a starting point for a new principle of creation or autopoiesis. Simple poiesis and mimetic literary concepts such as onomatopoeia are not among Pastiors literary ingredients.10 Dissonance rather than textual music is what he strives for, and yet the forms he adopts such as the sestina or the sonnet are among the trademarks of lyric. In terms of genre, Kling cultivates long, narrative poems or fragments that remind one of works by Sappho or Pindar. For him, the commitment to dissonance articulates itself both as an essayistic tribute to Dadaist poetic practices, in particular to Hugo Balls work in sound poetry and cacophony, and as poetic enactment, through enjambement and other fractures on the level of rhythm and verse.11 Klings appraisal of Ball is expressed most passionately in his essay On the German-Speaking Avant-Gardes, where he praises Ball as an early practitioner of speech installations or early live performances.12 Furthermore, Kling makes an unprecedented programmatic effort for contemporary German poets by reviving particular avant-garde traditions of performance in order to tap into new sources for lyric beyond a national model. These sources range from Hugo Ball, Velimir Chlebnikov, Kurt Schwitters and Walter Serner to the Wiener Gruppe. By focusing on experimentation within the very shape and meaning of the German idiom, Pastior shows a similar interest in deterritorialization. On the one hand, he relies on fictitious translations, which owe a lot to Tristan Tzaras early slaloms among languages and imaginary translations;13 on the other, he is indebted to the Futurist Velimir Chlebnikovs glossolalic poetry (zaum). Pastiors particular technique, evident since his early poetic work in Communist Romania, mixes present-day languages with their archaic correspondents and brings in dialectal influences as well. The metaphor that gives a title to one of his early cher (the Crimean-Gothic fan), describes an amalgamavolumes, Der krimgothische Fa tion of languages reproduced in verse. It is worth noting that the Crimean-Gothic bore at its inception not only a peculiar linguistic connotation but also a topographical one. Through this peripheral phenomenon nomen), Pastior claimed at the time to overcome the constraints (krimgothisches Randpha of territoriality.14 He was to get back to the importance of the Crimean-Gothic for his work in his Frankfurt lectures. For instance, in the third lecture, the poet exemplifies it a mixture of Swabian dialect, archaic High German, colloquial

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and bureaucratic Romanian, Hungarian, some elements of Russian from the work-camp, bits of Latin learned in school, some Greek, some reading knowledge of French and English in relation to a poem he does not name (US [3], p. 67). ren des Genitivs (The Textual references point to a piece from the anthology Das Ho Listening of the Genitive) (1997). Here Pastior refers to the Crimean-Gothic outpouring as the charade of a polyglot explosion based on an artificial dialect. The poem alluded to in the third Frankfurt lecture is O-Ton Automne-Linguistikherbst.15 Its point, as Pastior declares in his notes to the volume, is a zaum fragment borrowed from the Russian Futurist Chlebnikov:
O-Ton Automne-Linguistikherbst O-Ton Automne-Linguistikherbst Stick Harvest/Osenj/Toamna/Stick Stick Lippstick Nota Bene-heu was da abwest im Du mpel-Sermon: Zero-Phonem Der Ku chst rbis wa In Eros-Hemden sensen Tristia Trestia Deltageflecht Da ist (Kusnejtschik/Zinziwer) Synopsis von Kolchis her ergangen: Seerosensee/Seerosenbucht Ost-West-Phantom Ovids Metamorphosen am Bo sendorfer Luch [. . .] O Zero Osero-der See Rien ne va plus-O Zero Stick O Lambda Entengru lfa tze Haarnest Fa hilf Schilf heu Schelf O-Ton Automne Mir ist so rosident phantom Semiramis/Sorbonne/Sa-Um-Weh [O-tone Autumn-Linguisticfall // O-tone Autumn-Linguisticfall / Stick Harvest/ Osenj/Toamna/Stick / Stick lipstick Nota bene-hay / what is decaying in the languid-sermon // The Zero-Phoneme // The pumpkin is growing / In Eros-shirts

