mehr ewigkeit ist nicht zu haben - Buchpremiere: Jan Wagner

"in the rearview mirror, the same sign / that still hangs in the sky, / rather enthroned there, whoever we are, / whatever we were, what we will become /(steine & erden, steine & erden)," reads the title poem of the new volume Steine & Erden (Hanser Berlin 2023) by Büchner Prize winner Jan Wagner (born 1971 in Hamburg). In clear and at the same time surprising imagery, Wagner zooms in on the smallest details, makes time stand still in the lines of his poems - "every pause a boon" - reveals the fullness and vividness of the world and at the same moment puzzles it: "I will grow, become colder, denser, / of deeper black, until nothing escapes me, / no star, no grain of dust, not even the light". This becoming-a-poet is marked by considerable variation in form - there is a crow's ghasele, an asparagus sonnet, a fishing ode for Uncle Adi, among others - and simultaneous play with form, confident agility.

"A poem takes the right to think and see things as they have never been thought of and seen before, and invites the reader, its partner, to do the same," writes Jan Wagner in The Sandal of the Prophet (Berlin Verlag 2011). The new volume is the renewed invitation to do so: At the Haus für Poesie, Jan Wagner presents Steine & Erden for the first time in Berlin, in conversation with fellow poet Ulf Stolterfoht.

In reading and conversation: Jan Wagner

Moderation: Ulf Stolterfoht