Poesiefestival Berlin 2026: Ann Cotten

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.

Bollard. Idylls

Book premiere with Ann Cotten

"A bollard is a protective structure against imagined dangers, but at the same time an obstacle against the assumption that one can simply cross invisible borders everywhere." -

In Poller.Idyllen (Suhrkamp Verlag 2026), Ann Cotten (born 1982 in Ames, USA) places poems like bollards in the field of vision. They draw attention to what we would perhaps like to overlook in our beautiful late capitalist world, for example to those whose invisible work ensures the comfort of everyone else.

The motto of the volume refers to the bucolic idylls of Theocritus, which idealize the simple rural pastoral life and - even in their later forms up to realism - seek to conceal the precarious conditions of the working class in idyllic depictions and suggest a harmonious balance. The Poller Idylls, on the other hand, expose the imbalances of the globalized world and position themselves in the political sphere. Cotten compares the idylls to the "babble of a rippling hydrant opened by mischief or chance", which washes up "all the heavy metals, stupidities, lies of our societies and the drastic situations concerning the income gap, social policy and climate".

Below the Poller poems, a horizon line runs through all the chapters of the volume, below which everything is "nature's entrance", as it says in the notes. These are texts that have been written since 2009 and have been recycled into a conceptual breeding ground in which the bollards stand stable: "Because you are so powerful, so full of a brutal bypass potential, we stand to remind you of your destructive potential and ask you to keep yourself in check."

Afterwards: Ann Cotten in conversation with Bertram Reinecke

Price information:

€ 9/7 (plus booking fee)