Select poetry – concept albums and poetic marvels

In times of Spotify and other musical StreamingAs you know, there are plenty on offer Playlists, some of them supposedly hand-picked, but mostly an algorithm is responsible for putting the songs together: If you like Wanda, you’ll also like hearing about Bilderbuch or Voodoo Jürgens. Unfortunately, what is increasingly falling by the wayside is the concept album. “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” by Genesis, “The Wall” or “The Final Cut” by Pink Floyd, Bon Ivers “For Emma, ​​Forever Ago” or Paul Simon’s “Songs from the Capeman” – these are just a few Examples of great albums from the past, where every song has its place in an overall concept and can’t just be pulled out without losing some of its meaning. To put it bluntly: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are only whole as a whole.

There aren’t any playlists for poetry yet, but what you could consider the poetic equivalent of the concept album: volumes of poetry that don’t just collect poems, but arrange the poems according to a higher ordering principle. The alphabet is of course the simplest in this respect. In “dear, dear, dear, dear” (Literature Edition Lower Austria, 2021) gathered Gerhard Ruiss “Couplings” from A (“from a certain height …”) to Z (“between two gears”). The author, who was born in 1951, has compiled 188 pieces in a volume that is also beautifully designed graphically, mostly just short poems that move somewhere between Concrete Poetry and Robert Gernhardt. It should be noted that the closer to life and more meaningful the poems are, the better they are. The language games of Concrete Poetry have meanwhile become quite exhausted: “most holy holiest / most important important / all-encompassing comprehensive …” the penultimate poem lurks along without coming to a satisfactory end. One page later the final poem proves that things can be done much better: “give him a chance / go to the toilet / so that he can look after you / and tell you to pay / and after paying / can see you coming back / and say to pay / and let him say , he already / then say, oh.”

Time is also a great structuring factor. called “journal poems”. Sabine Gruber their texts in the volume “It’s best if I live imaginary” (Haymon, 2022), and instead of a title, they bear a temporal and local location as proof of their individuality: “Im März / Leopoldstadt, Wien” begins the narrow volume and spans almost a year and a half, which is published at irregular intervals and in a wide variety of locations (in addition to Vienna, Italy and elsewhere in Austria) are processed lyrically. “The road of the dead leads through the living” is Giuseppe Ungaretti’s motto, and it is her partner Karl-Heinz Ströhle, who died suddenly in 2016, that Sabine Gruber mourns in these poems. Sometimes the absent is very close, imaginarily united with the ego in places of shared experience, then again the grief over the loss seems unbearable.

“I can hear you again in the depths / of the bottom, in every wave / see”, it is said at Lake Millstatt, and the miracle of these poems consists in the fact that the deep sadness prevents the view of the world, of one’s own ego, on the lost loved one does not cloud, but infinitely sharpens. “When I met him, / I grew back eyes that believe everything” are two wonderful verses. Or: “Consonance and constant light of the evenings”.

Sabine Gruber’s “Wordatem” is extremely delicate and powerful at the same time, and how important poetry is (for survival) can be felt in every line of verse: “Write to live, not live / To catch sentences”.

The eighth volume of poems by the theologian is also a lyrical marvel Christian Lehnert: “opus 8. Im Flechtwerk” (Suhrkamp, 2022) That’s his name, and he collects 7 times 7 pairs of poems, each of which follows a sentence-like two-liner on a plant or an animal, followed by a longer poem that also describes natural phenomena. The sound of these poems, which use rhyme and catchy imagery quite naturally, can be almost addictive: “Now I’m at the turning point / here begins / the other side of that / what passes. / the inside of the pupil / what consists of / the afterimage / that smolders in dry brushwood?” These poems are”Glory to God alone“, but that (in the broadest, almost pantheistic sense) spiritual poetry could sound so beautiful and at the same time so modern, so natural and at the same time so metaphysical, one did not even dare suspect before Lehnert. Here the concept album becomes a poetic marvel.