When Jacques Derrida suggests that »an act of hospitality can only be poetic«, he is referring to poetry’s unique ability to create spaces that unconditionally welcome the Other. These are open spaces that hold things in place and refrain from immediately assigning a fixed meaning to what enters. In its tenth edition, Poetica celebrates poetry’s hospitality, inviting not only new authors but also poets and curators from previous festivals to enter its »room for thought« as their works reflect on »Poetic Thinking and Hospitality« in either form or content.
For the opening of Poetica 10, authors from Europe, Asia, Central and South Africa, North and South America will present their texts in short readings, providing information about their poetic thinking in a discussion with Uljana Wolf. The evening will commence with a welcome address by Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee, the University of Cologne’s rector.

»Come in.« That’s how easy it is to extend an invitation, and sometimes words aren’t even necessary: Ethnology speaks of the »poetry of gestures« that welcomes guests without language. Crossing the threshold into someone’s home implies a negotiation of orders and roles—and sometimes one stumbles. What applies to private spaces is reflected on a much larger scale between nations. Who are we willing to accept into our homes and what are we willing to share with our guests?
Sharing is a complex practice that is often associated with hospitality, but there are also demands that go along with it, as well as the challenge to deal with them. Is sharing always caring? What does a poem share when it doesn’t readily offer messages or content as other texts do? Which gestures of language or form allow us to cross the threshold? Can poetic thinking create spaces where all the doors shut? Together with anthropologist Thomas Widlok from the research initiative »Sharing a Planet in Peril«, the poets of Poetica will reflect on these and other questions.

If there is one author who is able to prove that more than one language belongs in a poem and that a playful approach to topics such as grammar can lead to unexpected pleasures, then it’s Yoko Tawada, whose chosen artform oscillates between Japanese and German. On piano is her brilliant music partner Aki Takase. Whether its replacement services or difficult passports is no obstacle, their virtuosity manages to create magic that brings everything together in soundscapes.
The texts of South African poet and performer Lebogang Mashile demonstrate that poems are a »space between I and we«. Celebrated and beloved for the hymn-like, critical drive of her poems in her homeland of South Africa and beyond, she sings of »tomorrow’s daughters« and the liberation of thought into free spaces beyond categories, maintaining »I will not live in boxes/ They are not my home.«
Not only has Michael Krüger published the most important poets of recent decades at Hanser and not only has he maintained friendly relations with the greatest voices of world poetry—no, his own poems have themselves long been a part of that legacy. Krüger’s precise observations—an epic grows out of his grandfather’s potatoes and a new alphabet is discovered from a dialogue with the forest—provide the basis for captivating poetic reflections that are as wistful as they are witty, and they are about, naturally, everything.

Poems, the poet Marianne Moore wrote, are imaginary gardens with real toads in them. How does one write poems that welcome reality? That create space for the moment of an imagined community? One that might even become reality?
As part of Poetica 10, students from the University of Cologne and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne will have the opportunity to present their texts in a literary workshop. The number of participants is limited to twelve to foster a thorough exchange. Only students enrolled at the University of Cologne or the Academy of Media Arts Cologne are allowed to participate.

»Why do we come places where no one understands us?« asks Hiromi Itō in her cycle Wildgrass on the riverbank, which is translated here into German for the first time. Her expansion of the space of poetry extends as wide as the plains of the prairie: children emigrating with their mother to the edge of some foreign-language landscape, perpetually in transit, incompressible to themselves and others. What remains are gestures, every child is a guest in their own life—»a growing, laughing, living body.«
The poems of the Syrian-born poet Lina Atfah, who has lived in Germany since 2014, also speak of transit and being existentially rootless. While expressing grief and anger at the violence ravaging her homeland, she is tender and tentative in her new home, which she first encounters through the robotic voice of a German »Navi« (GPS): »You’ve reached your destination.« Here, language is a shelter where memory and a sense of arrival are constantly in dialogue: »Where should I go with my poems? – Dig a grave in your pillow and sleep, that’s how dreams come true.«
Sjón’s poems tell of arrivals in dreams or in the »museum of trance« that is life. Ethereal, his texts seem to be inhabitable, like small parables, that show how the imagination of every individual can be a home if we shift our perspective. »To see it better, I closed my left eye.« 