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scythe / Tristia / Trestia / Danuberhizome / This is a (Kusnejtschik/Zinziwer) Synopsis / derived from Kolchis: / Seerosesea/Seerosebay / Ost-West-Phantom / Ovids Metamorphoses / At the Bo sendorf bog // [. . .] // O Zero Osero-the Sea / Rien ne va plus-O Zero Stick / O Lambda Common Duckweed Hairnest Wavewave / help reed / hay shelf / O-Tone / Autumn / I am feeling so rosident phantom / Semiramis/Sorbonne/Sa-Um-Weh]

In an appendix to the volume, Pastior provides an annotation to this poem and explains that he wrote it for a German radio transmission in 1996. In the same note, he mentions his poetic intention to test how a text designed for broadcasting takes shape; specifically, he wants to explore how a texts scripturality is modified by its potential use in the context of another medium. His effort at poematic medialization focuses on exploiting the full potential of words sonorities even at the risk of rendering semantics unnecessary. With Pastior, the theme of potentiality linguistic, thematic, mediatic and geographic extends from homonyms and contaminations such as O-Ton/Automne and linguistic cross-correspondences such as Schilf /Schelf or Tristia/Trestia to O-Toene, original sounds, once employed to distinguish authentic sounds from the former GDR in Western transmissions. Pastior also gives a contemporary twist to one of his favourite verse arrangements, linguistic catalogues of the type Stick Harvest/Osenj/Toamna/Stick. A possible reference to a digital medium, the memory stick, coexists in an ether with other elements of another kind and genre, which are transformed and stored by it. As for the principle underlying the catalogue or the listpoem, Pastior defines it as montage, collage, potpourri the listpoem as a mystical contemplation of ascertainment and de-poration, wisdom- and survival technique (US [1], p. 33). The listpoems reliance on montage and collage points to an unsettling coexistence of elements of different kinds, whereas the notion of potpourri adds the nuance of a complete melange or unrecognizable mixture. The missing t in de-poration deportation was a taboo word during the Communist dictatorship changes the sense of exile and estrangement to one of poetic play. The generic and material transformations that lie at the root of the linguisticfall compositum are epitomized by the zero-phoneme and its principle of material reduction. The zero-phoneme features as an independent unit after the first stanza. In the reading key provided by the third Frankfurt lecture, the zero-phoneme stands for potentiality. If we take another distinction from Pastiors theoretical laboratory, the phoneme is opposed to the grapheme as gesture is opposed to hiatus (US [2], p. 49).16 On this terrain of the phoneme as gesture of possibility, verses take the physical shape suggested by their meanings. For instance, a visual delta forms at the site where the poem mentions the Romanian correspondent of reed, trestia. The theme of transformation is completed in the next stanza through a reference to Ovids Metamorphoses and through an allusion to the void generated by the former East/West Communist division, the East West phantom. For the rest of the poem, incantatory refrains mingle in the fourth stanza with ode-like

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tonalities (O Zero) or with phrases of playful liminality and nonsense such as mir ist so rosident phantom (I am feeling like a rodent phantom). Multiple languages mix with possible references to computer language, as in lambda. Marinettis illusion of a lyric obsession with matter from the early 20th century, which allows one to lengthen and shorten words, to reinforce their center or their extremities by increasing or diminishing the number of vowels and consonants,17 is translated by Pastior into an obsession with non-matter, culminating in the universal scream Sa-Um-Weh. The ending in Sa-Um-Weh points to a feature of Russian Futurism coded as primitivism: a return to the primordial and the archaic. According to Aage Hansen-Lo ve, this peculiar type of Futurism finds its expression in a temporal arch linking an originary past with the future and differs from better-known varieties of the early avant-garde, which are characterized by an interest in analysis, technicity and urbanity.18 Pastiors use of a primordial scream in a text designed for live radio transmission documents the simultaneous revamping of early avant-garde motifs, the penchant for futurity and a belief in technical advancements within a contemporary setting. However, Pastior is not on an ideological utopian mission or in quest of advanced technology. Through what he calls an intramolecular cracking or reinvention of the genetic code of poetry, the poet anticipates todays proliferating world-wide library where he incorporates the past and prepares it for the present, not the future.19 Pastiors ambition to crack the poetic code itself and replace it with a poetic network is echoed by his play with Vokalisen from a volume conceived between 1990 and 1991. As he confesses in his notes to the volume Vokalisen und Gimpfelstifte, the Vokalisen try to mimic patterns of vowels from all over the world.20 This irreverent use of vowel combinations that render words semantically unrecognizable achieves a paradoxical effect. Words become familiar specifically through their ambiguous meanings that dissolve linguistic and semantic appurtenance. Pastiors vision of lyric lets the minstrel turn the euphonic Ohrwurm (earworm) into a URWURM ( primordial worm), in whose composition dissonance rather than assonance governs but where words rhyme internally, as in turmuhr fuhr. Thus an odd melos is preserved where, as Northrop Frye would say, the peculiar dissonant sound throws the ear forward to the next beat as a sign of musical energy rather than disruption.21
ZUR KUR FUHR URWURM-KULTUR pur! zur turmuhr fuhr uhu drumdrum-stur turnt nun purpurknurrwut um sturmschwurschwund; ruth summt, plumbum spurt krumm, unfug flurt dummklug rum-kurzum: nur schwung zum kuskus, nur schwung!

