Why poems are easier to read than the daily press (Heissenbuttel)

We have, as Franz Mon once said, tried everything, and now what? We grew up with the poetic way of speaking giving way to the prosaic, although to this day we have not properly digested the unpoetic verse of Heinrich Heine or Arno Holz. Who takes verses like these seriously:

Your long legs of progress,

pick them up for a new run –

coats rough, coats fine,

if they’re coats, beat them!

Or this:

Tears

roll down my face into the seventy-five-pfennig store tie

with the

Japanese… dragon motif.

We have read poems that consist of nonsensical sentences, that is, of sentences that do not occur in the language of communication. We have read poems that consist of combinations of letters, of sounds that resist written fixation, of numbers, of the syllables ping and pong, of quotations, of newspaper headlines, etc. We are familiar with Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Realist, Satirical, Symbolist, Neo-Romantic, Expressionist, Surrealist, Political, Concrete, Neo-Subjective, Neo-Political, etc. lyric poetry. We have read what André Breton wrote in the first or second manifesto of surrealism, what Bertolt Brecht wrote about the origin of meter, or Paul van Ostaijen wrote about the word fish, which, if read and heard correctly, Ostaijen considered more poetically productive than myth, the star sign or the poetic object fish. Or this: We read what Gottfried Benn said in Doppelleben, as long as thirty years ago: “Everything remains open. Anti-synthesis. Melting away before the irreconcilable. Requires the greatest spirit and the greatest grasp, otherwise it is tinkering and childish. Requires the greatest tragic sense, otherwise it is unconvincing. But if that’s what the man is after, then the first verse can be from the course book and the second a hymn and the third a Mikoschwitz and the whole thing is a poem after all.” But how do I recognize whether the man is in the mood, and why not a woman, when I have a piece of the Kursbuch, a hymn verse and a joke in front of me? By the reference of the Fahrplanstelle to Paul Gerhardt and the quality of the joke, or its unqualified nature?

Talked aside. And now what?

Since I took up the cue of openness and it has now almost become a buzzword, although I had forgotten that I read it in Benn, although the recipe of course, from Kursbuch, song verse and joke showed me the way when in 1953 I tried something new that was still valid when in 1954 or 1955 Hans Egon Holthusen, strangely enough, visited me in my apartment and explained to me what was poetic and what was not in what I had published, and I, in turn, asked whether he could imagine a poem consisting only of quotations, whereupon he looked at me sharply for a moment and then decided: never. Given all that and much more, can I now, , thirty years later, so to speak, use Benn’s old recipe again, the dish he has theoretically prepared, because in practice he never actually did proceed in this way, but rather stuck to the poetic or the anti-poetic, which, seen from today, comes out the same, so to speak, reheat it just to see what comes out of it?

I want to do it and not do it. I create a mixture that roughly corresponds to what Benn cites. But I don’t make a poem out of it, instead I try to find out how a poem 144 behaves in this context. I take three newspaper reports and three poems and compare them. I conduct myself, to use a word that has somewhat fallen into disrepute in the aesthetic realm, but which has also reached a venerable age, experimentally. Hans Magnus Enzensberger once understood it, and how long ago was that, as an indication of an aporia, which means an irresolvable internal contradiction and roughly corresponds to Benn’s “verharren vor dem Unvereinbaren” (to remain before the irreconcilable), but as an indication of aporia, the word of experimental literature would not have been negative, but only an indication of the contemporary, but perhaps, if you look more closely (only: does it make sense to look more closely at what he said?), Enzensberger meant that experimental literature wrongly resolves the aporia and the experimentalist therefore already knows beforehand what the outcome will be, and wasn’t that what he, in an unexperimental way, had set out to do?

I do this experiment, and I know, so I say, cleverly, just as well what will come out as I don’t know what will come out. I know and I don’t know. I know what will come out and what won’t. I don’t know what will come out and what won’t. As with other experiments, I have selected the starting position according to external, independent and objective criteria. The newspaper reports are from the nearest daily newspaper to me at the time of writing this, which was the Stuttgarter Nachrichten of Saturday, May 2, 1981. I took the three poems from the brochure for the “Lyri- kertreffen Münster” from May 18 to 27, 1979.

