• 2024-07-20, 7:00 PM
Betonhalle | 15/10 € Anthology included Tickets
This summer, we are celebrating a night of poetry for the 25th time in Berlin. According to the annals of the capital’s media, the first edition on Potsdamer Platz in 2000 coincided with the sudden onset of a summer cold spell. It was way too dark to read into the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two in the morning.
Opposed to that night’s mythological inception at the turn of the millennium, there are not only warm rooms at Weltklang, but also reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology that is traditionally limited to people in attendance.
The eight poets from different parts of the world who are taking the stage this evening will read and perform in their original languages, showcasing the intensities that poetry can generate not only in silent reading but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.
Anneke Brassinga (born 1948 in Schaarsbergen, Netherlands) is one of the most esteemed voices in contemporary Dutch poetry. She came to writing through translating Beckett, Diderot, Nabokov, and Plath among others. In her poems, the “language magician” Brassinga brings the materiality of language to life, exploring the essence of things and the “pulsating heart of the text” in idiosyncratic creations of new words and compounds.
Kayo Chingonyi (born 1987 in Zambia) has lived in the UK since 1993. The poems in his volumes Kumukanda, which was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize, and A Blood Condition (Chatto and Windus 2017 and 2021) address poetic rites of passage. They are tied to the history and mythology of his homeland’s culture while also being shaped by growing up in the UK, by hip hop, pop culture, and rap, and by personal and collective experiences of loss.
CAConrad (born 1966 in Kansas, USA) creates poems from (soma)tic poetry rituals that follow precise instructions. These include watching the sun rise around the world on webcams, meditating to field recordings of extinct animal species, and wearing or consuming only a single color for seven days. The poems that arise from these rituals remove themselves from the capitalist logic of exploitation and create their poetics from the radical position of the outsider. They are an invitation to heal together and to “falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.”
Fatemeh Ekhtesari (born 1986 in Kashmar, Iran) fled Iran in 2015 and has been living in Norway since 2017. She is a member of the “Postmodern Ghazal,” the most radical poetic movement in contemporary Iranian literature. Alternating between colloquial and elevated tones, she updates traditional forms of Persian poetry, such as the ghazal, in the context of her home country’s socially and politically violent present.
Hwang Yuwon (born 1982 in Ulsan, South Korea) has published four poetry collections that have received numerous awards. His poems are hyper-realistic journeys into discourse and the grotesque. Hwang calls them “real time poems:” live entanglements of what’s on the inside and on the outside. Rhythm and repetition create a thread upon which poetic images hang, drift, and collide. An English selection of Hwang’s poetry was published by Vagabond Press in 2019. He translates Anne Carson, Bob Dylan, and William Carlos Williams, among others, into Korean.
Sylvie Kandé (born 1957 in Paris, France) is of Breton-Senegalese descent and teaches African history in the USA. Among other awards, she received the Prix Louise-Labé in 2017. Her poems address the all-too contemporary specters of colonialism, reworking or re-imagining the mythological and historical elements. Kandé’s narrative, erudite, and dense texts are mysterious and clear at the same time. Everything remembered and adopted, everything personal and political—all of this is transformed into a sensual, sparkling, and yet precise language.
Marianna Kiyanovska (born 1973 in Zhovkva, Oblast Lviv, Ukraine) has written more than a dozen volumes of poetry. The collection Бабин Яр. Голосами (The Voices of Babyn Yar) was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in 2020 and was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in German as Babyn Jar. Stimmen (2024). Kiyanovska writes poems that confront the horrors of history and the wars of the present while nevertheless retaining the strength to remain open to tenderness and hope: “it means I still can sleep on your chest / I can sleep without fear.”
Miruna Vlada (born 1986 in Bucharest, Romania) published her first book at the age of 18 and sparked a public debate in her home country about so-called “women’s” literature. Three volumes have appeared since, including the multi-award-winning Bosnia. Partaj (Cartea Românească 2014) and Prematur (Cartier 2021). Vlada’s poems have been translated into 14 languages. They are highly political and provocative texts about the aftermath of the Bosnian Civil War, the “incessant inner bleeding of our society,” and the right to not have children.
Introduced by Ali Abdollahi | Juri Andruchowytsch | Suah Bae | Alexandru Bulucz | Oswald Egger | Zoncy Heavenly | Lisa Jeschke | Aurélie Maurin
Project management: Alexander Gumz | Nadine Tenbieg
with Brassinga, Anneke, Chingonyi, Kayo, CAConrad, Ekhtesari, Fatemeh, Hwang, Yuwon, Kandé, Sylvie, Kiyanovska, Marianna, Vlada, Miruna
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