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[THE ORIGINARY CULTURE-WORM DROVE FOR A CURE / pure! The owl flew to a clocks tower / drumdrum-obstinate trains violet- / moaninganger for a stormoathdissapperance; / ruth is buzzing, plumbum feels bent, mis- / chief resides stupidsmart all-around: / only a swing to couscous, only a swing!]

This pattern of word re-assemblages, echoic combinations (as in fug flurt or knurrwut ruth) and consonantal impetus (see the elaborate composite sturmschwurschwund) is not new. The first sound poems played with it before the turn of the 20th century and the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire adopted it as part of their aesthetic agenda. What for the Dadaists was a protest against war or a consumer culture becomes for Pastior a strategy to envision networks between countries in the shape of a consonantal rebellion that transcends any notion of a pure culture. Here words are not entirely dissolved as in Dadaist rhetoric but rather gain a new semantic status through chance associations. A further look into Pastiors method of assembling and disassembling words and contexts is necessary. In his first Frankfurt lecture, Pastior describes Berlin in 1990 as a new test arrangement (Versuchsanordnung) governed both by examination and discharge because unfit for military service (Mustern& Ausmustern) or units and resistance (Einheiten& Aushalten) (US [1], p. 16). These contradictions seem to point to Pastiors belief in a balance of forming and deforming forces to reflect the beginning of German reunification and the end of the Cold War. Pastiors contradictory formulations are just a prolongation of his earlier disbelief in any dialectal binarisms and his attempt to dissolve regimentations of form by both optical and visual means.22 This refusal of dialectics, which seems both to preserve and to transgress convention, is part of any avant-gardes own mode of existence, as Wolfgang Asholt notes.23 In the 1990s, Pastiors defiance against any binarism gains momentum through his adoption of the long sestina form. This form (6 x 6 3) is for Pastior a self-generating machine that reproduces, as he declares, the pattern of thought-generation (US [2], p. 48). The last fragment from Pastiors fliegen eintag polyglott (fly one-day polyglot) sestina reads as follows:
long live the english-rumanian sestina! no-italiana tra iasca sextina rom ! evviva la sestina italiano-russa! da sdrastwujet russke-nemezkaja sestina! es lebe die deutsch-franzo sische sestine! vive la sextine franc aise-franc aise! la sextine franc aise-anglaise est morte long live the english-italian sestina ` la sestina-sestina-sestina ma la piu ` bellissima e

Beyond the pattern of the sestina lies not just a solitary process related to the generation of thoughts but also a musical improvisation that unites countries after the collapse of Cold War divisions: evviva la sestina italiano-russa! or

