- interrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogation
- ???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???
- showing at the Bath Fringe Arts Festival
- from 25 May 2012
- in the exhibition
- WITHIN, WITHOUT YOU
Interrogation by Karen Margolis
Within Without You Bath Fringe Arts Festival 2012
.
Scroll too long to hang: Interrogation at Within Without You
Bath Fringe Arts Festival May-June 2012
INTERROGATION
- .
- a handwritten poem scroll by Karen Margolis
Interrogation
people ask
why I’m here
— not for the beer
.
people ask
why I stay
it’s far away
.
people ask
when I’ll go
don’t know
.
people ask
what I do
it’s not in who’s who
.
people ask
does it pay
what can I say
.
people ask
my selling price
want firm advice
.
people ask
for times and dates
can’t wait, won’t wait
.
people ask
for milk and sugar
the coffee’s bitter
.
people ask
for sympathy
it’s free it’s free
.
people ask
the time of day
light years away
.
people ask
if I’m in love
heavens above
.
people ask
persistently
drilling into me
.
people ask
what they won’t tell
just as well
.
people ask
reluctantly
on bended knee
.
people ask
but do they need
words or deeds
.
people ask
Buddha or Allah
dream of Valhalla
.
people ask
Christ or Mohammed
to bless their bed
.
people ask
to live forever
want a saviour
.
people ask
their own reflection
for protection
.
people ask
for excess
devil in the flesh
.
people ask
to get the answer
they prefer
.
people ask
insistently
rhetorically
impatiently
metaphorically
.
people ask
unhappily
inconsiderately
noncommittally
dispassionately
.
people ask
why I’m not there
an empty chair
.
people ask
all the same
what’s in a name
.
people ask
me to dance
dolphins advance
.
people ask
kiss my arse
I’ll pass
.
people ask
for final proof
the bitter truth
.
people ask
to ease the load
till they explode
.
people ask
why life is short
weather report
.
people ask
in monotones
of well-bred clones
.
people ask
again and again
here comes the train
.
people ask
mistrustfully
uncertainly
distractedly
disconcertedly
.
people ask
committedly
dementedly
wishfully
contentedly
.
people ask
impersonally
detachedly
perfunctorily
unctuously
.
people ask
courageously
what is reality
.
people ask
leading questions
in all directions
.
people ask
ask ask ask
tongues are sharp
.
people ask
a lot, too much
.
yearning to know
the human touch
.
© Karen Margolis Berlin 1991/2012
easy flying May 2012
.
Milano, May 2012
.
Piazza Bottini May 2012
.
- &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
- .
- .
- CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH
Berlin art approach (old Tagesspiegel site) 2011
by special request of Brian Gibson
in conjunction with the exhibition WITHIN, WITHOUT YOU
Bath, England, May-June 2012
Within, Without You
Draws together 20 artists from The United Kingdom, Russia, Haiti, Germany and Sweden
who share an interest in what it means to be in or out of the margins.
An eclectic mix of poetry, painting, photography, video and sculpture,
this exhibition celebrates the creative output of the individual and is a space to think about where we are placed (and place ourselves) within any given spectrum.
Curated by: Brian Robert Gibson & Patrick Narbal Boucard
Web address: www.withinwithoutyou.info
The Pet Store
7 Upper Borough Walls Bath, Avon BA1 1QR
25th May-10th June 2012 – 10am-6pm
Private View: Fri 25th May 6-9pm
.
CREDIT CRUNCH
a poem cycle
by Karen Margolis
Berlin/Nice 2008-9
.
.
credit crunch
these days money matters
are tougher, harder & fraught with pitfalls:
I buried the envelope marked EasyCredit
in the dump bin for unsolicited mail
under the letterboxes in the dingy hall
we are the people Barclays batters
with harassment tactics
(homeworking wife has to take the calls)
.
we are the breadline trekkers
light years from the market,
next-to-nil budget artists
fallen from the middle class
dodging the poverty trap
ever wary of the grabbing claws
of the monster of the conjuncture
.
they used to call it a squeeze
(at least the comfort of a boa embrace
before submersion in the mire of debt)
.
now it’s come to the crunch
you can feel teeth chewing
on human gristle, bones
cracking in anguish, broken homes.
.
