wie die flüchtige Skizze eines anderen – Ein Abend mit Michael Krüger

In the organizer's words:

Michael Krüger (born 1943 in Wittgendorf) is a novelist, essayist and publishing legend. He has shaped the German literary scene like no other in recent decades. Above all, however, he is a poet. The typical Krüger tone of voice, which has accompanied readers from his poetry debut Reginapoly (Carl Hanser Verlag 1976) to his latest volume Im Wald, im Holzhaus (Suhrkamp Verlag 2021), is characterized by an unsentimentally constating parlando, carried by a laconicism that moves close to the spoken word. The poems are calm, but never serene or routine. They are, in the Goethean sense, occasional poems, inspired by reality, by the first and last things and by "what else happened". Krüger writes about traveling and not wanting to arrive, his youth in Nikolassee between the church and Kleist's grave and the dream of "fraternally grasping the spokes" of the world. Many of the texts are dedication poems, conversations with and about friends (Brendel, Rihm etc.), others are notations or notes from the road (the reader is taken to Syracuse, Modena, Skopje and Abruzzo). Again and again, animate and inanimate nature becomes the subject of contemplation: foamwort, cranesbill and witch's onion, gray-backed shrike and nightjar. There is talk of the "chatty mafia of sparrows" or the "swarming whitewash" of ants. Anything can find its way into these texts, even the "uvula on the shrill bar" of a marsh grasshopper. The late poems are unsentimental reports on ageing, illness and medication, whose names (Venclyxto or Venetoclax) are reminiscent of "Aztec gods".

In reading and discussion: Michael Krüger

Moderation: Ulrike Almut Sandig