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long live the english-italian sestina! With this sestina, Pastior confesses to having violated the strict rules to which he adhered for the rest of the volume, namely the rhyming pattern 123456 / 615242 / 364125 / 532614 / 451362 / 246531 / 123 (Pastior uses numbers to designate rhymes). The fliegen eintag polyglott instead dissolves the classic sestina pattern and rhymes by giving the whole verse a linguistic unity. In his notes to the volume, the poet compares the sestina principle to a Mo bius-strip, which compresses and dilutes time upon request; his comment emphasizes the potentially virtual character of the sestina mechanism, which can expand ad infinitum in multiple combinations (US [4], p. 86). If Eugen Gomringers constellations and the inversions, tautologies and repetitions of the Wiener Gruppe were aiming for absoluteness and were targeting the removal of time from the poem,24 the purpose of the sestina is, according to Pastior, just the opposite to release time in the ear (US [2], p. 49). This focus on temporality in Pastiors design of the sestina might echo the primary tension within the avant-gardes themselves, originally torn between critiquing the present from within modernity itself and escaping from the present into the atemporal.25 Pastior renders this tension actual for the digital age, through a well-kept balance between the classic finite lyric form of the sestina and the voicing of a desirable world beyond a national space. Thus Pastior takes over Gomringers desiderata about poetrys function in society from vom vers zur konstellation but without its ingredient of absoluteness and atemporality. Pastiors time machine is represented instead by the concrete form of the sestina intoned in multiple simultaneous voices. Kling distinguishes his art from concrete poetry as he does not avail himself of the permutations peculiar to concrete poets, but rather of narrative textual structures and palimpsest-like constructions. But just like Pastior, he takes over the performative impetus of the Wiener Gruppe and their Dadaist predecessors and cultivates the mannerism of collecting (and preparing) voices.26 With the volume brennstabm, published in the early 1990s, Kling announces a shift from a 1980s aesthetic of subjectivity. This intended shift is a double polemic with the politically uninvolved aesthetic of the so-called new subjectivity of the 1970s and 1980s on the one hand, and the notion of subjectivity implied in the Adornian aesthetic of a historicized lyric on the other. Kling thematizes poetry rather in the shape of a peculiar type of dissonant song set within the new mediatic and poetic panorama of the 1990s. In two essays from Itinerar, he sets his poetic project, the brennstabmhafte der sprache (sectioning of language), against a formula from Chebnikovs arsenal, Zerlegung der Wo rter (disassembling of words).27 The poem knirsch! (grind!), dedicated to Oskar Pastior, from brennstabm, exhibits some peculiarities of this turn from a lyric of subjectivity to one of pure performance, where words start dispersing into atoms without entirely losing their semantic meaning, unlike Chebnikovs trans-rational language:

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knirsch! ratternde platte. wind-tape in den kron, flekkiges huschhusch das durch ba nder zirpt: ein scha delgeflakker, gesto ber im anflug, stellenweise blindflug durchgefu hrt. ARCHIVE NDERT/GEPLUENDERTE PLUENNEN!, GEPLU 1 GAUCH NACH DEM ANDERN! split tergraeem im unzersto rtn aug: balkn-balkn-balkm. im augn-, im-schauerraum ein hin geplatschtes licht, schon wieder zugeschattet: fott. ein zugeschu ttet, ausgeschlu rft; ein-totes-paestum das da rattert; -glifnplan, glifmplan o or, organisazzjon TOTH, o GOtt28 [grind! / rattling disk. wind-tape in / the light, bespotted hushhush that / through chords resounds: a chranioji- / ttering, drifts flying, par- / tially driven in blind flight / ARCHIVES / RANSACKED/RANSACKED THINGS !, / ONE FOOL AFTER ANOTHER! split / graeem in the unspoiled eye: beam-ba / lcn-balkm. In the eye-, looker space / splashed light all around, already / adumbrated: gone. fil- / led, slurped; a dead-paestum / that rattles; -summit, vilified summit o / or, organizzjation THOTH, o GOd]

The poem starts with a provocative onomatopoeic explosion, knirsch!, which can be translated approximately as grind!. The poems invocation of dissonance is perpetuated by gerunds such as ratternde platte (rattling disk, with its double meaning, material and digital); double onomatopoeia written idiosyncratically (huschhusch); elided vowels as in balkn-ba-lkn-balkm; enjambements, and unconventional orthography as in the variations on -glifnplan / glifmplan (the composite word glifnplan and its variation glifmplan are semantically close to gipfel plan, which means plan for a summit and also echoes Verunglimpfung, libel or slander). Taking off from these possible double meanings engendered by switching consonants and eliding vowels, the poem thematizes the fractures between oral and written articulation, between recitation and script. Further, contortions of vowels and consonants are physically highlighted through the fractured light in the eye: [. . .] im augn-, im-schauerraum / ein hin geplatschtes licht, schon / wieder zugeschattet: fott (in the eye-, in the looker space / fallen light already / adumbrated: gone). The dialectal form fott (Cologne) accomplishes one of Klings poetic principles: to incorporate dialect, colloquial forms and even slang in poetry.29 At its centre, the poem exhibits unconventional typography such as the capitalization of ARCHIVE, as well as assonances that are phonetically but not semantically close: geplu ndert (ransacked) echoes plu nnen. Concrete arithmetic also comes into play, when exclamation marks are followed by the graphic and

