HAUS FÜR POESIE

On this evening, four poets will appear whose texts subvert, as playfully as they are subversive, our certainties about what was once considered unquestioningly classical.

The concept of the canon is as central to literary studies as it is contested. It is defined as an ideal corpus of texts that are regarded within a given culture as authoritative and norm-setting. The word comes from Ancient Greek and means something like standard or rule. It is no coincidence that the term was first used in religious contexts—a fact that continues to resonate to this day, especially when one considers the fervor with which struggles over interpretive authority in canon formation are still conducted. The not unfounded impression has arisen that, especially in the Western canon, control lies in the hands of the white old man, whose necessarily subjective worldview produces processes of structural exclusion. In recent years, therefore, justified criticism has been directed against the supposed immutability of canonical judgment. On this evening, four poets will appear whose texts subvert, as playfully as they are subversive, our certainties about what was once considered unquestioningly classical.

Jason Allen-Paisant (born 1980 in Jamaica) takes on one of the Bard of Avon’s most famous plays in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet 2023), subjecting it to an anticolonial rereading. In doing so, he follows methodologically one of his role models, the writer Aimé Césaire, who reinterpreted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in his play Une Tempête (1969), transforming the original minor character Caliban into a symbolic figure of the colonized subject. Allen-Paisant’s “rewriting” of the Othello material is a multilayered self-interrogation via a deconstructive study of Shakespeare. At the same time, it is an imagined dialogue with the fictional character Othello, which begins: “How could I resurrect you to speak, / when your burial is in no ground / that I can pilgrimage to”? Shortly afterward it reads: “I feel sometimes / that our destinies conjoin, that your life, / unfinished, is lived through mine.” Allen-Paisant tells the story of suppressed racism: “When he wrote Othello, the slave trade had been happening for seven decades, with the Pope's blessing.” What Shakespeare left unsaid comes into speech here. “I'm haunted as much by the character Othello as by the silences of the story.” The poet Roger Robinson wrote of the book: “Brilliantly insightful and strikingly lyrical, it accrues significant emotional heft in its movements from Othello to self and back.”

The Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison (born 1947 in Kingston), with Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (Carcanet 2025), despite its title, does not offer a conventional translation of the first part of Dante Alighieri’s legendary Divine Comedy. Rather, it is a sparkling hybrid of translation, adaptation, and postcolonial rewriting. The famous opening lines, which show the poet in midlife lost in a dense forest, read in her version in unrhymed terza rima: “Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state, / for to tell you the truth my feet had strayed.” Notably, Goodison, analogous to Dante’s use of Florentine Italian (instead of the Latin customary at the time), uses Patois, thereby adopting a distinctly Caribbean perspective. The role of the cicerone, the knowledgeable guide through the underworld, is not taken by Virgil but by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett-Coverley (“Miss Lou, the fountainhead of Inspiration”), who introduces herself with words that immediately set the tone for this version, hailed by critics as groundbreaking: “Me was a little gal / pickney when I wish upon a star fi the gift fi write / poetry that praise mi people inna wi own Jama tongue.”

Like Jason Allen-Paisant, the Swedish poet Judith Kiros (born 1991 in Sweden) approaches the figure of Othello. Her poetry collection O displays, for a debut, an unusually high degree of artistic maturity and assurance, which critics have acknowledged with great respect. The writer Maaza Mengiste wrote: “O is unlike anything you have ever read. A revisioning of a classic text and a revolt against its many implications.” In five parts, in which she moves through different genres from drama to essay, Kiros deconstructs the famous play and, by constantly recomposing it, brings it into a radically new form. At the very beginning, in a short dialogic scene, she lets her Othello say: “When I first came here, I had to pass a citizenship test. Because this is Venice, I was asked to write down everything I associated with water. I wrote time and tears and piss and thirst and dread and drowning and trade and embrace and escape and soldiers and salt and silver.” In essayistic passages that follow lyrical miniatures (“pressed just so / to the eye's O / becoming / happens fast now”), Kiros explores the racist subtexts and examines the historical performance practice of Othello: “When the white Brit John Coleman played O in nineteenth-century London he described how the character possessed him; so much so, he said, that black paint appeared to ‘ooze out of my very pores.’ He left handprints on white t-shirts.”

Anna Julian Mendlik (born 1986 in Hanover), in her new poetry collection Dante in the Darkroom (Verlagshaus Berlin 2026), mixes texts by Sappho, Ovid, and the author of the Divine Comedy already named in the title. She employs techniques of so-called queering, with which heteronormative expectations are questioned, even pulverized—a kind of explosive device within the textual mass of the Western canon. At the same time, the book is a declaration of war on prudery in German poetry. A “dictionnaire in the diction of desire,” featuring spanking, fisting, cunnilingus, and dirty talk. The texts are populated by figures from paradise, hell, and myth. A chronicle from “Theseus to Bezos.” Readers encounter Eve in a “ribbed shirt,” the “sweet pussyboy” Antinous, and a Daphne who rejects Apollo and prefers to remain with Diana. Arachne, less embarrassing than Spider-Man, sends ancient MeToo reports; Orpheus becomes a female singer, Pluto an incel, and Sisyphus a masochistic SM slave. The bath overflows with metaphors, and “on Lesbos the tents are burning.” One also learns instructive things about the kinship of Rome and Eros and about the paradise apple with its “organic seal and fair trade,” e.g. about the proportional relationship between knowledge and sugar content. The whole is underscored by a soundtrack “on a tablet from teenage years”: Ne me quitte pas, Don’t Leave Me This Way, It’s a Sin.

The poems presented at the event were translated specifically for Poesiefestival Berlin.

Moderation Asmus Trautsch

The event will be interpreted English-German.
Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

Funded by: Swedish Arts Council