Nature writing, ecopoetry: these are terms for genres from Western, or, more specifically, Anglo-American literary theory. They’re search words for a poetry of the Anthropocene that holds a mirror up to human intervention in nature and participates in debates about climate change or species extinction. As a festival for world literature, Poetica 9 will be dedicated to the relationship between nature, poetry, and history, and will thereby expand the search field, particularly by showing the global diversity in contemporary nature poetry and the widely differing cultural traditions and literary forms that poets from Colombia, England, Greece, Iran, Japan, North Macedonia, Switzerland, USA, or Germany refer to in their poetry.
For the opening of Poetica 9, ten authors from Europe, Asia, North, Central, and South America, will present their texts in short readings, providing information about their poetic stance in a discussion with curator Daniela Danz. It will commence with a welcome address by Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee, the University of Cologne’s rector.

At a time when »bread and wine« were still not produced industrially, Friedrich Hölderlin, the author of the elegy of the same name, nevertheless felt that there was so much wrong in the world that he had misgivings about the meaning of poetry. »What are poets for in a destitute time?« he asked, only to give an answer elsewhere: »But what endures comes from the poets. « Centuries later, this is echoed in Kendel Hippolyte’s »but the poet’s words will last,« which admittedly isn’t as upbeat as hoped for: »It will be the poet’s words coming at you in the thundering sermon of the landslide, in the revenging wind swearing down through the valley, the crackling of the sun gone wild.« Can poetry give a voice to nature? But how do poets know what nature says, how do they hear it, what language do they find for it, and does this speaking extend beyond lamentation and accusation? The communal thinking about these and other questions will be preceded by statements from the poets.

That lyrics have a political meaning is »like second nature to us, that’s what music is for« (Rou Reynolds). Climate change, the overexploitation of natural resources, and criticism of the economic system are the most important issues in Rou Reynolds’ lyrics for the British band Enter Shikari. In the song Arguing with thermometers, he writes: »That’s the sound of another door shutting in/ In the face of progress…/ Back to the drawing board, boys/ Accept nothing short of complete reversal.« Rou Reynolds’ lyrics are small, nimble entities advocating for collective insight into the urgency for action. In conjunction with Enter Shikari’s music, they act as an »all inclusive activity,« concerned with creating an impetus to evoke creative powers in the listener. And the texts juxtapose the combative determination of the music with the vulnerability of personally being at the mercy of someone else.
The conversation with Rou Reynolds will focus on the belief of the transformative power of words and music. And it will surely also be about whether a song that implores us to go back to the drawing board and make new plans is a lonely one, since in the end everything is about what’s most personal: »So to keep us from falling apart/ We’ll write songs in the dark.«

Writing about nature is writing about the personal experience and subjective perception of nature. Given the urgency of the matter, it remains difficult to avoid truisms, to steer clear from ideological phrases and agitations, and to write about what makes up the core of poetry: to find what can be said only so and in no other way. As part of Poetica 9, students from the University of Cologne and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne will have the opportunity to present their texts and discuss them with the other participants in a literary workshop. Only students enrolled at one of the universities are allowed to participate.
Applicants are asked to submit text samples (five poems or a maximum of two pages of prose/drama) that address subjective moments that capture the interrelationship between humans and nature. 

Three continents, three women, three perspectives on a society that exploits nature—partly carelessly, partly intentionally, and partly involuntarily. In her long poem, God is a bitch, too, the Colombian poet María Paz Guerrero sends a female god into the human wasteland of the present and into the misery overshadowed by the destruction of all resources and the unholy desire to enjoy small pleasures, for, God isn’t able to make great financial leaps either. Equally saturated by the present, Camille T. Dungy’s texts relate the small, yet world-changing insights she gains from her dialogue with nature while digging in the soil. She also deflects the racism she encounters as an African American woman with observations of sparrows outside her window: »The grackles/ […] so bright within their blackness, I pray they will stay.« Using the term »disturbed terrain« from natural history, the German author Esther Kinsky sees it as a metaphor for how human traces are inscribed in nature. In her poems, she wants to reclaim the openness of nature writing from its narrow definition: »layered work from an intervention in the state of things that deprives us of all names.«

In the beautifully illustrated volume The Lost Words (2017), the British author Robert Macfarlane describes an experience that many have had: the disappearance of rarely used animal names in the use of language. Likewise, Kendel Hippolyte speaks of the fruit »miwiz«, which none of his students were familiar with, and which he could only barely remember seeing—only as a flash of lightning that ran through his thoughts. Those who have never heard the nightingale’s song will still be able to infer from poems what it might sound like. What’s lost when the creatures behind the words are no longer part of our lives? Or when we no longer feel connected to them since we no longer share a common narrative? What’s lost when we’re no longer able to distinguish between ducks and seagulls, as Camille T. Dungy describes in a crucial moment of her book Soil (2023)? All the names of agricultural equipment and activities disappear with the necessity for their existence or implementation, just as other words for digital skills emerge.
Each Poetica 9 author will bring an object or image that he or she associates with lost words, lost experiences, lost experiences of nature, and will then talk about the potential role of poetry to act as a refuge for these words.

When fire storms into the poem, when the physical experience of heat, of smoke, wedges itself between life and poem, a kind of literature emerges that has a fundamental connection to nature in its very core. The threat of one’s own existence is intertwined with the threat to poetic expression. Liana Sakelliou weaves into a love story the horror of the wildfires that ravaged her homeland—moments when the reality of fire threatens to consume the written word. Nevertheless, poetry asserts its presence behind the leaves. Nikola Madžirov’s poems are testimonies of the poetic expression of losses, the inner shocks left by an earthquake and the societal upheavals in his homeland. They embed the unheard of events into all the monstrosities of former times and yet remain quiet testimonials to the courage of contemporaneity and the defiance of inexplicable confidence. Raphael Urweider’s new poems do not lose the lightness that the play with language can generate even while they clearly speak about moments of despair. His verses lay tracks and cover them—in a forest that, as in a game of deception, is both a metaphor and a natural space.

»Storm, oh storm/ I’m a storm myself,« standing in the long tradition of Persian nature poetry, Ali Abdollahi’s verses read like secret messages of a sad reality passing from one actuality to another. Against the backdrop of the oppression of an entire population, the rage of the farmers towards a corrupt government that does nothing to counter to the existential threats of climate change are but one battlefield amongst many. »In the morning, we count the dead/ In the newspapers, in the hospitals, on the streets/ On the beach, beneath the rubble that used to be homes/ We need your ghostly dance, Amenouzume,« Takako Arai’s lines bring us to the other side of the world—to Fukushima after the nuclear disaster in 2011. Invoking the Japanese god Amenouzume with her ritual dance to bring forth a morning so that the dead can be counted is an attempt at creating a poetic and religious awareness. At the same time, it also resonates with Kendel Hippolyte’s vision of an animate nature that global warming is committing violence upon, a violence one would never inflict on any mother, as he calls the Earth. His poems are as moving as they are evocative of the perceivable threats to his Caribbean homeland, which he seeks to give a different future through poetry: »re-write / this island / I-land.«

The final evening will bring all the authors together once again. The voices of this choir are meant to be heard »after nature,« united in a production that lures nature into the theater’s interior. And it makes connections between poems about the threatened island paradise of the Caribbean and the threat posed by the Japanese nuclear industry, between digging into the earth and laments about droughts, and between the attempt to find a language for one’s own relationship with nature that goes beyond everyday understanding. All of this in the hope that an echo will reverberate, changing us from how we were when we entered this conversation.