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the numeral 1; they give the poem a very tangible material and visual dimension. The poems ending, through its ode-like quality and invocation of the Egyptian God Thoth, is torn between formal lyric constraint and experimentation.30 Patron of script and orality, God of time-measurement and science, Thoth seems to have migrated into a possible archive, digital or otherwise. The lyric impetus is expressed as mediated experience across archived sounds, compressed vowels and consonants, which have been ransacked from the archives of a divine patron of organization, temporality and commerce. The gesture of ransacking archives establishes a self-referential connection between Kling and bertragungen) of Pastior, who is well known for his poetic interpretations (U classics such as Petrarch, Charles Baudelaire and Velimir Chlebnikov. Although Kling does not work with this model of free translation, he certainly sees a link between Pastiors way of translating his predecessors into the present and his own manner of revolving around models of script and orality. In knirsch! and elsewhere, Kling uses the pattern of dense consonant associations both to celebrate a lost avant-garde aesthetics at the end of the 1980s and as a tribute to the new significance of noise in a globalized acoustical world.31 Whereas in knirsch! the poetic focus was on lyric transmission, poetrys lifespan and mediation, the Hombroich Elegie 2 addresses a wider spectrum of historical transmission, anchored in a past situated after German reunification. Here Kling foregrounds the metaphor of the bee, a popular one with bucolic writers, to present a possible linguistic and territorial confluence in the wake of reunification, an event that perhaps does not count minor sounds. The bee-speech (bienenrede) at the end of the poem warns against intolerance, doing so through associations of vowels and consonants that belong to a language hard to understand and possibly codified as wild:
die bienen, von den graugesehenen wiesen, heimwa rtsbretternd, zu der bienenbude, um dort einlabkontrolle zu passieren. um ta nze aufzufu hren, was bienensprachlich, honigalphabetisch etwas u bermitteln soll. sang. beru hrt zuletzt, yakutischer schamane, das rote eisen mit der zunge. zunge aberirgendetwas la uft schief erstrahlt nur kurz und ist verbrutzelt stinkt vor sich hin, erba rmlich. von winter-vitaminen, motorschlitten, kann wilde rede, bienenrede, -ie, -ede -ein. vielleicht von schwarzem rachen.32 [the bees, returning from the gray fields / homewards to the bee barrack / in order to pass border controls. in / order to dance, which, in bee language / should transmit something honeyalphabetical. / sang. at last impressed, the yakutean shaman // the red iron with the tongue. tongue though- / something goes crookedly flashes only briefly

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/ sizzles-stinks, pathetically / of winter vitamins, motor sledges, can speak / wild speech, bee speech, -ie, -ede / -ein. perhaps of throat scorched by smoke.]

The episode of the bees bombing down the roads is a possible allusion to the period immediately following the fall of the Berlin wall, when access by GDR citizens through the checkpoints of the Federal Republic was still controlled, despite the official opening of the borders. The strident sounds of this transgression of internal German borders turn the last part of the poem into wild speech and word fragments, with bee speech dissolving into its components ieede- ein. Against the obtuseness of borders and custom controls, Kling sets up his intonations of vowels and an overcoming of borders inherited from Kurt bernationalismus or from Hugo Balls protest against Schwitterss idea of U nationalism. Not by chance, Klings primary model of inspiration is Dada. As Martin Puchner observes, this movement sought to establish an internationalism best described by the figure of the network, a web organized not by nation states or languages but by connections among cities.33 In his 1994 interview with Hans-Ju rgen Balmes, Kling underlines his ties to the Rhineland but also his interest in a melting pot of voices and sounds that goes beyond his national German territory and beyond one cultural historical reference.34 He achieves this effect of transcending national linguistic frontiers through dialectal references and a so-called break of linguistic flux (Sprachflussunterbrechung). Instrumental for his lyric, these interruptions denote caesuras created through rhythm as language, music and dance. A poem such as Ach je! (in the volume lan. Through Auswertung der Flugdaten) connotes by its very title onomatopoetic e dialectal inflections, symmetries and chiasmus, the poem conveys a sense of fatality but also playful resignation:
So war dat aber bestemmp! Schwester! Ha a r Dokteer! Aber so war datDat war so-so war datZu Neuss am Rhein.35 [So was it meant / for sure! Nurse! / Mrrr Doctor! // So was it meant / Meant was to be-so was it- / At Neuss on the Rhine.]

