»States of Euphoria«

»One can fall upward just as well as downward.«
Friedrich Hölderlin

What would poetry be without the heavens? There is rarely verse without praise, exaltation, rapture. Inspiration and euphoria are prerequisites, striving to soar remains a given. Since its inception, poetry seeks the proximity of bliss. Once described as “flights of fancy,” today rapture is referred to as a “high.” Seekers of beatitude seem to stop at little to achieve it. The mental meanderings of opium, cocaine’s kicks and the happy face of ecstasy are contemporary catalysts supplementing the muse’s kiss of old. But where is poetry when it is “far out”? Is there a language for being out of control? And do they truly exist, those artifical paradises? If soaring rapture has a shadow, it is plummeting melancholy. What would words be without gravity, without the earthly pull of affects and objects? Verses may levitate, but they never leave the atmosphere. In the words of Swedish Nobel Prize Laureate Tomas Tranströmer: there are days when “a kilo weighs 700 grams, no more.” Might the remaining 300 grams be the weight proper to poetry?

›States of Euphoria‹ is the simple yet multivalent theme of Poetica 5, the fifth Festival of World Literature presented by Cologne University’s Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies and the German Academy for Language and Literature. Poetica V will take place from January 21st to 26th 2019 in Cologne. Curator is the Swedish author Aris Fioretos who has invited writers from three and a half continents and roughly eight countries to render their personal interpretations of creative rapture, its languages, conceptions and contradictions at afternoon discussions and evening readings. Poetica V will take place at different venues throughout Cologne: at the University of Cologne, the public library, the Literaturhaus, the Altes Pfandhaus, the Sancta-Clara-Cellar and the Cologne Theater. 

Guests will be Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, Oswald Egger from Germany, Christian Kracht from Switzerland, Mara Lee of Sweden, Israeli Agi Mishol, Lebo Mashile from South Africa, Marion Poschmann of Germany and Jo Shapcott from England.