Hungry to blow up bonds
in the tunnel of conformity
thirsting after talk of liquidity
searching desperately for a bolt hole
& ignoring the stars warning me
not to live beyond my means
.
I snatch my future
from the jaws of the credit crunch
abandon the servile life in Berlin
and pawn my rotten pension
for a sunshine studio rented virtually
.
a room I don’t own, red rooftops and gulls
waves on the doorstep, shells underfoot,
at last a lone track by water
_________________________________
Footnote for AJAR Trustees & Co.:
clutch your pounds tightly, avoid fair shares
exploit loopholes to evade the tax crunch
strive to control the will beyond the grave —
your futures a stake in a perimeter cemetery
© Karen Margolis Berlin 2008
.
Stranded mermaid Nice Promenade March 2011
Stillborn Poem
for Ruth
Sat down to write a poem
a man came into the room
to use the telephone
the title flew out of the open door
.
a boy came into the room
to tell me why Russia is cold
the first line fell into an ice hole
.
a postwoman came up the stairs
to hand over a registered letter
the rhythm fled with her departing footsteps
.
my mobile rang twice
the display was blank
a harsh voice shattered my rhyme.
.
The poem came out unripe
shrivelled
and aged before its time.
.
Grieving, I cut the cord
to my botched creation
and gasped for breathing space
until the next interruption.
Berlin October 2008
.
Professor Dr. Dr. Dr.
Bronze nameplate extra long
a row of titles makes a man;
description of status,
notably academic
requires the ultimate in precision
.
But please let’s not argue
about perfection in translation
language belongs to its users
& feels simply right or wrong
.
Professor Dr. Dr. Dr.
cultivates prestige & pension
in his institutional chair
pen poised over student essays
classic comment: could do better
.
bewildered by linguistic creativity
& baffled by digital technology
he takes refuge (or revenge)
in the thicket of pedantry
.
Let’s not talk of hours & weeks
spent in careful search for sense
Professor Triple Doctor, textual sleuth
is busy tracking down stray commas
& oozing scholarly authority;
.
correcting three times over
he’s satisfied at finding fault again:
a missing bracket in a bibliography.
.
Please let’s not talk about the price
of this farce.
How do you calculate the cost
of humouring an academic
with no hair left to pick the nits from?
Berlin September 2008
.
When you live with children, you live with sand
From the playground the beach the sports field
they bring it home as a seasonal offering
sand caked to mud or soft and slushy cold and gritty
mixed with salt or sunbaked fine and powdery
.
sand knocked out of shoes on doorsteps
fallen from pockets turned inside out
strewn over carpets, pillows and towels
settling in corners behind cupboards
and clogging up washing machines
.
Fresh from building castles and winning trophies
for picture book families
the children return with a bounty of sand
enough to fill a lifetime of hourglasses
ebbing away in a trickle of dry grains
to be sucked up in the connubial vacuum.
.
Out there in the virtual world
pundits discuss hedge funds & capital gains
and politicians deplore toxic debt & meltdown
.
while here on the home front
legions of female warriors
equipped from the household arsenal
battle ceaselessly against that inflationary menace
sand, the encroaching desert of domestic life
Berlin November 2008
I have skills, Nice March 2011
.
Looking for feelings on my laptop
long past bedtime
still awake, all alone
looking for feelings on my laptop
.
there’s comfort in clicking,
illusion of activity
in virtual contact with the ether
.
power in my fingertips
over a digital universe out there
wrapped in a web of news and views
.
sounds, colours, fast moving pictures
tickle the synapses
but don’t touch the senses
.
and often jangle the nerves
with pop-ups or downloads
(never mind that ugly word ‘blog’)
.
voyeurs are watching
from hidden windows while pincodes
vanish down memory holes
.
later, after hours of online trawling
the emptiness beyond logout
an end without conclusion
.
Millions of women, pollsters say
prefer online surfing to sex
personally I like my climaxes live
.
but tonight I’ve worked too long
in my electronic office
the 21st century sweatshop
.
alone at my laptop I surrender
to the pleasure of chasing links
until numbed by a hundred hits
.
How long does it take for the mind
to reject mass pacification
and make its own connections?
.
When the feeling finally comes
it’s anger. It’s real
and it shouts for revolution
© Karen Margolis Nice December 2008
.