With this performative chiasmic poem Kling draws on a model of audience participation that he delineates closely in Wiener Vorlesung zur Literatur.36 In this lecture, he focuses on H. C. Artmanns poetic practice in post-WWII Austria and his cultivation of public forms of expression despite the trend towards solitary poetic monologues. Inspired by Baroque and Surrealist practices, Artmann, a prominent member of the Wiener Gruppe, composed poetic texts that resembled processes of transmutation, transcending through sound and movement a solitary dialogue with the self. Kling understands transmutation as an

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old alchemical technique, where the poet serves as a languages expert (Sprach(en)fachmann) or word magician. This definition recalls Klings earlier engagement with Hugo Ball and his play with paradoxical combinations of sounds in an effort to retrieve the inner alchemy of words.37 With the volumes Fernhandel and Sondagen, Kling transfers the alchemical processes of composition on tape and thematizes both the nature of the poetic medium and its possibility of transmission. In this sense, he expands his exploration of the history of the pre- and postwar avant-garde practices by re-valuating their meaning for the 21st century: from processes of vocalic and consonantal transmutation to a play on voices encrypted on a CD, designed for an even wider audience. Whereas Pastiors play with media had limited itself to poems richte, and audioplays conceived for the radio, poems on cassettes such as the Ho such as Beiss nicht in die Birne (Su dfunk, Stuttgart 1971) and Reise um den Mund in 80 Feldern (WDR, 1971), Kling brings the mediatic engagement a step further as he takes advantage of the possibilities offered by the burned performance, the CD.38 Klings speculations about the nature of the poetic medium are part of his aesthetic praxis as well. Gaumensegel (Soft Palate) from Sondagen reads:
die welle dagegen schla gt ins komplizierte ohr. fluten. gedicht ist: kennungsdienst; das sagst mir du, mein brandungsgeho r. tondokumente der wind, der wind/das himmlische kind. 39 [the wave beats instead / against the complicated ear. flutes. the poem is a service of information / that is what you tell me, my aural rock. audio documents // the wind, the wind/the godly child.]

On the CD, the voice of the poet mimics the various tonalities of voices in the poem. Klings poem begins in the palate and from there transfers its listening data to an interested audience. The same preoccupation with the process of poetic creation and reception can be found in Pastior who, in his third Frankfurt lecture, emphasizes the various degrees of correspondence between the larynx and the ear, the poems letters and the eye, the auctorial intention and reception by the reader (US [3], p. 77). A concern with the physical side of reader reception unites the two poets through a joint performative intention. Klings and Pastiors poetry does not just illustrate processes of perception, dialogues on poetry or political themes. Their poetry also mimics these processes through a recasting of the lyric subject as medium of transmission. Ultimately, the two poets embody what Haraldo de Campos calls a post-utopian poetry, which represents the chance of poetry to dig into the resources, promises and contradictions left behind by the historical and post-War avant-gardes and cultivate them while focusing on the present day and its new media.40 A vigorous reappraisal of the avant-gardes emerges from these two poets and it is anchored

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in current German poems as well as in sounds located on the peripheries of language and space. Department of German Studies Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 U.S.A. acr42@cornell.edu
NOTES hrung (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Michael Braun, Die deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur. Eine Einfu Bo hlau Verlag, 2010), pp. 141 76. 2 See Gerhard Falkner, Baumfa llen. Zur Pha nomenologie des Niedermachens in der deutschen Literaturkritik am Beispiel Michael Brauns und des Bandes Lyrik von Jetzt, Ndl, 2 (2004), 121 31. Kling and Pastior have corresponded on the subject of poetry and paid tribute to each other on several occasions. For reasons of space, however, this article restricts itself to their poetry and poetic affinities.
4 5 3 1

Harry Matthews, Oskar oulipotisch, Text Kritik, 186 (2010), 47 49.

