I just had my first encounter with poetry from Franz
Josef Czernin, born 1952. As there’s no published English translation to quote
from, I’ll quote the first four lines of his poem sonnet, with the plough taken from his 2002 collection elements, sonnets in my own translation:
with flames.
tongues, out and playing at us, up, wild lashing
and edged
vivacious wheels which are hot in our hands,
what heaves us up
to heaven, fiery in their prompting
until it off it
flies, reveals, far off and still akin:
This sonnet sequence is built from, as the title of
the collection suggests, the four antique elements and aims – according to
Michael Braun writing in the latest issue of the literary newspaper Volltext - at embodiments of star constellations in concrete
poetic material. Braun reads Czernin as writing using the poetics of the early
German-language romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg
(Novalis to your man on the street) & Clemens Brentano. Not really knowing
these writers myself, Czernin reminds me above all of Gerald Manley Hopkins on
first impressions – the way stressed syllables appear to be crammed into a line
(the original first line has got 8, my impromptu translation 7), the alliteration,
the readiness to break with colloquial idiom & grammar for poetic effect.
Czernin hasn’t only been interested in poetic effects,
but also in the subject of affectedness, how the standards with which publishers
& literary establishments judge texts in any given period constantly need
to be questioned. That’s what lead him to write and publish, in conjunction
with Ferdinand Schmatz, a book of purposefully bad poems at the start of his
career: Journeys. Around the World in
Eighty Poems (1987, Residenz Publishers) tricking his own publishers in the
process – a piece of holy shit, in other words. It only became clear that
Czernin & Schmatz had done this when they brought out, later the same year,
an exposé of what one may have been nothing more than a clever publicity stunt:
The Journey. Into the Whole Deep Ditch in
Eighty Squashed Dogs (1987, Droschl); - I guess Residenz didn’t have the
guts to publish the exposé after the first book had left them looking foolish.
Shame.
Is bad poetry, or to go a step further, intentionally
bad poetry, possibly just as rewarding & useful to read as the poetry that
they’re claiming is good? And what if Czernin enjoyed that early confidence
trick of his so much that he’s simply gone on playing it with his audience
& his reception into the literary establishment, writing on through his
acceptance into the Darmstadt German Academy for Language and Poetry – continuing
to write what many readers will experience as in some way holy, though it might
only be holy shit? My gut feeling is that Czernin isn’t doing this; but I’m
going to keep close tabs on his future poems. And if these turn out to be the
latter of these two holys I may keep it up my sleeve; it’s often better to let
Squashed Dogs lie.