The Stampede of the Wildebeest
Barely registered on the global scale
of tsunamis, terrorism and epidemics
a stray news item
retrieved again a year later
from a file marked accidents
.
Did I save it as an early premonition
of the decade’s ending in decay?
.
October 2007: 15,000 wildebeest
perished on the annual migration
between Tanzania and Kenya
.
A strong tide swept them away
panic did the rest; for most
death came by trampling
.
Had the trees still been there
they might have checked the speed
of the rushing river waters
.
Conservationists blamed deforestation;
a game reserve official took solace in percentages
not a big loss, he said, relatively speaking
millions of wildebeest are still roaming
in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem
.
The stampede, it was agreed,
would hardly affect tourism
a landscape of dead animals, in fact
can be a bonus in peak season
if you don’t mind the stench.
.
For more than a week
the carcasses lay rotting
picked over by marabou storks,
vultures, crocodiles
and other scavengers
.
visitors held handkerchiefs
to their faces
as they took snapshots
of the piled-up corpses
Nice December 2008
.
Year’s End Wish for Caroline
Let it be May, Caroline
three times a year
.
first in its rightful place
after the frost
and before full bloom…
.
… and then again
cancelling November and December
and bypassing the hectic season
of endless cooking
and automatic giving
.
Instead, a gentle ride
above the clouds
on a carpet of marigolds
dotted with bluebell cushions
gliding lightly over
new year’s fiery baptism
before descending gradually
to join the dance of spring
.
If May came around
three times a year, Caroline
I’d send you triple birthday cards
on humming birds’ wings.
.
A wish for a dear friend
can’t alter the calendar
yet life would be bleak
without our flights of fancy
Nice December 2008
.
Season of empty shops
A bubble of fragile truth
floating on a puddle of lies
refusing to be blown away
and trying not to burst
.
Credibility a flash game
while the present is downloaded
as a crisis scenario
on flickering displays
.
Elena, age 7, fires a question
through the baubles and tinsel
of adult illusion: “Why all the fuss
about a baby being born?”
.
A season of empty shops
dwindling faith and hollow sentiment
weighs ahead, sinking the year
we’ve already written off as loss
Nice December 2008
.
Auguststrasse gallery weekend Berlin 2011
Credit Crunch Conjunctural Rap
or Hit Back with Poetry
for Dmitry
.
They tell us to spend
they tell us to save
their speech has a frown
the conjuncture’s grave
.
they ask famous experts
why things went wrong
and forecast much worse
before too long
.
They bail out the culprits
and prop up the banks
convene crisis summits
and set up think tanks
they promise relief
for the poor and homeless
and donate rescue funds
for firms in distress
.
They issue new dress codes
in style with the times
grey is the colour
discreet are the lines
they tell us to swap
excess for rigour:
tightening our belts
is good for the figure
.
Who are they anyway?
The powers that be?
watching politics on stage
from seats in the gallery
.
they were there before leaders came
and still there when they went again
.
the spectre of revolution
robs their sleep of late
Marx back on book lists
Trotsky rehabilitated
.
the masters urge moderation
offer games to amuse
but deep down we serfs know
there’s nothing to lose
.
How many times
must we repeat history?
How many must suffer
the ills of society?
How long will it take
till we seize our own fate
and dispose of a system
that’s past its expiry date?
Nice January 2009
.
We the people are dangerous
“What is worse – to rob a bank or to found one?”
– Bertolt Brecht
.
we the people are dangerous
we are the threat from within
on our own alone a risk factor
in twos a conspiracy together
in threes a terrorist network already
(at least potentially
if thoughts roam freely)
.
phrase-coining machines
are minting new slogans
for hard times
.
if we get angry
they call us grievance-mongers
if we won’t fit the mould
we’re anti-social elements
if we march in protest
they treat us like vandals
.
the bigger their leadership deficit
the louder they praise democracy
calling in thought police
to monitor our surfing habits
planting spy cameras on lamp posts
to protect order and property
& preaching sermons that mock belief
.
we the people walk on streets
littered with trampled promises
while they sweep past blindly
rehearsing smiles and hollow speeches
in the comfort of the back seat
on the way to a pressing
historic photo opportunity
.
we the people
don’t have the time
to hang on for gloomy forecasts
or global pronouncements
.
we have an appointment
to greet the moment
our natural desire to enjoy
small gestures & simple pleasures
is dangerous
Berlin July 2009
.
