»Poetic Thinking and Hospitality – Freiräume der Poesie«
The current crises and wars have an impact on how we speak to each other, how we listen to one another, how we wield language, and what we expect of it. We are witnessing how heated polarization, social media, and the »enshitification« of the internet (Hito Steyerl) have unleashed a drive for clarity and positioning that has not spared the arts, especially those working with language. What stance does poetry take with regards to the tension between real suffering and rampant moral pressure? How does it engage with the phenomena of social polarization, with the national and geopolitical identity mandates that lead to a narrowing of linguistic spaces?
»Literature is freedom«, Susan Sontag declared in her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003. Through the relational spirit of its metaphors, poetry is capable of evoking a manifold of ideas in its readers. Its mental imagery oscillates between the graspable and the ungraspable, thereby creating spaces that cannot be reduced to a single, definitive interpretation. Its power stems from its nature that is inherently dialogical, engaging with what is given and what hasn’t happened yet but could be. One could also say that poems practice hospitality in aesthetic spaces—small shelters, islands of understanding—that can be entered and where every intended or unintended meaning can be reconsidered. If so, poems create through the shifting of meanings and sounds a diversity of meanings that undermine the static friend-foe line of thinking. Instead of fixed positions, there are new beginnings. Instead of rigid conviction, there’s a sense of possibility.
Poetica 10 is wholeheartedly dedicated to this sense of possibility in poetry and to its invariably productive and precarious accommodations. With authors from five continents, it seeks to ask: How do contemporary poems across the globe respond to the collapsing of spaces from social transformations, wars, autocracies, turbo-capitalism, or other mandates? How can we learn to open up poetic spaces of thought from poems and keep them open for all of us? How do we practice hospitality in language, how do we create aesthetic practices that keep us ethically grounded and are sustainably responsible?
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