Media Library

BERLIN POETRY LECTURE 2021: JOHANNES JANSEN

Ergebnis einer Isolation / Outcome of an Isolation

2021-06-13, 8:00 PM

Johannes Jansen (born in East Berlin in 1966) is delivering this year’s Poetry Lecture. It is a text in 34 prose miniatures, in which a poetics of the state of emergency is sketched out. It is about the fear that sits in the forms and the “grudge against the world”. But it is also about moments of epiphany in being lifted out of the everyday, which show a clear move into the mystic.

With Johannes Jansen, poet (DEU)

The “subtly sacred message” of the Lecture points to Jansen’s closeness to such writers as Simone Weil, Angelus Silesius and the Rilke of the Book of Hours and the Sonnets to Orpheus. With a clarity anchored in the depths, the “bright moments” are described in which “friction is created and what is small gets to speak”. It is about the serious game of order and about clear thinking that “determines the running of the household”. The poet is thought of as the bearer, the translator who makes literature an experience for readers. This Lecture allows them to look inside his transparent mind and watch while it “charges up and radiates”.

Ergebnis einer Isolation / Outcome of an Isolation is being published to coincide with the event in German and English (translated by Shane Anderson) by Wallstein Verlag (€ 13.90). Deutschlandfunk Kultur is broadcasting a recording of the Lecture.

Lecture in German with English subtitles.

Project leader: Matthias Kniep