von liebe viel – Die Dichterin Doris Runge

In the organizer's words:

The poet Doris Runge (born 1943 in Carlow) celebrated her 80th birthday this year. Wallstein Verlag presented her with the book von liebe viel (Wallstein Verlag 2023), which brings together texts from 40 years and eleven volumes of poetry: startingwith jagdlied from 1985 and endingwith die schönsten versprechen, published in 2022. "No poet, no poetess of contemporary German poetry has explored the phenomenology of love so unswervingly," writes Heinrich
Detering in the afterword, calling her voice "defenseless in all its cool sovereignty."
Runge is a master of the multiple referentiality of a single word in the structure of successive verses; there is a beautiful foreign word for this technique: apokoinu. In this way she leads the reader into an enchanted zone of twilight, to a place where the meaning forks, as it were. Small blur, great poems. Behind the conciseness of the language (hardly any poem takes up more than one page) a lush world appears, in which echoes of Song of Songs and Baroque poetry, folk and art fairy tales mingle. We meet Hans in Luck and the Little Mermaid, are led from the Frog King in the monastery pond to Tödlein on the garden bench. There are poems about lying together in flight, blind dates "zwischen tür und / engel", "montag und neumund".

Thomas Sparr talks to Doris Runge and Jörn van Hall, the editor
of the latest volume.

In reading and conversation: Jörn van Hall | Doris Runge
Moderation: Thomas Sparr