Von BABYlon in die Provinz - Lesung mit Jennifer de Negri und Christoph Wenzel

In the organizer's words:

Jennifer de Negri's poetry collection reise nach BABYlon was published by parasitenpresse in March. Christoph Wenzel recently published the poetry collection landläufiges lexikon. Essential to both books are documentary-poetic methods through which the crisis-ridden present - such as the destruction of the environment and nature, conflictual urban-rural polarization and queer hostility - finds its way into the poem. There is no shortage of humor, however, and at the same time the contemporary saturation of both poets' poetry has a close connection to Cologne and the Rhineland.

The cycle Who is Witch, which is central to Jennifer de Negri's new volume, unfolds around the anti-lesbian reporting surrounding a historical murder trial, which was also the subject of the Cologne Express headline in September 1974: LESBISCHE MORD-GMBH. The lyrical egos negotiate the ambivalent desire to "de-queer" themselves in a heteronormative society in which "shots are still being fired at the gay museum" in Berlin, for example, as in the cycle reise nach BABYlon.

In Christoph Wenzel's volume landläufiges lexikon, the presence of historical fascism is also revealed in the poeticization of landscape. In the cycle blickbeziehung, splittersiedlung, the "höckerlinie", colloquial for the concrete anti-tank barriers along the Nazi regime's Westwall, which still run through Aachen's surrounding countryside today, is lyrically transformed into the "landschaftsintarsien in der iris". In the poem filialsterben der dorfkirchen, the village is "surrounded - by hidden champions, / by windmills, by the struggle of the citizens' initiative / against the windmills, their feelings".

The Cologne-based author and journalist Paul Jennerjahn will moderate the evening.