2023-08-09 04:11:33
“I’m happy, which I never wanted to be,” says one of Wolf Wondratschek’s poems, which were published shortly before his 80th birthday. That’s not bad, you think to yourself and continue browsing. “Small garden of peace / small garden of forgiveness / place of my failure” one reads at the end of a three-stanza poem regarding “little paradises and what shouldn’t be missing”. Has the former roughneck got tired – or just being honest?
“Some Poems” is the title of the white volume, just 78 pages long, that Ullstein Verlag has just delivered. Pure understatement. His book of poems “Chuck’s Zimmer” sold an unbelievable 300,000 copies in 1974, and the epic poem “Carmen oder Am I the Asshole of the Eighties” (1986) achieved cult status. His “Collected Poems” comprise 13 volumes, which Ullstein sells individually or as a box. Five years ago, Wondratschek said in an interview with “Deutschlandradio Kultur” that he was convinced that he would gradually be re-publishing his entire life’s work when his rights had all been released and he was threatened with no longer being represented on the book market. to.
The cassette with individual volumes such as “The Loneliness of Men” (Volume 5), “The Girl and the Knife Thrower” (Volume 7) or “For a Life without a Dentist” (Volume 12) also has the author when it was published five years ago himself enthusiastically, as he told the radio station Ö1 at the time: “I’m reading these small volumes and tell you: It’s a pleasure! It’s a pleasure when something lasts for more than 40 years. Great. I’m just a great poet .”
Not everyone thinks so. But even his critics can’t help but give him credit. “In terms of literary history, Wondratschek’s West German poetry is a test of the example of Americanization,” wrote Franz Schuh in 1998 on the occasion of the publication of a 480-page paperback edition of Wondratschek’s poems, and ended with a consideration of the poet-self-portrayal: “The sensual Wondratschek with his love poems, with his sloppy ingenious talk, with its appearances and its image is a whole, a very vital art product that I consider a poet The question that contemporary poetry asks of language, namely: Who is speaking?, when the words of the Lips flow, this poet answers unequivocally: Wolf Wondratschek is speaking, and I believe that ‘the avant-garde’ often find no better answers.”
Wolf Wondratschek speaks. Whether that also applies to the lyrical I in poems like “The Postman’s Wife” (“I don’t see the stars, not without glasses / I don’t see the dreams in my blind sleep.”) or for “The Eye of the Rabbit” ( “My neighbor, a poet, only drinks.”)? It certainly applies to the poems dedicated to his son Raoulito (“Have I never told you the story / regarding the woman who rings the bell three times? / But it never rang three times.”) – and probably also for his reflections on what happens between heaven and earth: “Heaven was an invention of the gods. / The gods were an invention of the poets. / The poets were gods.”
Even gods get tired. You can feel that once more and once more in these location determinations, which are attempted without anger or melancholy. But they never lose touch. In the midst of the hype surrounding Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” film, Wondratschek’s new volume features the poem “Oppenheimer”. It shows the physicist in the New Mexico desert in the hours before the first atomic bomb exploded: “He pulls a volume of Baudelaire out of his pocket / and reads poetry until it gets light. Then, seconds / before the detonation of the first Nuclear bomb, he puts / his fingers between the pages. // How to protect yourself from the deadly light? / With the lie, how children protect themselves / when they say: It wasn’t me?”
(SERVICE – Wolf Wondratschek: “Some Poems”, Ullstein, paperback, 78 pages, 18.50 euros)
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