Elke Erb Gedichtverdacht
[Suspicion of Poem]

Elke Erb may have celebrated her eightieth birthday in 2018, but she is still the most radical and nonconformist figure in experimental Germanophone poetry. Indefatigably productive, and admired by her younger colleagues, she pursues what she calls her "processual writing": the attempt to find unfiltered words for the perceptions of her "subliminal self" and then to give them shape not formally but associatively (as she outlined in her 2015 Poetological Remarks). The resulting poetic energy combines with the poet's oblique humor to produce a wealth of open images and surprising connections that can in turn stimulate further creative processes in the minds of her listeners and readers.

Erb owes her resilient determination at least in part to her biography. Born in a village in the Eifel mountains and raised in poverty during and after the war, the daughter of a literary historian moved to East Germany with her family at the age of 11 and had her share of opportunities there to show her mettle: alongside her work as a translator, her poems began to be the subjects of scandals as early as 1968, as did her advocacy for her fellow dissidents. She began to publish in West Germany in 1982, where she was awarded the Peter Huchel Prize in 1988, followed by many more prizes since then. Her books have been published by the Swiss publisher Urs Engeler since 1998, most recently in the appropriately idiosyncratic roughbooks series.

The title of her latest collection, "Suspicion of Poem", offers a glimpse of the procedure Erb has used for several years now: she "fetches" texts, notes, diary entries, and old ideas from her carefully managed archive – and this "fetching", as she explicitly insists, is itself a poetic gesture. Whether and to what degree the "fetched" material constitutes a poem remains uncertain, a matter of definition that is also up to the reader. The transitions are fluid, and so it is sometimes a matter of a "suspicion". But even just that is often inspiring enough.

Beyond that, Erb's approach leads her slim volume to include a wide range of types of texts: longer prose passages, tiny fragments of ideas, quotations, notes from conversations, dream protocols, and fully developed poems, sometimes with the poet's own commentary. All this plays out on a temporal axis from impressions of East Germany in 1970 to a morning meditation on chopped-down trees in the winter of 2018, with its striking ending: "They will outdie me. / The palms of my hands think: too bad about them." Entirely free of all confinement, classification, and judgment, these observations of self and world may be fragments, but they come together to form a flickering whole. "Anamorphosis" was the title of one of Elke Erb's early collections, a concept that this book, too, brings to mind.

The enormous challenge of translating experimental poetry is often confronted by its limits. But in the case of this book, at least, several factors relativize the problem: Erb rarely works with rhyme or other phonetic effects; she always remains very concrete semantically; and, no matter how uninhibited the movement of her imagination becomes, her devotion to reality always keeps her down-to-earth. This striking contrast is the basis of the appeal of her language, and this appeal can be effectively translated into a different idiom, with very little loss.