On the train

June 05, 2012 A girl two seats behind me tells her friends how she fell out of a car yesterday. I am travelling from Poland back to Berlin. Trains aren’t my favourite means of transportation, as they tend to be too noisy – but what can you do if you are a poet earning most of her money by giving readings?

And what can you do if you lack the wings for flying (which would be one of my favourite means of transport, besides, of course, being ‘beamed’ as it was phrased in the German versions of “Raumschiff Enterrose” in the 70s)? In my opinion, teleportation is the most overdue invention. I have been waiting for it for ages now. It would be so useful – and its development so entirely incomplete . . .
           
So, I am on the train.  Since the quality of the coffee served in German ICEs has been largely improved, I actually like trains. I even like them for work in spite of the noise (special thanks here to my younger sister for her habit of listening to loud music while doing her homework – without headphones – which induced my brain to acquire some weird brain/ear-shutdown capabilities). I cannot remember to ever have written a new poem on a train, however – no place for inspirations, it seems. But the best inspirations and ideas always come unexpectedly, in inconspicuous circumstances, from things and aspects no one else takes notice of. For a poem they require (in my case, often) a conflux of rhythm and vision which I cannot ‘produce’ by sheer will. What I can do, though, is create a field or an atmosphere where this may happen. I can ‘be there’: attentive-lazy, relaxed and under suspense – in a poetic mode, so to speak, of perception, listening to sounds – language sounds, body sounds: the sounds of gestures, the sounds of faces, of trees, of trains.
           
Travelling might sometimes help to get mysef into that ‘poetic mode’. Being in a foreign space, especially a space whose language I don’t speak, sets me off: it loosens the tight ties of sense and meaning, of rationality and all the pragmatisms of communication. It heightens my perceptibility for margins, ambivalences, contradictions, funny coincidences and frictions between my mother tongue and the ‘other’ language, of which I might, as with Dutch, comprehend some bits and pieces – falling for all the ‘false friends’ dancing lively in the magic foreground.
           
I only have one mother tongue (I always envied people who grew up bilingually), and am tied to my native German: it gives me the feeling of having my feet on the ground. In a way it is this rootedness that ‘entitles’ me to play around with language: to stretch and bend it, to treat it as if it were a dough, to test its limits. I feel assured, I know the resonances and the resonances of resonances and my memory of its uses and beauties is not only dictionary-induced, but a memory coming out of a (my own) lived life.

Sometimes, though, I write a poem in English – it happens when, while travelling, I start to think and feel in that language. This change is a real Wandel – a transformation of myself and the poetry, too. The poems produced in English follow different patterns of metaphors and meanings than in German, and are imbued with other ways of perceiving connections. I always feel that any effort to change the language affects my poetry intensely, because it is written out of a bodily feeling for the linguistic body that I am ‘using’.

But, alas: all these verbs and structures I am using here to talk about these processes imply a relationship of object and subject as nicely separated entities. Which is exactly what does NOT mirror my experience in dealing with language in poetic ways. There I am interested in weird connections and flowing boundaries: the dependence of thought or feeling on the language in which it is expressed. And ‘express’ is a misleading term: it suggests that what becomes expressed sits readily in my head, just waiting for its expression. Wonderful nonsense! I think and feel and hear simultaneously in poetry, and anything ‘expressed’ is at least partly MADE by that and exactly that language. This process, and the question of how much of our existence and experience might transcend the language patterns in our heads, and what these categories of body and beyond intrigues me in poetry.

So at its core poetry is connected to adventure for me. It is the adventure of what the reading and writing of poetry means. It’s an adventure in the old sense of the word: a search, a journey into unknown areas of oneself (which seems to be the most incomplete thing of all. Luckily enough, I’d say. There’s room for improvement.)

For reasons obvious enough I tried to write a native/not-native poem about writing in German and sometimes in English. You can read it at the end of this entry. This poem isn’t finished yet, so please forgive its jumps and irregularities. Above all: it hasn’t found an ending yet.

So: when do I know when a poem is ‘complete’?  

I just don’t. Instead I know when a poem is not finished. I work on it until this ‘knowledge’ decreases. When I don’t feel it any more, I put the poem away for a while. It needs darkness. Coming out after a couple of months into the broad daylight of being read aloud publicly makes things much clearer. If it stands the test it is as finished as it might ever get. And then it is important to really put a full stop to production. Otherwise the whole thing might become overdone – it will die beneath your typing fingertips:
 
zu hören
warum die einen den baum
„palm“ mit dem inneren ihrer hände
verbinden was die anderen die „inneres“
sagen (erinner es), vielleicht begreifen nie
aber fühlen: palmtree, palm oil.
 
was das heißt? (inneres öl?). was für
folgen es hat? ob es folgen hat für die
art und weise sich in der welt zu bewegen
was in dieser sprache auch „sich zurechtzufinden“
heißt und mich daran erinnert wie ich morgens im bett
die erwachenden glieder einsammle die sprache
sich zusammensetzt in meinem kopf
 
erste sprache
vorsichtig (sich setzt) und frech
vom schrubben (sprichthandelt)
des astes am fenster als kind
                        (you cannot say: find yourself toright)
niemals “tree” oder “child” and never a branch
this couldn’t be, it came later ich war 21 in bed with a lover narrow
bed window tile sashed window and sound this of the wind
unforgettable branches sound of kissing though embedded
thought in my thighs and tighs and sighs
and tides: the unforgettable gliding of branches
my bra in my palm, palpable palm
glassy glossy hätte
ich das nie
auf deutsch erlebt in keinem deutschen bett
erlebt/uplived this grey colour of branches of tree
of palmtreeroot of trunk and bird
in the sky
after tree and tea and t- - to to
never erlebt
uplived oder lived through
lifted up to the
branches of äste of baum – treeast
baumbranch now, palm
palm
in my miraculing
miracletossing toss-kopfing
hin und her head 
 
Unfinished. The German word Geäst still flicks around in the margins of the last ten or so verses, asking to enter, playing with not wanting to enter. And there are other words that this Geäst shades. I can feel them but not pronounce them. I know that they will change the beginning of the poem (which is too long). They are there, they are images or part of images – of thoughts, embedded in image. I’ll have to wait – perhaps for Rotterdam and its manifold poetic languages.