all that shame and all that rambling
Re-Writing Petrarca

Poets' Corner
Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
← / →

Tim Atkins © privat

Rudi Burkhardt © Natalia Reich

This evening brings together two poets who each engage, in their own distinct way, with the Italian poet and historian Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374).

Rudi Burkhardt’s poems in Fragmente einer echten Ikone – Petrarca-Variationen (kookbooks 2024) are appropriations, reworkings, and overwritings of the Canzoniere, the famous collection of sonnets in which the poeta laureatus Francesco Petrarca sang of his love for the distant Laura. The elevated tone is adapted, imitated, ironised, and brought up to date in contemporary lyric form, without disavowing the intimacy of the original. It is a bow without reverence, in which parody and homage are evenly balanced. The apparent love idyll on a “holy illuminated meadow” in truth rests on unstable ground.
Burkhardt himself describes the method as “Petrarca drag,” the taking over and inhabiting of a self that allows him “to speak from another body, another mouth.” Burkhardt’s Petrarch is sometimes a bean at Laura’s feet, sometimes a “speaking fountain” that never runs dry. “Among hostile bushes and nasty thickets / I walk safely through the grove and keep singing / you, whom I carry in my eyes, / women and little women seen with me, / but nothing but intoxication and little drunken spells.” At the centre are two insights that remain valid across the centuries: singing can indeed alleviate suffering, but from every act of speech “only residue remains anyway.”

Tim Atkins’ approach, collected in the 550-page Collected Petrarch (Crater 2014), is similarly radical, though the poems read very differently. In the foreword, Laird Hunt describes the method—actually a collection of many methods—as “one mind's field of words bent on/by another's.” The texts emerge from an underlying play between languages; they are an attack on traditional form and literary convention. They probe the boundaries of what we commonly call “understanding” or “not understanding.” Apparent nonsense continuously releases an excess of new meanings. Atkins’ poetics are one of calculated excess, yet they leave readers with a desire for ever more and still more: a sustained overwhelming of all the senses involved. “We come with fourteen lines & a haircut we / Leave with too much information.”
Italian Humanism meets British Avant-gardism. Translation as a pleasurable deconstruction with references to Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, The Gospel According to Tupac, Popeye, and Krazy Kat. In passing, Collected Petrarch also makes a valuable contribution to translation theory, for example when it states: “all translation – at last – approaches / ecstatic / relation.”

Moderation Shane Anderson

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