See Hermann Korte, Deutschsprachige Lyrik seit 1945, 2nd edn (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2004), p. 260. 6 Four volumes have been published so far: Vol. 1: . . . sage, du habest es rauschen gehoert, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006); Vol. 2: . . . Jetzt kann man schreiben was man will, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003); Vol. 3: . . . Minze Minze flaumiran schpektrum, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004); Vol. 4, . . . was in der Mitte zu wachsen anfaengt, ed. by Ernest Wichner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008). Following in Jo rg Drewss steps and his article on Selbsterfahrung und neue Subjektivita t in der Lyrik, in Lyrik-Katalog Bundesrepublik Gedichte: Biographien: Statements, ed. by Jan Hans, Uwe Herms and Ralf Thenior (Munich: Goldmann Verlag, 1979), pp. 453 62, Korte sketches a succession of phases in German poetry, where he distinguishes a lyric of subjectivity in the 1970s and a return to traditional forms in the 1980s. He attributes the development of a lyric of subjectivity to the need of the poet, or creator, to withdraw into a private sphere after the turmoil of 1968. Korte does not contrast the notion of subjectivity in the 1970s with the notion of mediality or the publicization of the poet through performances and CDs in the 1990s, but distinguishes rather between the concept of subjectivity and the notion of engagement with language as defining features of poetry since 1989. Since I think that this engagement with language or reflexivity is terminologically very close to a lyric of subjectivity, I prefer to use the terms mediality or medialization, which render more clearly the purported overcoming of the lyric subject through media. See Hermann Korte, Deutschsprachige Lyrik seit 1945, 2nd edn (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2004), pp. 168 293. Thomas Kling, Zu den deutschprachigen Avantgarden, in Botenstoffe (Cologne: DuMont Verlag, 2001), pp. 9 32. For Oskar Pastiors series of five poetry lectures presented in Frankfurt between 11 January and 8 February 1994, see Das Unding an sich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994). The lectures are untitled but numbered and dated. All translations are my own. Further references will be given in the text as US followed by lecture and page numbers. This quotation, US (1), p. 16. In US (3), Pastior expands on the impossibility of reducing the text to music or the music to a conceptual frame ( p. 76). 11 See Thomas Kling, Hugo Ball. Fru he Performance, in Itinerar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), pp. 31 41; Thomas Kling, Zu den deutschsprachigen Avantgardes, in Botenstoffe, pp. 9 31 ( p. 28).
10 9 8 7

AVA N T- G A R D E R E A P P R A I S A L S I N K L I N G A N D PA S T I O R
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Kling, Zu den deutschsprachigen Avantgarden, p. 19.

See Vom geknickten Umgang mit Texten und Personen, in . . . was in der Mitte zu wachsen anfa ngt, pp. 341 50 ( p. 349). 14 cher. Lieder und Balladen. Mit 15 Bildtafeln des Autors (Erlangen: Oskar Pastior, Der krimgothische Fa Verlag Klaus G. Renner, 1978), pp. 103104. In US (3), Pastior also points retrospectively to his notion of the Crimean-Gothic as a parody of East West relations ( p. 68). 15 ren des Genitivs (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1997), p. 10. Oskar Pastior, Das Ho Pastiors reference to zero versus hiatus differs from the concrete poets focus on zero as object of concentration minus its disturbing past inheritance. See eugen gomringer, konkrete poesie und zero, in theorie der konkreten poesie. texte und manifeste. 1954 97, Vol. 2 (Vienna: Spitter, 1997), pp. 115 18 ( p. 116). Pastiors focus is not on the historical burden of the past but rather on its sonic potential and articulation. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 87. 18 ` la russe (unpublished paper distributed at the symAage Hansen-Lo ve, Neoprimitivismus a posium Das literarische Primitivismus im fru hen 20. Jhd., Freie Uni, Berlin, 19 20 November 2010). 19 See in particular US (2), p. 40. Here Pastior talks about the genre he invented, Gedichtgedichte ( poemspoems) as self-generating lyric machines that anticipate the logical and syntactic patterns of web networks (emphasis added). 20 Oskar Pastior, Vokalisen und Gimpfelstifte (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), p. 107.
21 17 16

