Dichter
Nico Bleutge
Nico Bleutge
(Duitsland, 1972)
Biografie
Nico Bleutge was born in 1972 in Munich. Between 1993 and 1998 he studied German Literature, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Tübingen, where he still lives. He has been writing his Ph.D. thesis on Robert Musil since 1999 and has worked as a freelance literary critic since 2001 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Stuttgarter Zeitung, among other publications. Bleutge was awarded the Open Mike prize by Berlin’s literaturWERKstatt in 2001 and received the Wolfgang-Weyrauch-Förder prize from the Literarischer März in 2003. In 2004 he was awarded a scholarship by the Baden-Württemberg Arts Foundation and a fellowship by the Berlin Literary Colloquium.
Photographic terms often appear in Bleutge’s texts – at times technical attempts are made in the poem to arrest the process of the world coming into being through perception: “plate upon plate// i fill with images for the future”, as the poet says in ‘punctured sky’ in a quote from Karl Kraus. The first person singular generally only appears as a quotation: Bleutge’s poems look for connections between worlds and languages in which an apparently fixed ‘lyrical I’ is portrayed in its groping movement.
The future and the past, memory and re-creation intertwine in the perception technique of these poems. Levels of time and language are mutually exposed in both the imagery of the texts and in a variety of quotations and associations: “the pressure// of tiny hairs against the napkin rings, the perspective/ of the memories stacked up on top of one another”. In unusual proximity, day-to-day details such as “the spatter of cleaning water” form sublime and disturbed views: “the crescent of the ocean broken out of the picture, the lime/ in the finger-grooves”.
Landscapes, architecture – but also plant surfaces – and a body that hears, sees and understands them mirror one another. Through the poems’ comparative structure itself, the environment becomes the somatic figure that the subject uses to go in search of perceptions: “the hair is following the wind/ which goes back a long way, on the skin of the houses/ cartilage is protruding and the shutters/ are gasping for air”.
Born out of a scepticism towards language in the age of modern media, a totally new and changing inspiration of thoughts and viewpoints is consequently created in Bleutge’s poems. Writing about his work, the critic Michael Braun says: “a poem’s highest achievement is to change the adventure of perception into a concept of lyrical images”.
© Alexander Gumz (Translated by Jane Palmer)
BibliographyPoems published in:
Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2004. Ed. Christoph Buchwald. Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2003.
Lyrik von Jetzt. Ed. Björn Kuhligk and Jan Wagner. DuMont, Köln 2003.
neue deutsche literatur 5/2001.
neue deutsche literatur 2/2003.
Das Gedicht, no. 9.
Das Gedicht, no. 10.
Sinn und Form 1/2004.
Links
Nico Bleutge on Lyrikline
Gedichten
PUNCTURED SKY
CHARACTER HEAD, SECTION MESSERSCHMIDT (F.X.): 2
WANDERING PARTICLES, SEEING
HONEY-WARM PUPILS . . .
AFTERNOON, SHIFTING VIEW
LIGHT SUMMER
CHARACTER HEAD, SECTION MESSERSCHMIDT (F.X.): 1
west side, twilight, the sharpness of edges remains only briefly
then the heat slowly eased itself
IN THE WINDOW, AT THE TINY
Gedichten
Gedichten van Nico Bleutge
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