What connects poetry and magic? What happens when words begin to take effect? Poetry arises when we turn toward one another and toward the world, where we pay attention. Magic means opening ourselves up to vulnerability, transformation, and what’s never been there before. On this evening, we will discover how the international authors and musicians of Poetica find forms of community – be it in a talisman under the pillow, in a butterfly nebula, in the languages of children or in the sonic origins of language. 
For the opening of Poetica 11, the authors and artists will trace the magical potential of poetic language in concerts, readings, and conversations with the curator Rike Scheffler. Inspired by Jamaican author and philosopher Sylvia Wynter and her idea of the »re-enchantment of humanism«, they seek a poetry that reimagines humanity beyond violent orders – one that is more tender, diverse, and in deep connection with all living beings. The evening will open with welcoming remarks from the Rector of the University of Cologne, Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee, the director of Poetica, Uljana Wolf, as well as the poet and translator Olga Martynova, Vice-President of the German Academy for Language and Literature. 

»This is poetry as illumination«, the poet and activist Audre Lorde writes, »for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt«. Poetry, then, is not merely an echo of the world, but its harbinger: it senses what is to come, brings new life into being through words – and thus becomes magic that generates insight and makes the invisible felt.
Yet the very act of bringing things »to light« and naming them contains a threat: words can hurt, exclude, and cement power and order. This is precisely where poetry enters and helps us to liberate language from the old, binary coordinates consolidated during the Enlightenment – light (Enlightenment) and dark, nature and culture, living and inanimate. How can we name things without reducing them? Who holds the authority over meaning of what can be said – and how might futures sound if their languages were more tender, more permeable, more polyphonic?
The Poetica authors invite us to explore this charged terrain together. Drawing on the Ancient Greek poiein – »to make, to create« – they approach poetry as a creative act that writes solidarity and transformation into being. With this in mind, they will bring their own ›magical objects‹ – poems, songs, spells, and stories – with them and will open up encounters with the worldmaking application of poetry.

Ancient knowledge holds that the magic of words was preceded by the magic of sound. When the human voice begins to speak – creatively calling something into being or calling after it in invocation – it takes on the very characteristics of the thing, expanding into sounds previously unknown. It babbles, coos, hums, and echoes the calls of birds – and draws new energy for poetic speech from this transformation of the voice.
With her brilliant acapella piece One Pitch: Birds for Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers, singer and composer Sofia Jernberg celebrates the timeless, oral, and musical aspects of poetry. She creates a biodiversity of voices without any electronic effects; voices that speak of multiple identities, glitches, and unexpected communities – an exhilarating experience.
The texts of Ursula Krechel, winner of the Georg Büchner Prize, are attuned to the »mimetic magic« of language. Imbued with the »whispering wind« of poetic thought, her poems address mechanisms of power and exclusion, but they also ask what beauty is – »Saved. Threatened«. In her expansive body of work, she examines historical and contemporary ruptures as the result of war, violence, migration, and solitude, while hearing the »voice of snowflakes«, the »voice of hay bales«, or the »guttural« voices of witnesses. This is not an otherworldly magic, but poetry that resists sitting on the fence.

»The poem wants to reach an other, it needs this other, it needs an counterpart« Paul Celan writes. Few figures are so central to poetry as the address, notes poet Anja Utler. What lies at the heart of poetic address is a need: the lyrical I needs the poem as a laboratory for shaping itself and the world. It invents and transforms itself through the you, it understands itself in relation: »you mixed up you & I. Poems, of course, do it all the time«, Sarah Howe writes. 
But what kinds of relationships sustain this act of address in the relationship between the I and Other? Can the I exist without a You? Where does it go, when the You becomes a muse and the I a medium? Are they then both enchanters and enchanted simultaneously; participants in a shared ritual?
As part of Poetica 11, students from the University of Cologne and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne are invited to present their texts in a literary workshop. Together, we will explore contemporary forms of address – including more-than-human speech and in our relationship with AI.

Together, we will explore the inner alchemy of poems, ritual and planetary spells, incantations and curses.
We begin, quite literally, with Eve, who »knew what she was doing when she ate«. In her long poem Nach Eden, the German poet Daniela Seel searches for a feminist language that gives voice to what science knows little of: dying, birth, and vulnerability.
In her collection Foretokens, the Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe twists strands of DNA from the ends of her lines. How do we decipher information passed down through generations? Touching and playful, Howe finds poetic freedom in the chromosomal babel of incomplete traditions.
»Can the future be softened?« asks the Danish poet Mette Moestrup. Presenting her Butterfly Nebula, a radiant red, hymnal collection, she’ll delve into blood divinations – prophecies from verses, sounds, and bodies – live, turning our gaze to the disrupted metabolism between humans and the earth.
The songs of the Haitian-Canadian musician Mélissa Laveaux also sound like spells of memory. Laveaux herself speaks of »transmissions« – as soon as she starts singing, the air begins to vibrate. On her album Radyo Siwèl, the anti-colonial resistance songs of her ancestors merge with queer joy, pop-inspired folk riffs and pulsating beats.

