Lyricist Kurt Drawert turns 70: stepping stone to absurdity | EUROtoday

There are good causes to undergo on this planet, and naturally the extra sensitively organized one is, the higher the willingness to take action. For poets, such sensitivity is a part of the fundamental gear; it’s a part of an issue and on the identical time a part of an answer that, one can hope, compensates for the issue: maybe for the poet, however definitely for his viewers.

“Everything tends towards the incomprehensible” is the identify of Kurt Drawert’s quantity, which was printed two years in the past. The creator publishes a protracted poem that confirms the analysis contained within the title together with his worldview and powerfully undermines it together with his poetry. Because whereas there may be a number of discuss irritation there, whereas sensual impressions are bundled and held facet by facet till they create the picture of a resistant and on the identical time fleeting world, the lyricist’s language good points a superb readability in statement: “The days burn themselves out,” it says there, “there is (really) nothing / left. Also in time: the accelerated standstill, restless, / the / same in the same. Yesterday there was snow on the fir tree, / today the fir tree lies cut up in the wood.” And the text then raises the question of what happens to the memory of someone who had previously observed the fir tree and registered “the same thing in the same thing”.

Kurt Drawert is one of the most distinguished German poets, one of those who most carefully reflects on their craft and their actions. Born in Hennigsdorf in 1956 and living in Darmstadt for a long time, his works often connect the wide world with the Odenwald in an astonishing way, what has long since faded with the present and its glaring appearances. The strict form of his texts often becomes a springboard for the sheer absurdity that sometimes flashes briefly and sometimes colors entire passages. You can see in his poems how much freedom a self-imposed lyrical constraint can mean. Anyone who attends Drawert’s Darmstadt writing school benefits from this.

Drawert, a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, has obtained many awards, together with the Italo Svevo Prize, which rewards literary stubbornness. The resolution is sensible. On Sunday he celebrates his seventieth birthday.