The first report reads: “Munich (dpa) — A 65-year-old ordained cleric is said to have embezzled 2.9 million marks in donations under the pretext of wanting to help Vietnam refugees and to have satisfied his sexual needs with boys with a sum of 880,000 marks. He used 360,000 marks for himself.”

The second report, not as funny as the first, and I admit that I chose the first one because of its comic overtones, reads: “Churchill: Poison Gas Use Planned for Germany. London (dpa) — During the Second World War, the British ex-prime minister Sir Winston Churchill considered the use of poison gas against Germany if the kingdom had been threatened by the V-1 and V-2 rockets developed under Adolf Hitler. According to the Times newspaper on Friday, BBC reporter Robert Harris found this out while researching biological weapons. According to an official document, Churchill asked the British General Staff on July 6, 1944, to calculate the use of poison gas cold-bloodedly. He had dismissed moral concerns by pointing to the use of poison gas in the First World War and the cruelty of the enemy. The report quotes Churchill verbatim: “We can spray the cities on the Ruhr and many other places in such a way that most people will need constant medical treatment.” A report is said to have highlighted the targeted use of anthrax.

The third report, which is rather more curious, is signed by Werner Oemke: “VÍB shot at soldiers. EIf goals for a good cause. Balingen — The Bundesliga professionals of VIB Stuttgart went to the Alb for a good cause and kicked the ball around: in front of 3,000 spectators, whose entrance fees will benefit the disabled children of members of the armed forces, the team of coach Jürgen Sundermann defeated the soccer soldiers of the Immelmann reconnaissance squadron from Bremgarten 11:1 (5:1) in Balingen yesterday.”

And now the three poems. First, “For Pasolini” by Nicolas Born:

In a dream Pasolini came towards me in a leading role.

He looked good, blue and shiny like a machine, a representative of everything.

Pasolini trudged through puddles, he could

be small, stocky, dark and anti-social, but he was always Pasolini and always a different person. 146

Then he stood in the entrances of unfinished buildings, waved down from scaffolding.

He pointed at old cars.

He was a lover of the population of the entire country and with his camera he found countries

he no longer saw through his dark glasses.

“My pictures whine,” he said. ‘I could make silent films; I haven’t heard a word in years.’

He began to rub up against me, and that was fine by me.

Then he plunged into a construction pit.

A car burnt out.

Rain fell into the sea

The movie theater curtains were white again.

Second poem: von medizinen, Ernst Jandl:

Some who never have think study medicine later in life want to be a doctor, so have access to the various medicines, the happy-making psicofarmakes, also the sleep-making barbital and then you have a can of the lethal stuff to clean yourself out of the dirty eyes of the shitty world. But not before you’ve had all kinds of fun with opiates like morphine.

The third poem: Tas illusiun… by Oskar Pastior:

Tas illusiun

statisfiziert

die menglich

Schraufe

läumsten

kollekt aber das

Eibliche

urmelt 147

wacholder

wardeinisch

frontäl :

Minze Minze

flaumiran

Schepktrum

Is there anything, generally and categorically speaking, that can be compared to reports like poems? At least two of the poems, the one by Born and the one by Jand, have something factual that resembles the reports. The reports, in turn, come to the point where one could imagine individual sentences from them in a poetic context. Or am I mistaken? On closer inspection, it turns out that the wording of the reports, as it is, is not usable; I would have to rearrange and reformulate. Or am I assuming too much from my own habits? Would I, if I did that, be the man who, as Benn said, “is gone after that”? And what would I gain? Curiosities in the tone, in the sentence structure of a newspaper report?

