Original research in refereed journals
· ‘The Body as Art, in Early-Twentieth-Century German Poetry’, Monatshefte 96 (2004), ed. Hans Adler, 503-520
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, clusters of poems, by both major and minor poets, evoke bodies as art objects, such as statues, paintings, and floral ornaments. In part this originates in a desire to synthesize the ancient and the modern, or to posit a quasi-sexual model of art-reception and art-creation. The symbol-laden bodies constitute a play with aesthetic tradition: strict separation of the made image from the mortal, birthing body allows poets to explore how bodies are conceptualized. They set silent corporeal gesture against lyric language: whilst sonnet form counters the disintegration of broken art-bodies, the voiceless, non-intellectual model of communication also challenges the poem. In the shift from a visual to a linguistic medium, gaps open up, so that images are not just reproduced but critically interpreted in body poems; the critical gaps around bodies’ speechlessness show up the power of spectatorship and the satisfied gaze.
Link to journal
· ‘Time in Volker Braun’s Poetry’, Volker Braun in Perspective, German Monitor 58 (2004), ed. Rolf Jucker, 197-208
In Volker Braun’s pre-unification collections, the present predominates grammatically and structurally and it is exalted metaphorically as a peak of restlessness, culinary adventure, or sublime revelation. Drawing together chronologically disparate poems to conceive of them as parts in a long-term Auseinandersetzung with the nature of time, this essay examines how Braun variously inscribes the temporal moment. Readings of five poems spanning the period between 1964 and 1996 – ‘Könnt ich die Augenblicke leben’, ‘Die Austern’, ‘Der Mittag’, ‘Das Nachleben’ and ‘Der Reißwolf’ – reveal contrasting constructions of the bodily experience of time in terms of presence and absence. They also posit relationships between time and the work of art which indicate a radical poetological shift after Germany’s unification of 1990.
Link to journal
Link to article
· ‘Eine im Feuer versunkene Stadt: Dresden in Poetry’, Gegenwartsliteratur 1 (2002), ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, 87-106
Exploring a particular manifestation of the city-poem, this article traces how Dresden became a topos in German poetry after 1945. Identifying a complex of associations and motifs reveals poets’ concern with commemorating the devastating wartime fire-bombing of the Saxon city. Taking its cue from essays by Wulf Kirsten and Gerrit-Jan Berendse on Dresden poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, this essay examines how the tradition established in those decades has been developed by a subsequent generation, writing in the 1980s and 1990s. The representation of Dresden in relation to various histories (national, personal, literary, art history) returns repeatedly to the tension between what passes away and what is preserved in perpetuity. Whereas earlier poems tend to read the city as history made concrete, later poems focus on abstract forces and the city’s supernatural power.
Link to journal
· ‘Science in Contemporary Poetry: A Point of Comparison between Raoul Schrott and Durs Grünbein’, German Life and Letters 54 (2001), 82-96
One of the most striking characteristics of Raoul Schrott’s and Durs Grünbein’s poetry is a thematization of natural science. Originally a graduate seminar paper, this article brings together science poetry by these remarkably different European poets of the 1990s. Schrott’s scientists are poet-like figures who see the world in a new way, extending perspective and providing an example to the modern-day lyric subject. For Schrott, science is a set of metaphors, a benign language of poetry. In Grünbein’s poetry, however, science is a threat, a dominant, sanitising influence on modern life which, far from raising up humans as adventurers and explorers, diminishes them. Science here reveals only the serious meaninglessness of life and is taken up in the poetry for bravura provocation.
Link to journal
· ‘The Ex-GDR Poet and the People’, German Life and Letters 52 (1999), 490-505
Post-Wende poetry shows both older and younger poets coming to terms with a new self-understanding. At the Wende, these writers were swayed anew by abstract ideals, which at first seemed to match the aims of the civil demonstrations. Ultimately, however, the people sought western-style democracy and the end of German division, whilst many GDR writers and intellectuals were sceptical about unification. This made them ‘unpopular’ in a way that had been inconceivable under GDR circumstances. Many poems assess poets’ loss of social function: they express a sense of dispossession and descent from a position of presumed significance. Dialogue is one important aspect of their comparison between past and present: this essay identifies poets’ dread of writing into a void where literature has no resonance, analysing laments for the loss of the imagined relationship between the GDR poet and the GDR people.
