Slovenian poet, prose writer, and publisher, Aleš Šteger, the curator of Poetica II, has invited renowned writers from around the world to Cologne for one week. These authors are ›literary amphibians‹, who know how to move between genres when they compose ›Blue Notes‹. They are authors who, in poetry and prose, in librettos and song lyrics, in essays and performances, give form to their grief and longing—grief for a world out of joint, longing to put it together again in art. The opening event in the Aula (auditorium) of the university will introduce all of the Poetica authors in conversation with the Curator and through readings of texts by which they can be recognized, both in the original language and German translation.

The evening will begin with a welcoming address from Axel Freimuth (Rector of the University of Cologne), Katharina Kloke (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), and Barbara Foerster (Culture Office of the City of Cologne), the sponsors of Poetica. In addition, there will be ›Minima Poetica‹ from Günter Blamberger (Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies) and Heinrich Detering (German Academy for Language and Literature). Following the event, Morphomata will host a reception to which all are welcome.

At midnight a young man sitting at his desk, thinking of his vanished lover, Lenore, turns to the raven that has just flown in through his window and asks him one question after another. The raven repeatedly caws back to him but one word: »Nevermore«. With this bleak oracle ends Edgar Allan Poe’s »The Raven« of 1845—the poem that made him famous. A year later, he explained his success in the essay The Philosophy of Composition as a mere calculated use of form with no reference to reality: Nothing would move a reader more than grief at the death of a beautiful young woman. The essay is, of course, little more than an artistic legend designed to conceal the traumas of Poe’s life: the early death of his mother at the age of 24, the death of the sweetheart of his youth, Helen, and the illness of his young wife Virginia, who would die of tuberculosis in 1847.

›Blue Notes‹—literature as the art of grief and of overcoming it in different cultures and forms: That is the topic of this public discussion with the Poetica authors and the Fellows of the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne in the Center's library. What shape does grief take in poems, what shape in novels? How is it able to motivate the short form, and how the long form? Melancholy as muse, poetry as its remedy—a comforting formula that deceives author and reader alike, only leading them further into hopelessness, but which may also turn out to be helpful.

»Do you know how long Adam and Eve were in Paradise?« – »No«. »If Dante is right, just seven hours.« Thus writes the Basque author Bernardo Atxaga, asking how short is happiness, how long is grief, in his poems and novels, for which he has been honored in Spain with the National Prize for Literature. – And how long are the »tall spikes of blue flowers«?, asks English author Lavinia Greenlaw, who seeks to describe ›blue moments‹, knowing all along: »I keep my distance, as things turn blue / through stillness and distance, / as everything blue is distant.« – Sometimes all that is needed is a blue pencil to summon up melancholy: »For your blue pencil: / ›All cancelled; / Nothing gold can stay‹«, writes Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner from the USA, one of the best known contemporary poets in English, who also writes for rock bands, looking back at »a golden age / of poetry and power.« – ›Blue Notes‹, quoted from the works of three important contemporary authors who will be introduced in readings and conversations at the Cologne Public Library. ›Two golden hours of poetry and power‹ are to be expected.

Can writing be learned based on the model of American universities? That is, in creative writing workshops? In Germany, this was doubted for a long time. Creativity was viewed as a natural talent, the expression of an original genius. Recently, however, in Germany, more and more courses of study in creative writing are being made available. And rightly so, for writing requires, first of all, a skill that can or should be learned.

In the context of Poetica II, students at the University of Cologne have the opportunity to review the craft of their texts in a literary workshop hosted by Aleš Šteger and the Swiss poet and prose writer Ilma Rakusa. The number of participants in this half-day workshop is limited. Participants must be enrolled as students at the University of Cologne. Those interested in participating should send a CV along with writing samples (only poetry; max. six poems; no poem longer than two pages) by January 10, 2016, to: Marta Dopieralski, Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Universität zu Köln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne ().

