Wanderung unter dem Fleischmond

Gedichte, die du siehst, bevor du stirbst – Hendrik traut sich trotzdem

Gedichte, die du siehst, bevor du stirbst? Scheint mir die beste Zeit zu sein, Gedichte anzuschauen

„Poems you see before you die“

… nein, das ist nicht die lyrische Version des guten alten Monty Python-Sketches vom ‘Tödlichen Witz’, sondern es ist schlicht das Motto, unter das der Frankfurter Bildkünstler Ray Rubeque und der Autor George Koehler ihre gemeinsame Bild/Textkunst gestellt haben, die in einigen handlichen kleinen Bändchen (fünf sind geplant, der dritte gerade frisch erschienen) in der „Handschmeichler edition“ vorliegen.

Warum sich die Beiden nicht nur als The Glutton Group, sondern u.a. auch als „a two-man army of Verbindlichkeit“ bezeichnen, ist mir schleierhaft. Aber meine dadurch genährte Befürchtung, die von klassischen Haiku- und Senryu-Poesiekurzformen inspirierten Texte Koehlers würden sich jetzt in Dinglisch abspielen, bewahrheitet sich zum Glück nicht.

Die bisher erschienenen Bändchen schmeicheln tatsächlich der Hand, und ich merke schon beim ersten Durchblättern, warum es „poems you SEE before you die“ heißt und nicht „poems you READ before you die“. Denn die Texte Koehlers sind kurz genug, um mit einem Blick erfasst, mit einem zweiten Blick um das jedem Text beigefügte Bild ergänzt zu werden und so Text und Bild zugleich zu sein, und das ist ja nun so ziemlich das Multimedialste, was ein in Schwarzweiss gedrucktes Bändchen auf die Schnelle zu leisten vermag.

Die Texte sind in englischer Sprache, die dazugehörigen Illustrationen ebenso wie  Haikus auf die wesentlichen Pinselstriche reduziert: konkretisierend vergröbert, wenn man so will. Was formal einen Haiku der traditionellen Sorte ausmacht – siebzehn Silben, ein Naturbezug, ein lyrisches Ich –, kann man meistens hier wiederfinden, wie z.B. in dem Gedicht

NIGHTSTALKER
A cold meat moon and
Thousands of stars, lighting my
Path with midnight thoughts.

Aus Poems You See Before You Die Band 2

Nächtliche Melancholie ist wohl eines der ältestehrwürdigen Themen für die Form des Haiku. Schon die frühen Beat-Poeten haben solche formalen und atmosphärischen Konventionen dann gerne aufgenommen und damit gespielt – sie mit bewusst gesetzten Modernismen, Brüchen, Provokationen angereichert, manchmal damit gesprengt, manchmal zu neuem Leben erweckt. Die Bildgedichte/ Gedichtbilder der Glutton Group stehen ganz klar auch in dieser (längst selbst zur Konvention gewordenen) Tradition der Brechung von Tradition. Aber sie hinterlassen angenehmerweise insgesamt nicht das Gefühl, hier werde eine längst verpasste literarische Anarchie mangels eigener Ideen aus dem Wachkoma gerüttelt. Dazu sind die „poems you see before you die“ insgesamt nicht effektheischend genug. Ein bisschen spaßbesoffen zuweilen schon, aber dabei auch sehr entspannt und nicht anbiedernd: man will sich erstmal selbst eine Freude bereiten, und wenn dann andere den Spaß teilen möchten, sind sie herzlich eingeladen. Damit entfalten die poems ein Charisma, das von den spielverliebten, sinnlichen Gedichten Adrian Mitchells nicht weit entfernt ist (ich erinnere z.B. an Ten Ways To Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow To Anybody), oder vielleicht auch das vor Jahrzehnten schon in die Literatur hineingelebte genüsslich-skurrile Daseinsgefühl eines Richard Brautigan runderneuert und quietschvergnügt in unserer Gegenwart abliefert.