Genius café Berlin 2011
.
low trust
We don’t need the man with the bow tie to tell us it’s a time of low trust.
He sounded as if it were a quote of the day, a brand new discovery
or the latest twitter message.
I’ve known it since I caught some of my nearest (undearest)
setting up a trust to swindle my inheritance
and salesmen rang the doorbell peddling afterlife insurance.
.
Meanwhile we’ve settled in to the credit crunch —
inured to globalised fraud & fake predictions
compiling lexicons of synonyms for crisis
we’ve learned to count the change twice at our friendly local supermarket.
.
Low trust, secret pacts, hidden agendas, high profits.
Wars exported in camouflaged crates
random killers shooting for instant fame
boots stamping out brains in meaningless rage.
They can’t scalp or scapegoat the gods that failed.
.
Do we really want the details? Can we trust what they tell us?
How can facts sustain their value when trust is a safety net
with the threads worn through?
.
Out of the quicksands of perpetual betrayal
the fragile sprouts of a seventh sense
reach towards a way without a compass
urging us to invest in dreams
and trust our instinct for laughter
Berlin August 2009
.
Alone & Afraid
The Great Fear in the Dark Ages
bred riots and mass migrations
freak storms & tidal waves
calves born with two heads
babies with cauls around their necks
plague and pestilence, wars
and inquisitions, visions
of the horsemen of the apocalypse
avenging angels and weeping madonnas
.
millions downed tools and left their villages
running from they knew not what
.
our age is still nameless
only a series of changing labels
fashion fads we can’t avoid
affordable fakes for one & all
the Great Fear stalks us in shopping malls
perpetually ringing cellphones
menacing headlines
tales of invading hordes & terrorist threats
screens and cameras
in public and private spaces
.
the Great Fear fills the hole
where gods or love used to be
it’s fuelled by insecurity
.
insects devoid of instinct
we scuttle into the web for safety
our virtual universe offers disembodied
signs & wonders to all & sundry
numbs the senses with the drug of choice
and leaves us lonely.
Berlin, August 2009
.
Whatever you do, don’t react
if you answer a question
you might betray feeling
.
if you raise an eyebrow
they’ll condemn you for doubting
.
if you venture a comment
it’s stored for future evidence
.
speak only when spoken to
avoid suspicion of free thinking
.
if you shout out loud
they’ll charge you for losing control
.
before going out in public
check your mask in the mirror
.
if you play it that way, my friend
you’ll soon feel the chill of success
Berlin, August 2009
.
.
depression fashion
those classic pictures of the 1930s
black-and-white, subtle undertones
depression, like any other era
has its iconic images, its music, its look & feel
(its war photos particularly striking)
.
those enduring clichés of the ’30s
the bleak images of poverty
pinched faces in soup queues
dossers asleep on heating vents
veteran beggars on crutches
children barefoot on snowy streets
.
black shirts, high boots & monumental buildings
the harsh aesthetics of tyranny
.
forget suffering, focus on lifestyle
youth claims copyright on the present
the past tastes of stale biscuits
the future will design its own costume
.
fashion cuts its cloth to suit the times
look at this season’s salute to the ’30s:
flat caps, drape suits, wasp waists, hard chic
muted colours & padded shoulders (watch for the movie tie-ins)
made in China marketed by the mafia
elegantly tailored to the new age of sobriety
Berlin August 2009
.
.
.
misery memoirs farewell
misery memoirs are out
— stow away that unfinished tale of your dismal childhood
and study current market trends —
fantasy tops the bestseller lists
wizards, vampires & goblins followed by spies
gangsters, advice manuals and sex confessions
with history retold as psychodrama
(while crime maintains its market share
with ingenious technical updates)
.
there’s misery enough in life
daily facts in gory detail
feeds for extra hungry consumers
.
mainstream literature, always a slow mover
is struggling to meet real time demands
transformed on touch screens by the minute
agents condemn writers to wander through
the labyrinth of the entertainment business
looking for hidden corners and escape routes
Berlin August 2009
.
Reza: K’s favourite Berlin café
dyddiau du*
El farto no cree al fambrento.