Link to journal
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, clusters of poems, by both major and minor poets, evoke bodies as art objects, such as statues, paintings, and floral ornaments. In part this originates in a desire to synthesize the ancient and the modern, or to posit a quasi-sexual model of art-reception and art-creation. The symbol-laden bodies constitute a play with aesthetic tradition: strict separation of the made image from the mortal, birthing body allows poets to explore how bodies are conceptualized. They set silent corporeal gesture against lyric language: whilst sonnet form counters the disintegration of broken art-bodies, the voiceless, non-intellectual model of communication also challenges the poem. In the shift from a visual to a linguistic medium, gaps open up, so that images are not just reproduced but critically interpreted in body poems; the critical gaps around bodies’ speechlessness show up the power of spectatorship and the satisfied gaze.
Link to journal
· ‘Time in Volker Braun’s Poetry’, Volker Braun in Perspective, German Monitor 58 (2004), ed. Rolf Jucker, 197-208
In Volker Braun’s pre-unification collections, the present predominates grammatically and structurally and it is exalted metaphorically as a peak of restlessness, culinary adventure, or sublime revelation. Drawing together chronologically disparate poems to conceive of them as parts in a long-term Auseinandersetzung with the nature of time, this essay examines how Braun variously inscribes the temporal moment. Readings of five poems spanning the period between 1964 and 1996 – ‘Könnt ich die Augenblicke leben’, ‘Die Austern’, ‘Der Mittag’, ‘Das Nachleben’ and ‘Der Reißwolf’ – reveal contrasting constructions of the bodily experience of time in terms of presence and absence. They also posit relationships between time and the work of art which indicate a radical poetological shift after Germany’s unification of 1990.
Link to journal
Link to article
· ‘Eine im Feuer versunkene Stadt: Dresden in Poetry’, Gegenwartsliteratur 1 (2002), ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, 87-106
Exploring a particular manifestation of the city-poem, this article traces how Dresden became a topos in German poetry after 1945. Identifying a complex of associations and motifs reveals poets’ concern with commemorating the devastating wartime fire-bombing of the Saxon city. Taking its cue from essays by Wulf Kirsten and Gerrit-Jan Berendse on Dresden poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, this essay examines how the tradition established in those decades has been developed by a subsequent generation, writing in the 1980s and 1990s. The representation of Dresden in relation to various histories (national, personal, literary, art history) returns repeatedly to the tension between what passes away and what is preserved in perpetuity. Whereas earlier poems tend to read the city as history made concrete, later poems focus on abstract forces and the city’s supernatural power.
Link to journal
· ‘Science in Contemporary Poetry: A Point of Comparison between Raoul Schrott and Durs Grünbein’, German Life and Letters 54 (2001), 82-96
One of the most striking characteristics of Raoul Schrott’s and Durs Grünbein’s poetry is a thematization of natural science. Originally a graduate seminar paper, this article brings together science poetry by these remarkably different European poets of the 1990s. Schrott’s scientists are poet-like figures who see the world in a new way, extending perspective and providing an example to the modern-day lyric subject. For Schrott, science is a set of metaphors, a benign language of poetry. In Grünbein’s poetry, however, science is a threat, a dominant, sanitising influence on modern life which, far from raising up humans as adventurers and explorers, diminishes them. Science here reveals only the serious meaninglessness of life and is taken up in the poetry for bravura provocation.
Link to journal
· ‘The Ex-GDR Poet and the People’, German Life and Letters 52 (1999), 490-505
Post-Wende poetry shows both older and younger poets coming to terms with a new self-understanding. At the Wende, these writers were swayed anew by abstract ideals, which at first seemed to match the aims of the civil demonstrations. Ultimately, however, the people sought western-style democracy and the end of German division, whilst many GDR writers and intellectuals were sceptical about unification. This made them ‘unpopular’ in a way that had been inconceivable under GDR circumstances. Many poems assess poets’ loss of social function: they express a sense of dispossession and descent from a position of presumed significance. Dialogue is one important aspect of their comparison between past and present: this essay identifies poets’ dread of writing into a void where literature has no resonance, analysing laments for the loss of the imagined relationship between the GDR poet and the GDR people.
Link to journal
posted by Ruth J. Owen at
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