Stanislaus Perfezki—hero of the Ukrainian underground—has mysteriously vanished after an eventful symposium in Venice on the postcarnevalistic madness of the world. This is the opening puzzle of Perwersija, a novel by the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, possibly his country’s best known intellectual voice today. Less well known, in Germany, than his novels are his punk text performances or his melancholic and angry poetry, which will be the focus of this evening. – »Transparenz in Blau« is the title of a poem by Durs Grünbein, a blue poem without the word blue; its transparency is due to the »emptiness« beneath the sky, the lack of transcendence. In 1995, at the age of 33, Grünbein was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. Ever since then, with his highly learned poems, he has been viewed as Germany’s poeta doctus. – The evening will close with ›Blue Notes‹ by Ana Ristović, one of the most impressive southeast European poetry discoveries of recent years, with the fear of the »fear of too much blue«, of »too much melancholy«, as expressed in her poem »Gradski otpad«.

»Days with the half-life of a whole life«, reads a line from a prose-poem by Aleš Šteger. Again and again he searches for moments of epiphanic vision that transcend time. His stories and poems are feats of repetition, which give the dead of the Yugoslavian wars or of Fukushima their voices back and break the survivors’s silence about the traumas of the victims of history. The unique atmosphere of the King Georg Bar has inspired Aleš Šteger to a different kind of repetition, a repetition that will be a memory for the future: Playing together with a musician, he mingles his own with others’s blues-voices.

Blueprints, as is well known, are drawings for construction. The changing building plans of the art of writing are the topic of this public discussion with the Poetica authors and the Fellows of the Morphomata International Center of Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne. Literature does not only store the knowledge of past times and its own time, it always also creates new knowledge of the world in each specific form and hands it on with power to affect future times. How does poetry and how does prose form our knowledge in different ways in the sciences and the arts? What added value do aesthetic ideas have compared to the ideas of reason? How freely do authors today deal with creative models and traditions? What makes them ›literary amphibians‹ who switch between poetry and prose? How do they describe such an ›amphibic‹ creativity, living in sentences, one the one hand, and dancing in verses, on the other?

»Nostalgia for Jean Marais and Lollobrigida, / for old Russian war movies, / […] / Nostalgia for the old bed in the village / with the colored headboard—turquois-blue«, four lines from the poem ›Born on January 7‹ by Georgi Gospodinov, one of the most fascinating contemporary writers from Southeast Europe, whose work investigates the »Physics of Sorrow«. – From the turquois-blue of the Balkans to the »blue band of the sea«: For Ilma Rakusa, daughter of a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother, living in Zurich, this blue is one of memory, of longing, since Switzerland, unlike Bohemia, cannot be rescued by sea, not even through such a wonderful book as Mehr Meer. – Brighter, cooler, harder is the blue of the North, the melancholy of the North, traceable in the poems of the Icelandic author Sjón, who writes lyrics for Björk and was nominated for an Oscar for a song in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.

The ›Stiftersaal‹ of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, designed by Ungers, is without doubt the most beautiful modern hall in Cologne. It is the ideal venue for a spectacular writers’s meeting between Poetica authors and award-winning authors from the German Academy for Language and Literature, so that, in readings and conversations with an eye to past and present, they may together trace the culturally differing symbolic values of blue, the ›blue of the world‹ in all four points of the compass: the blue of the North (Greenlaw, Muldoon, Sjón) and the South (Atxaga, Gospodinov, Rakusa), the blue of the East (Andrukhovych, Kermani, Ristović) and the West (Krüger, Mosebach, Muldoon, Rinck).

The farewell evening will be directed by Moritz Sostmann, in-house director at Schauspiel Köln. Once more, the Poetica authors will appear together with renowned authors from the German Academy for Language and Literature. The festival of world literature ends with a celebration. In authors’s readings and in adaptations of their works on stage, it will be possible to hear and experience poetry and prose, in the hope of experiencing a reciprocal illumination of the arts, which will be followed by the opportunity for conversation with the authors over food and drinks.