The interesting thing about it, I can already see that, in such a use of these specific newspaper reports for a literary purpose, would be that the fact that is expressed, penetrates, but remains incomprehensible in the usual sense. If I proceeded in this way, my intention would be recognizable only in the alienation of what should be explainable in a familiar way. Would that correspond to Benn’s suggestion? Undoubtedly, the excerpt from Kursbuch, the line from a song, or the joke could not be alienated in and of themselves. Taken apart, the three ingredients that Benn suggests would remain just what they were and are when “the man is after it”: a page from the Kursbuch, a verse from a song, and a joke. Alienation would only take place where and because they collide. The alienation would thus resemble a demonstration that, in principle, cannot be repeated. What Peter Altenberg once collaged in his own way testifies to a transition. Kurt Schwitters’ banalities, however, have already done away with the principle.

This means that Benn’s suggestion is only useful as a method for producing literary structures, i.e. texts, i.e. poems, if the components are transformed back into material. On the one hand, I can see that these newspaper reports can be used in terms of pure content and even more in terms of substance. Coincidence, facticity, alienation, mysteriousness, superficiality, meaninglessness, or whatever terms one chooses, they all contain it. On the other hand, I can say that although every single word and the sentences in their style and tone of voice are usable, they are obviously not usable in the unique concrete form. Why not? Because their formulation and orientation towards message and communication resists being materialized.

The reports are reports in the usual sense. They communicate something that, to paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, was the case here, there, and there. “The world is everything that is the case.” So begins Wittgenstein’s Logico-Philosophical Treatise. The case is a member of the clergy who embezzles money because he is gay. The case is the discovery that Churchill considered spraying the cities of the Ruhr area with anthrax in 1944. The case is that the VfB Stuttgart team defeated the team of the Immelmann squadron in Balingen by a large margin for the purpose of donations. But what is the case here? Does it make sense to report something like this to someone who has no idea what VfB means, who doesn’t know where Balingen is, and who has never heard the name Immelmann? Or for someone who doesn’t know what role Churchill played in 1944, what the V-1 and V-2 were, and what kind of disease is caused by anthrax?

It seems easier with the chaplain, because if the recipient of the message, the reader of the report, for example, cannot accommodate refugees from Vietnam, he still recognizes the fact of embezzlement, the sums are understandable to him, and satisfying sexual needs with boys does not require any special knowledge. But what this means, in a somewhat abbreviated form, which makes the reports unwieldy as literary material, is that it can only fulfill its function as a report if it falls on a field of preconceptions, if, so to speak, it is confronted with a grid of sometimes very specific knowledge. It is necessary to know that V{B Verein für Bewegungsspiele, which many who use the abbreviation have long forgotten, means and that it is the most successful Stuttgart soccer club of the 1970s. Behind this, there is a claim to knowledge of what the Bundesliga is, what a trainer’s role is, what special role this trainer Sundermann played in the course of a few seasons in the Bundesliga, what the number of 11 goals means, etc., etc.

I don’t want to expand on this any further, although, of course, with a historical-political-military fact, in which prejudices and resentments that are still present have a say, as with the Churchill Plan, completely different and far more complicated things would come to light, and even the poor pederastic religious would still have something to say, but only to note that the newspaper report always presupposes prior knowledge. A newspaper report from ancient Egypt would be incomprehensible to me.

The prerequisite of prior knowledge now characterizes the linguistic structure of a report and thus differs from the linguistic structure of a poem. Is that so? Don’t I also need prior knowledge to be able to understand a poem? The poem by Nicolas Born is titled “For Pasolini”. Don’t I need to know who Pasolini is? Of the three poems selected, doesn’t this one in particular resemble a news item? Perhaps I am missing a reference if I have no reference to Pasolini? But I can also say, based on my prior knowledge of Pasolini’s character and work, that I misunderstand this poem by Born if I ask too many questions about the significance of my possible interpretation. Rather, to cite a parallel example, in the case of a poem by Peter Hamm, I have to bring with me certain prior knowledge about this author in Venice.

Seen in this light, the poem, unlike the newspaper report, does not say what the case is. It says, pointedly, what is not the case. Or, conversely, when it says what the case is, then what is the case in the world of the newspaper report is not the case. Or, to put it another way, what is the case in the poem is the case in a completely different way than in the linguistic communication of facts that have really happened. And if what obtains in the world of linguistic communication of facts is to be transformed into what obtains in the language of the poem, then what obtains must be completely abandoned in order to gain what obtains on the other side.