Entsprechend legt sich die Glutton Group auch thematisch weiterlesen

Lincolns “Inaugural Address”

An essay by Christopher Henkel, translated by Gregor Deissler
The USA brought to the scratch: President Lincoln’s speech at his accession to office

President Lincoln is an icon for the national unity of the USA. His inaugural speech on 4 March, however, represents a turning point to the identity of the United States.

Lincoln’s Inauguration Address on 4 March 1861 signified one of the main conflicts in the American constitutional history. Back then and still today, „Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness“represent the three corner pillars of American society. The fourth is the federal Act of Settlement of the United States. The United States of America founded in 1787 were a propriety society, even though not explicitly pointed out and only paraphrased by the claim for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And after a gory battle for independence, the protection of this propriety society defined the main achievement for the nation. weiterlesen

“The Bin Ladens”

Christopher on “The Bin Ladens” by Steve Coll, translated by Nicola Clayton-Stead

Names are meaningless. Burning office blocks, cries of horrified people –since September 11^th the name Bin Laden has represented terror and death. Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center did not only destroy a symbol but also a network of relations, which spread from Washington via Jerusalem to Riad, guaranteeing Bin Laden’s influence and prosperity for centuries to come. Aside from its political and economical significance, “nine eleven” also represents a family catastrophe. Steve Coll shows the rise and fall of the family in his book “Bin Ladens”.

Steve Coll, who in the past has already won the Pulitzer-Prize two times over, studied the world political role of the Middle East. Already in 2004 he concentrated on his book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001” with help from the Taliban through the USA and with the involvement of the Bin Laden family from this region. One of Coll’s focus points, who at the time worked as managing director for the Washington Post, represented the use of Islamic fundamentalism as an instrument of American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union. Yet this strategy had a weak point: the financial and physical support for Islamic resistance in Afghanistan to a large extent faced an uncontrollable dynamic from these groups. Appearing in his 2004 publication, Coll chose a rather foreign-political, contemporary perspective, yet now in the family biography “Bin Ladens”, he has carried out a different perspective and has concentrated on inside-Arabian developments. There are hardly any other Arabian families who hold such a key position as the Bin Ladens.

The rise of the Bin Laden family is a mixture of oriental fairytale and American dream. At the age of twelve, Mohammed Bin Laden left his Yemeni home initially to work in Ethiopia, then later Saudi-Arabia. Migrating for work is traditional in Yeman: children leave their home at an early age and get sent elsewhere by Yemeni migrants. Like his age group, initially Mohammed carried out work which got rejected by the Saudi Bedouins. But he had an advantage. He was skilful and motivated and had the time on his hands. weiterlesen

Rule Britannia (english)

Christopher on: Peter Wende “The British Empire”, translated by Nicola Clayton-Stead

Judgement of the British Empire changes. Criticism and agreement, ascertainment and doubt balance each other out. A dispute with tradition. Even at the time of the Empire, frustration alternated with admiration for heroes. Although only few years apart, there lay worlds between Oscar Wildes’ sceptical “Ave Imperatrix” and Rudyard Kiplings’ “The White man’s burden’. But despite all this, the moral key balance remains unfinished. And with it the question remains unanswered of whether, for those affected, the British Empire was a curse or a blessing. Peter Wende’s book “The British Empire” considers this in the historical middle way. A way which leads from the first colonies in North America and West India to the decolonisation of the twentieth century. Peter Wende, born in 1936, published early on the main focus of his research into English history.

As successor to Adolf Mattias Birke, he ran the German Historical Institute in London from 1999 to 2000. Here Wende published “British Envoys to Germany”, the story of the English envoys between 1815 and 1866, among many others. Moreover, Peter Wende also involved himself in further publications with German-British relations. In 1999 he published an analysis of German-British relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in “Rivalität und Partnershaft”. As early as 1997, he produced a comparable study entitled “Reform in Britain and Germany” about the development in both countries between 1750 and 1850. Aside from German-British relations, since 1980 Wende has involved himself with the emergence of modern structures in England, in which he has examined the interplay between king and parliament. In his most recent book, Wende described the British Empire as a form of power that was complex and very prone to change. And so the author differentiated essentially three phases: an early phase, an expansion phase as well as a phase of decolonisation. weiterlesen