Poesiefestival Berlin 2026:

In the organizer's words:

This year's program of the Poesiefestival Berlin (15 May - 14 June) focuses on three major themes: Myth, mourning and a critical de-writing of a mostly white and male-dominated European literary canon.

The festival's decentralized programme on Whitsunday also includes a performance at the Akademie der Künste. The poets Esther Kinsky, Ann Cotten and Anne Carson will be reading from their texts and can be experienced in conversation. The program will be opened by the award-winning writer and translator Esther Kinsky. Her work is characterized by an intensive examination of landscape, history and memory. She will be followed by Ann Cotten, who is considered one of the most idiosyncratic voices in contemporary poetry and who will present her recently published poetry collection Poller. Idylls.

In the evening, Canadian poet Anne Carson will be reading live in Berlin for the first time in 20 years. Her work is particularly linked to this year's festival themes, as myth, mourning and a preoccupation with canonical traditions repeatedly intersect in it.

From June 2, the festival will be concentrated at silent green in Berlin-Wedding, where, in addition to major thematic evenings, numerous other readings and talks, "Weltklang - Night of Poetry" with seven international poets and the Berlin Poetry Speech will take place.

Before the creation of creation, I kept some notes.

Anne Carson: Lecture and Performance on the History of Skywriting

Anne Carson (born 1950 in Toronto) is perhaps the most renowned living writer. Every year, bookmakers rank her highly among the most promising contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a poet, essayist, translator and classical scholar, she is a virtuoso of different genres and genres, some of which she invented herself for her own use.

She achieved her first major success in 1986 with a text that moves freely between essay and academic study: Eros the Bittersweet. In it, she deals with Sappho and Plato, among others, and argues that Eros arises from a feeling of lack. Her international breakthrough came twelve years later with the verse novel Autobiography of Red, a book that is available in two German translations: one by Karen Lauer (2001) and one - expanded to include the sequel Red Doc> - by Anja Utler (2019). In these texts, Carson uses a method for which she became famous: She radically retells a remote ancient myth - in this case the Geryon myth by the poet Stesichoros - and relocates it to the present day as a story about abuse and desire.

Numerous books followed, in which Carson continually expanded the range of her expressive possibilities, including such groundbreaking works as Decreation (2005), Nox (2010) and Antigonick (2012). In 2020, Carson also delivered the fifth Berlin Poetry Speech, entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Short Talk (Wallstein Verlag 2020). Most recently, Matthes & Seitz published several books in the German translation by Marie Luise Knott, including Norma Jeane Baker von Troja (2025), an artful superimposition of two iconic female figures: the mythical Helen and the no less mythical Marilyn Monroe.

On the evening of Pentecost Sunday, Anne Carson and her partner, the British artist Robert Currie, will present a performance of her text Lecture on the History of Skywriting, which has been specially translated for the event. Carson describes this lecture as a "short history of her life as a writer" and tells it as an alternative origin legend in which science and the biblical creation myth are intertwined.

It says: "Before the creation of creation, I kept some notes." And: "I was a superhot superdense young sky and I liked a good bit of rebound." The poet expands together with the universe on the seven days of the creation week, from redshift to redshift - an infinite and at the same time infinitely short journey on which Heracles is conceived, Christopher Hitchens comments on fatherhood and clouds take the form of Werner Herzog.

There are also interspersed quotes from John Cage, Virginia Woolf, Immanuel Kant and Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis) as well as an interview with the Beckett character Godot, who asks Yoko Ono for advice on how to pass the time while everyone else is waiting for you. And hidden in the middle of the text is the insight, clothed in a question, that actually applies to everything Anne Carson has ever written: "Who would be bothered doing science if it weren't erotic?"

Afterwards: Anne Carson in conversation with Marie Luise Knott

The event will be interpreted from English into German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

+Share page

Price information:

€ 24/12 (plus advance booking fee)