Hospitality does benefit the Other not despite their being Other, but precisely because of it. But what enables us to become hosts in the first place? This is a question that artist Sandi Hilal’s »living room project« explores. In refugee shelters, she creates public living rooms that allow people living in transit to welcome guests they would like to host—to open the door to others and invite them to share food and conversation and be the host for a change. This a reversal of roles. At the same time, the project draws attention to essential questions. What does it take to be a host? An available space? Could that space also be a poem? Or is it, instead, the practices of hospitality that can be found wherever you go—offering a cold drink or the best pillow, listening to a language you don’t speak? What objects, texts, or practices can be used to become a host, even in unfamiliar places? With the aid of texts or objects they have brought with them, these questions will be explored by the authors.

For this evening, three poets will show how furious and entertaining poetic thought can be in responding to the world by tapping into technical languages and colliding with discourses. Sergio Raimondi, for instance, expands the lyrical vocabulary by examining how the global working world impacts language and the environment, associating the »death’s head hawk moth« with coal plants.
In his tonally vibrant poems, Fiston Mwanza Mujila combines colonial traces and »mining songs«, creating a psychogeography of the Republic of Congo. How many »munchkins« does it take to satisfy the mines in the belly of the earth? How many ancestors speak through the minerals or the »stomach names« of a poem in our age of extractivism?
A traveler to the other life on German Autobahnen, »bottleneck clearances«, and ducks that establish a state—all of these can be found in the poems of Monika Rinck. Her work has always celebrated the pyrotechnical potential for insight that is unleashed when nonfiction, theory, and sublimely dark absurdity are interwoven: »Do you feel the tug from work you didn’t get done / Haha! It’s still here. What did you trade for it?« The collision of different modes of thinking is exhilarating and—indubitably!— leads to new departures of the mind.

»And where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?« Claudia Rankine asks in her long poem Citizen, which examines the effects of racism on the soul, body, and social textures in the United States. Perhaps this place is that of the poem. And perhaps it changes depending on the pressure of the conditions it seeks to change—transformed, as with Rankine, into textual spaces bordering on essay, critical intervention, and autotheory.
The poems of Radna Fabias from the Netherlands also deal with bodies and the resistance to the collapsing of social spaces due to xenophobia. Navigating between not belonging and an ascribed sense of not belonging, her poems create worlds where absolutely everyone has a place. An entire apartment block is shouldered »436 turks,« »night porters«, »cleaning staff«, and »sleepless welfare recipients«—just »because they fit on my back«.
»Poetry, when it succeeds, knits us together.« What Sasha Marianna Salzman said about the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan when he won the Peace Prize could equally apply to their work. Through deeply disturbing approachability, Salzmann’s plays and novels evoke the interconnectedness of our destinies. At the same time, they touch upon that safe space in language that cannot be anything but sacrosanct, the poetic reservoir for our sense of possibility, our hopes.

In her Guessays—a neologism derived from »to guess« and »essay«—Uljana Wolf likens the act of translating to jumping in a bounce house: »The space changed with every jump, with every new impact, the jumper’s sense of space changed. The landscape punched back unexpectedly. Basically, the bounce house was a poem.« Given its ability to perceive the world and to experience new things through its fleeting architecture, theater also shares, at its best, some of the qualities of a bounce house. For the last evening of the Poetica week, the international poets will take another leap and be joined by ensemble members from the Schauspiel Köln as they allow their texts to reshape the landscapes we live in; exploring a sense of letting go as much as new movements and together, sounding out the freedom of poetry together for one last dance.