Every reality and every detail of life has a potential significance not just for the person experiencing it, but also for itself and every other person that might learn to perceive the others experience in the function of poetry. To see the big things and questions in little things of everyday life is what I like most in poetry. One poem of mine starts ‘Was Sinn macht, ist am Ende vielleicht nur das Banale’ (‘What makes sense in the end, maybe it’s just the banal’)… If you are classical poet or writing novels about Humboldt, poems about the old Greeks, or just purely experimental and writing poems that nobody really understands with more allusions than lines, or just pop-literature, then it’s okay, you will find success, or if I was fifteen years old and writing about taking weird drugs and exercising bizarre sexual practices, then again, I would be a saleable success. I am happy to be something that doesn’t fit in these drawers.
For the 21st in the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the German poet Marco Kunz.
in the end, maybe
There is quite a heavy weight and a strong pressure on young poets – about what poetry should or shouldn’t be like, a pressure connected with the Polish tradition. Fortunately, I didn’t do Polish studies and so I managed to distance myself from all these futile discussions. On the other hand, there are more and more options for young poets, there’s a growing interest in the writing of Polish authors who have been somewhat neglected, there are lots of literary magazines and publishers. So, even though the dominant tradition is still quite strong (in school curricula, in the media), there are numerous options for those who want to do something else…
This glittering spring of time,
The way a poem looks (as well as the way it sounds) is as important as its content, for form and sound have everything to do with the poem’s reception: if the poem calls for lucid communication, it needs to be given space to ‘breath’ its meaning through; if, on the other hand, it challenges the reader to unlock it, it may very well do so through its form, as well as its syntax…The look of a poem on a page (as well as its oral delivery – which is very often dictated by its look on the page) is as important as the medium used on a visual work of art… Some poets never engage in methodological experimentation… that would be like having to sing all the world’s songs in the same musical metre: feasible but sterile.
A solitary shadow dances in circles in the middle
The circular gallery runs at the point where the vault of the Dome starts to curve inwards. The name comes from an intriguing characteristic the dome possesses: namely, if a person whispers facing the wall on one side, she/he can be clearly heard on the other, since the sound is carried perfectly around the vast curve of the Dome… In Budapest to Babel one of the many connotations of the “Whispering Gallery” refers to the original myth of the Babelic/linguistic confusion language is always associated with… I attempt to understand this Babelic concept as the most fundamental “building” material with which the language of the poem is provided… I imagine the texture of language, as the building material of my poems, as the texture of many “languages;” as a polyphonic voice which is not only creating chaos but, on the contrary, an unfinished tower of meaning…
Cities don’t leave, they stay. They don’t.
I put on Beethoven’s
In the two months I have been preparing myself to write my first book, I have had to break off all ties with contacts and kept myself from seeing any people. By day I’ve been reading books, at night time I’ve been writing, especially around 2, 3am, when silence is most deafening. Silence, laptop screen, words, all of that was very hypnotizing. Somehow after a month I had become so perfectly isolated, that I started thinking in poetic form thus found the writing of poems so easy, that I could write them also by day. I was wandering the streets of Warsaw, catching words, noting these ‘ricochets’ into my mobile phone, and later, at home, I typed, connected words, watching, how they played with one another. And that is how Radiowidmo (Radiophantom) was made. 
