Festival for World Literature
Jan. 20–25, 2020 – Cologne

»Widerstand. The Art of Resistance«

»Bad poetry / does not convert the despots. / Unfortunately, neither does good poetry.«Richard Krynicki

Ovid, forefather of all literary exiles, never saw his beloved Rome again. He died in bleak banishment by the Black Sea. But we, readers of his Metamorphoses, are eager to believe his closing lines declaring neither fire, sword nor age will destroy his completed work. It will outlive them all, even Jupiter’s wrath. And although, regarding his own fate, Ovid may have been powerless against the mighty of his times, Caesar Augustus, bets are still on just which works are more resistant, Metamorphoses or those of the Roman Jupiter, Augustus.

The word resistance has three basic meanings. It defines the hardness of an object; it defines a living being’s protective system against outer influences, and, lastly, it defines the ability to oppose a situation, a person or a group of people. All three apply to poetry as it strives to be hardy enough to defy time; with its stubborn insistence and timelessness (or antiquity as contemnors would say) it is seemingly immune to fleeting Zeitgeist and all modern isms; and that, ultimately, it can and hopes to be a perpetual counter-draft to the status quo, a contradiction; an obstinance. To be sure, resistance, the theme of this Poetica, is plural – resistances.

The fact that poetry persists in liberating; that it consistently seeks another way to see and understand, to attempt the impossible; that a verse is a capsule full of freedom and invites its readers to do the same, to think up a different world, has always been resented by autocrats. Each well-written poem is an audacity, in the best sense of the word. But are there times, are these such times, in which the language of verse must become more definitive? Times in which an unequivocal, opposing voice must express criticism? Does poesy run the risk of fading with the day along with the political affairs it addresses? And on which banner – the one snapping in the wind as we charge the barricades or the one defiantly raised on a deserted island – do we write Peter Rühmkorf’s divine line, “Stay susceptible and resist”?

- Jan Wagner