Ernst Jandl’s poem is teeming with facts: medicine, medical school, doctor, access to drugs, psychotropic drugs, barbiturates, opiates, morphine, and also that which transcends these facts, the latency of self-removal from the dirty eyes of the shitty world, suicide or suicide or freitod, has the form of a rather factual message, not that of a metaphorical transformation, unless one wants to brush away the verb and call the adjectives dirty and crappy metaphorical remnants, last traces of what was once considered poetic. Nevertheless, it is not said here what the case is in the world of the message. This is partly because the material of facticity is so brutally beaten up that it becomes perverse, and partly because of the mutilation of normal grammar and syntax. This mutilation dissolves the super- and subordination of formal syntax into a paratactic juxtaposition, without giving up syntax.

The brutalization of language in Jandl’s parody, which may at times take on comic traits but immediately stops the dissolution into the comic, pushes back the approach to laughter, so to speak, the neck of the laughing person, the person wanting to laugh, and now creates precisely what one might call the still-poetic in such a poem, its tremendous compactness and impenetrability. While an element of the fragmentary, even of the broken and crumbling, seemed important in Jandis’s earlier poems, such as the sound poems, here there is something of linguistic boulders, which, however, are not found but made, something melted down of great hardness, resilience and consistency.

In this respect, Oskar Pastior’s poem is a step aside, so to speak. Instead of the facts being described, we have incomprehensible words that repeatedly seem comprehensible or resemble something we do understand. But if we go back from “tas illusiun” to an understandable word, “illusion”, we realize that we have got everything wrong. You could explain that in each of these words a multitude of other, similar sounding words have entered into a new connection, somewhat like in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But then what does: “but the ordinary mutters juniper was Germanic frontally?” What is the case here, what could possibly be the case here, is limited to what can never be the case, the resonance, the ambivalence, the ambiguity that blossoms in the ambiguity of sound, sequence of letters and the semantically imaginable.

And in saying this, I feel that I am talking in vain, that in order to grasp this poem, it is quite unnecessary to make such explanations or paraphrases. I do not have to understand this poem at all, which is so colloquial and at first glance incomprehensible. I do not have to understand it because it is stripped of facts. I do not have to understand it because it requires no previous knowledge whatsoever. And, this is the crucial point, I understand it as a poem only then and only because I do not understand it. Understanding presupposes non-understanding.

But this means that in the case of such a poem, and this now applies retrospectively to Jandl and Born, I cannot speak of understanding in the sense that I have to fit something into the pattern of my previous understanding when I read a report in the daily press. My understanding, if I can put it that way, consists in accepting the poem, in listening to the poem, in responding to the poem. I accept it without any understanding of the facts, indeed without any semantic reference at all. In response to? To a moment of stimulus, to a moment of surprise, due to the openness of which Benn spoke? All of this together and many other things? I take what I have accepted and add it to the store of linguistic material available to me. I add to what I already have, to what has certainly not yet appeared in it. I turn it back and forth in the encounter and in the addition. It may be that I expel it again, that it does not prove to be an addition for me, not as something durable, but as something that dissolves again, crumbles, disappears. But it may also be that it becomes particularly dear to me, that it forms, so to speak, a completely new and unheard-of core, around which something accumulates, without which I would not want to live on.

I’ll stop here. Because what I promised to show has, I think, become unmistakable to anyone who has been willing to follow so far. That poems are actually easier to read than the daily press. You just have to know how to read. As I have tried to suggest. Or perhaps learn to read. The literacy that Enzensberger liked to talk about so much in the early days and that he so emphatically demanded, might look quite different. Different from what? Yes, than what. This is, in conclusion, not a relapse into irrationalism. At best, this is an attempt to disregard the aporia of rationalism and irrationalism for once. And one more thing, for adherents of the tradition of the poetic: it is only now that we recognize what a poem is. The incomprehensible rather than the comprehensible. 153

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