Contributions

POETRY IN CONVERSATION REGARDING THE PRODUCTION: What does Niyazi want in Naunynstraße?

READING AND TALK BEFORE THE PREMIERE – His poems are terrifyingly relevant to this day: Over 40 years ago, Aras Ören poetically compacted Turkish migrant workers’ lack of prospects, their illusions of life in Germany, and Turkey’s social reality in his “Berlin Trilogy.” In his writing, bleak and everyday life in Kreuzberg’s Naunynstraße epitomizes many places in Germany. Aras Ören testified to the odyssey of “nameless nobodies.”

Ören, Aras • von Verschuer, Leopold

POETRY IN CONVERSATION REVERSIBLE: Shared language there, German-language here

READING AND TALK WITH REVERSIBLE AUTHORS – Poets from multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina will speak with their verse-smuggling partners from the Alpine region about their experiences with multilingualism, dialects, and a “common” language.

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Alajbegović, Bjanka • Chana, Daniela • Garzetti, Sascha • Kaplan, Almin

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Kim Yi-deum – Even my dictionary is bleeding

Kim Yideum’s poetry is polyphonic, wild, and feminist, teeming with quirky personnel. With explicit eroticism, dirty sentences and a maximum of lyric energy, she exposes patriarchy’s crustiest structures – not only in Korea. Kim Yideum teaches in addition to writing, at the university, runs a bookstore and café in Seoul, and publishes her own publication series.

Yideum, Kim

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Julia Wong Kcomt – In Peru, no one looks like anyone

Julia Wong Kcomt hails from a Chinese-Peruvian family and lives in Lima and Lisbon. The diasporic experience is formative for her texts, which move between Brazilian and Argentine poetry. Critics have praised her poems’ evocative tone, calling them “enigmatically sensual invitations to hypervigilance” (Brandon Shimoda).

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Agustín Fernández Mallo – This is how kings are born

Agustín Fernández Mallo is a physicist, novelist and poet. He belongs to the “Nocilla” movement, which derives its name from Fernández Mallo’s trilogy of novels, a punk song, and a nougat cream. His poetry – described as “afterpop” or “zapping literature” – is at once hypnotic, enigmatic, and deeply unsettling.

Fernández Mallo, Agustín

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Raymond Antrobus – Can we disagree graciously?

Raymond Antrobus hails from the London slam and Open Mic scenes. He writes autobiographical poems about his Jamaican-British heritage and about the experience of deafness, with which he was diagnosed with at age six. He is a political poet who writes about very private matters. Ilya Kaminsky and Ocean Vuong are among his admirers.

Antrobus, Raymond

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Mihret Kebede – Intimate exile

Mihret Kebede is not only a poet, performer, and visual artist – she also organizes festivals and co-founded Tobiya Poetic Jazz, the artist collective Netsa Art Village, and the video art festival Addis. Her poetry is marked by multidirectional thought and action, transcending the limits of what is individually said in a grippingly political way.

Kebede, Mihret • Scheffler, Rike

POETRY IN CONVERSATION: Halyna Kruk – There, the hairy spider of gloom is weaving

Halyna Kruk’s poems respond to the immediate reality – even (and especially) in times of crisis and war. She writes about disappearance, fast-flying summer weeks and the heaviness that suddenly settles on our lips. Her poems are messages from an uprooted world that “flees like running thistle behind the humpbacked horizon.”

Kruk, Halyna