Maintenant #21: Marco Kunz
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.
Three Poems
in the end, maybe
it’s just the trivial –
rain-wet tarmac
smelled in may — one point of
time, just lived and
inhaled, what more
do you seek, what
more do you long for?
The great ambitions, bleak
and awful, just
fuel for burning,
travelling on
By Marco Kunz.
The Missing Links
“I’m gonna piss ‘RIP JOHN CALLAHAN’ in the snow.” * Jon Savage on the cult of the Screamers, the punk band who never released a record. * ‘When We Fell In Love’, Tony O’Neill on William Burroughs. * Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Radiant new movie.* Tim Parks on fiction in translation. * 10 of the best nameless […]
A Shout in the Street
This book captures two sides of the city: the social dimension, and the solitary experience of the urban flanêur. Cotner and Fitch render urban conversational wandering extremely well, a mode of experiencing the city where one wanders the streets, talking excitedly as one goes; where the surroundings provide an atmospheric backdrop to the main event, so to speak: the conversation. The conversational sections of the book are expansive and gesture towards the philosophical, but these movements towards a higher knowledge come from and return to reality, through reference to the everyday world.
Karl Whitney on Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch‘s Ten Walks/Two Talks.
Wish You Were Here?
To the dismay of many existing residents, obscure coastal backwaters became places of economic and cultural significance. Locations for recovery and indulgence, of difference and sameness, and of virtue alongside vice. With a splattering of seamen to salt things up a bit. Many of the cultural shifts of the past century also found their unique expression, and sometimes even their inception, at the seaside. The rise of the teenager and the tabloid obsession with out-of-control youths peaked with the coverage of the Mods-v-Rockers “battles”. And a remarkable number of other cultural conflicts, between conservatism and modernity in art, architecture and attitudes to gender and sexuality have been played out at the seaside, albeit often in code.
John P. Houghton on Travis Elborough‘s Wish You Were Here: England on Sea.
ampere’s and
This week’s visuals: Edmund White on the photos of Allen Ginsberg & James Avati‘s 1950s paperback covers for William Faulkner [via] & Saul Bass‘ opening titles for Grand Prix [via] & The lost art of the film credit sequence [via] & Yellowbacks & penny dreadfuls, an overview of Victorian publishing [via] & Jonathan Ross on […]