Northrop Frye, Sound and Poetry (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1956),

p. xiii. nfte von und u ber Oskar Pastior. Fussnoten zur Oskar Pastior quoted in Christoph Meckel, Ausku neueren deutschen Literatur, Vol. 5, ed. by Wulf Segebrecht (Bamberg: Arbeitsbereich der neueren deutschen Literatur, 1985), p. 13. 23 Wolfgang Asholt, Avantgardistische Selbstkritik, in Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer. Avantgarde-Avabtgardekiritk-Avantgardeforschung, ed. by Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fa hnders (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 97 120 ( p. 115). See eugen gomringer, Vom Vers zur Konstellation. Zweck und Form einer neuen Dichtung (1954), in konkrete poesie (Ingolstadt: Museum fu r Konkrete Kunst, 1992), n.p. Members of the Vienna group (Gerhard Ru hm, Konrad Bayer, Friedrich Achleitner, Oswald Wiener, Hans Carl Artmann), a literary group formed in the 1950s, experimented with different, non-literary media (the white page, images of the body in performance or montage patterns from everyday language). Central to their literary practice is the question of reference; language ends up pointing self-referentially at the very process of reference, while revealing the bare grid of paradigmatic, syntagmatic, phonological or morphological differences. See Bianca Theisen, Silenced Facts: Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), p. 5. 25 See Bernd Hu sse der Avantgarden. Die Zeit, Avantgarden und die ppauf, Das Unzeitgema Gegenwart, in Asholt and Fa hnders (eds), Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer, pp. 547 82. Ein schnelles Summen. Thomas Kling im Gespra ch mit Hans-Ju rgen Balmes und Urs Engeler (April 1994), in Botenstoffe, p. 203. Cf. Klings essay Hugo Ball, Fru he Performance and his Sprachinstallation 2, both in Itinerar, 33. 28 knirsch! in Thomas Kling, Gesammelte Gedichte 1981 1993 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), p. 127.
29 30 31 27 26 24 22

See Botenstoffe, pp. 28 29.

In Botenstoffe, Kling writes a special tribute to the god Thoth ( pp. 128 29). Karen Leeder characterizes the 1980s as motivated by a tendency towards stagnation and apocalypse and considers paradigmatic in this regard Alexander von Bormanns definition of the

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1980s as a return to form in the context of an Anti-avantgarde impulse. See Schaltstelle. Neue deutsche Lyrik im Dialog, ed. by K. Leeder (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 5. Eine Hombroich-Elegie (2), a poem in 21 parts, in Sondagen. Gedichte, with CD (Cologne: DuMont, 2002), p. 95. 33 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avantgardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 136.
34 35 36 32

Ein schnelles Summen, in Botenstoffe, p. 203. Ach je!, in Thomas Kling, Auswertung der Flugdaten (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), p. 19. Totentanz, Fotomaterial. Wiener Vorlesung zur Literatur, in Botenstoffe, pp. 70 93, esp.

p. 76. Hugo Ball, entry from 24 June 1916, in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (New York: Viking University Press, 1974), p. 71. For the Pastior reference, see Heute kann man schreiben was man will, p. 340. Here Pastior richte (Listening Reports), which were primarily expands on his audioplays and his cycle of poems Ho richte anticipate the Ho rbuch praised by Kling as the new conceived to be spoken. In this sense, the Ho instrument for publicizing poetry. For the Kling reference, see CD. Die gebrannte Performance, in Botenstoffe, p. 102. 39 Gaumensegel, in Kling, Sondagen, p. 40. Haroldo de Campos, Post-Utopische Poesie: Das Engagement der Gegenwart, in Minima Poetica, ed. by Joachim Sartorius (Cologne: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), pp. 145 50 ( p. 146).
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