How to write – in an age when all life is being threatened? 
For the US-American poet Joyelle McSweeney, poems that embrace both song and destruction have an »sinister and resourceful and delightful and dismaying aesthetics«. In an age of human-made catastrophes, questions about political and poetic forms of resistance are increasingly more urgent: How can a poem translate traces of ruin and loss into language without appropriating them? »Annihilating all that’s made / to a green thought in a green shade« – drawing on this famous line by the poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), McSweeney frames her reflections on a poetry that confronts today’s crises. Such poetry does not write about the end, but from within it – as a poetic practice of survival, lament, and transformation.
Together with guest author Joyelle McSweeney and Assistant Professor Judith Rauscher, the authors of Poetica are invited to explore how poetry can create a space that not only bears witness to the deadly consequences of political neglect, but also resists them through language. A space in which the wounded, silenced, and erased continue to have an influence: »a green thought in a green shade«. Soft magic as a resistant, interspecies echo. An echo where vulnerability becomes a creative force.

»A language isn’t a language if it doesn’t have secrets«, writes Alhierd Bacharevič. What is a language made of, what boundaries does it know? And what magical means can be used to expand language? What is the role of poetic language in political activism? Can it provide hope and healing? Can it sustain us through moments of powerlessness?
In his novel Europas Hunde, Bacharevič sketches a fragmented Europe in the future – a dystopian fable but also a meditation on the erosion of freedom and language’s ability to resist tyranny.
In his prose miniatures, Egyptian writer Haytham El-Wardany reimagines sleep as a hopeful instance, as a »strange language«. The Book of Sleep, which was written in the shadows of the Arab Spring, is a poetic-philosophical manifesto for vulnerability: sleep is seen as a daily surrender to the unknown. In the darkness, hope ripens »like a fruit« – and language becomes an act of awakening.
For the American poet Joyelle McSweeney, this awakening becomes a rebellion against death and decay. Her collection Toxicon and Arachne develops a »necropastoral« poetics – a toxically luminous, mutating imagery that circles around destruction as much as birth. Her poems search for seedbeds for new life with the ruins of Romantic poetry and with John Keats amid climate devastation.

»Dream Strong« celebrates poetry as a place where dreams can take shape. To dream doesn’t mean escaping, it means practicing a gentle, visionary, and determined practice that forges relationships and gives rise to new futures. In a time when so much in the world seems rigid, language becomes a movement that changes the world by retelling it.
»Woman is a construction«, writes Angélica Freitas. Transforming her anger at patriarchal violence in Brazil into rhythmically flickering verse, she writes with laconic fury about queer bodies and nationhood – and with Rilke Shake and Der Uterus ist groß wie eine Faust, she rewrites the Western canon with relish.
Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh transforms loss into light. Even amid the most painful realities and war, she is able to find tender, clear images for warmth and the future. She writes »as a substitute for home« about life under occupation and the mulberry tree in the morning light, as well as about poems as signposts »pointing towards the heart«.
Finally, the Indigenous US poet Natalie Diaz dares in Postcolonial Love Poem to write of love »and worse« – »to dream strong«. Her verses flow, at once sensual and political. Diaz unsparingly addresses the ongoing discrimination against Indigenous peoples and demands that every single body in this world – land, rivers, suffering brothers – be touched and held like a lover.

Unfortunately, Natalie Diaz had to cancel her participation for personal reasons. Her poems will be read by Rike Scheffler and Uljana Wolf. In addition, curator Rike Scheffler will read from her own work.

»Come – into the green night«, Natalie Diaz calls, »I am the alchemist of ink«. It is darkness that often brings forth new, vivid ways of seeing. Things that the light cannot fix are healed in darkness. For Poetica’s grand finale, the authors return to the stage a final time and are joined by members of the Schauspiel Köln ensemble. Together, they gather the week’s highlights and conjure what stirs in secret: the untranslatable, the unknown, the indefinable. Inspired by the writer Édouard Glissant and his idea of the »right to opacity«, they celebrate their languages as forms of resistant magic, capable of always being read anew. The result is a joyful, archipelago-like way of thinking: fragile, open, and interconnected. The world reveals itself in a poetic web of traces, resonances, and movements – a poetics of being on the go, one that connects us and makes us sing along:

»The night sings, sings, sings, sings
She sings, sings, sings beneath the earth« – as the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita writes.

Unfortunately, Natalie Diaz had to cancel her participation for personal reasons. Her poems will be read by actors from Schauspiel Köln.