HAUS FÜR POESIE

Ingo Vitman Öri is an important new voice in Slovenia’s LGBTQ+ community and literary scene. Their debut Sin svoje roke (Škuc 2024) is the first poetry book by a non-binary in Slovenia. The title, Son of One’s Own Hand, can be interpreted as a reference to the self-empowerment of navigating one’s own gender identity. They write about names that cause pain—unless you give them to yourself. In an attempt to describe one’s own gender, one of the poems gives rise to a cascade of images: “I am: […] as feminine as a mushroom is a plant […] a cap that ought to have a brim but doesn’t […] the horrified look of the lady on the bus....” This search ultimately ends with the realization that they are none of these. It speaks of the longing for gender reassignment surgery and of questionnaires at the psychologist (“From a scale to never to always, how often do you feel like a woman, a man, a hermaphrodite, an underdeveloped child, a vermin, a mistake, a person?”). Öri pays tribute to the “history of deviation,” their book is a celebration of sustained contradiction, “when I elude definition, I finally come into form.”

“Here, queer-femme-rage is medicine,” writes Angela Peñaredondo about the poems of No'u Revilla (born in Waihee-Waiehu). In a poetics of continual transformation, everything is always on the verge of becoming something else: they’re texts of molting and pupations. In the process, an enigmatic and politically charged game is played with Hawaiian cultural concepts. The mythical figure Mo'o, a reptilian shapeshifter (“All lizards and shapeshifters, I belong to you”), appears throughout, as does ʻŌhiʻa-Lehua, the Hawaiian tree of transformation. Trickster deities who subvert authoritarian systems and always stay one step ahead of their seemingly more powerful counterparts abound. The concept of Ai-kāne (a kind of spiritual same-sex intimacy) is also addressed. “So sacred, so queer,” reads one poem’s title in the highly acclaimed collection Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022). The book significantly expands the canon of transformation poetry (from Ovid to Dante to Rilke), which, in Europe at least, has largely been dominated by men.

The American poet Anney Boyer described the poems of Verity Spott (born 1987 in Manchester) as spells for no less than the total transformation of the world. For Spott, the body itself, along with all external labels, are eminently political. The poem I never said that I was brave, begins with the lines: “I never said I was a ‘real woman’ nor did I adhere to your distinctions—the broken knotted world of your categories and gibbets—your essential primacy.” Later, it continues: “I did not give my consent to the idea of an opposite, to a world of stupefied duality.” Spott has explored gender identity on their blog since 2011. The texts were compiled and published as the book Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press) in 2017. In an interview, Spott confessed: “I’ve no fixed idea of what my gender identity is anymore. I feel like I’ve untied lots of knots, but more appear. Gender baffles me. It feels like a system of perimeters and borders, constantly acting to contain non-stable subjects.” On this evening, Verity Spott will read the long poem Went to Get the Sink Undrainer, a breathless poem: “I cannot stop trying to send my tiny distracted thoughts towards you.”

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

Moderation: Lisa Jay Jeschke

The event will be interpreted into English and German. Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.
Kindly supported by: Slowenisches Kulturzentrum SKICA Berlin
The event takes place at silent green's Kuppelhalle.