The well-fed doesn’t believe the starving
– Sephardic proverb
.
dyddiau du, a refrain for dark days
clouds mob the August sun
(but only now & then)
.
“Crisis? — I haven’t noticed a crisis”
she says, stirring her happy hour
margarita at the street café
dusky warmth, tourists looking skyward
to the last trails of purple
behind the temple’s golden dome
across the street the newsstand headline:
more banker bonuses
.
dyddiau du, dark images
tangled with chains of circumstance
bind me to the far side of a precipice
others sidestep with mortgage & salary
am I free or just living precariously?
.
dark days, light evenings
after supper poker at the kitchen table
winning is child’s play
if you can change the rules at will
.
dark times, eclipses in cycles
cast shadows on unsuspected planets
tomatoes shrink before ripening
sunflowers waving tall on the terrace
turn from the light to warn me trivia
translates into choked imagination
.
dyddiau du adieu, dark days are over
I’ve jettisoned the fake Ray Ban shades
and given up trying to play cool.
*dyddiau du is Welsh for “dark days”
Berlin August 2009
Inside Reza
::
CREDIT CRUNCH war & walls
.
The blame game
India accuses Pakistan
Pakistan hits the ball back
and while they’re batting
the death toll is rising
(follow the running score across the bottom of your screens)
.
Nations of millions
play the blame game
over corpses of victims
who died just being there
.
And you & I alone
in our opposite survival corners
battle to keep pace
with the rising cost of loving.
.
how can we stop hitting
our dangling hearts, the punchbags
of mutual recrimination
while watching powerless
the daily slaughter of our future?
Nice December 2008
.
Gaza
effigy of a charred baby
high on a pole
a trophy of suffering
on parades of grief
and hate
.
Goliath versus David
the legend perverted
masses converted
to revenge
and hate
.
endless retaliation
devouring new generations
condemned from cradle
to grave
to hate
.
the parents of war
devour their children live
before the world’s eyes
an orgy of suffering
for hate
.
truce; mourning; rubble
aid appeals follow the TV show
viewers donate
to compensate
for hate
.
who needs the carnage?
who gambles on collateral damage?
who profits from death
with the weapons of war
to feed hate?
.
we the Jews
can only lose
the Red Sea will not part for us again
no god and no book
will stop us drowning in hate.
Nice January 2009
.
Look after the pennies…
money on everybody’s mind
weapon makers, for instance
praise the cost cutting impact
of their latest invention: the DIME bomb
let me spell it out for you:
Dense-Inert-Metal-Explosion (seen in action recently in Gaza)
who rewarded the inventor
of the smart acronym?
Berlin, August 2009
.
Wall story
Once there was a wall
that stood for world war
mass slaughter, genocide
and the cynical ideological
division of a continent
.
The wall fell
people rejoiced
the world watched the party
before switching channels
.
change always looks good
garnished with handouts & promises
but tarnishes quickly
dulled by the business of living
.
the magnifying glass of history
makes dictators more fearsome
heroes braver
and walls higher
.
pending anniversaries
the past is packaged
for present consumption
concrete chips in bottles
maps of vanished border zones
memoirs of neighbourhood spies
photos of faded graffiti
obsolete car models
retro matchboxes
recipes for scarcity —
all the stuff that feeds archives
commemorative displays
& museum shops
.
nostalgia repeats itself
until remembrance
turns to depression
still, there’s no going back
.
the hole the wall left
has grown to a global chasm
with millions teetering
on the edge of existence
freedom fenced in
threats on all fronts
and devalued promises
sold as rescue packages
with the call to build new walls
.
Each of us has a wall story
a tale buried in the debris
of a time that keeps returning
© Karen Margolis Berlin, 31 March 2009
.
Original fake Berlin Wall pieces (sculpture by Karen Margolis)
remember that summer
the Baltic shores were crawling with ladybirds
red & black carpets on golden sandy beaches
ignoring the omen, the official party newspaper
blamed it on a plague of aphids
from the Soviet Union, possibly
but didn’t mention the masses streaming westwards
socialism haemorrhaging through opened borders
.
twenty years on, the ladybirds are back in force
swarming over deckchairs of budget holiday families
the Baltic shores are crawling with neo-Nazis
& real estate sharks fat from reconstruction
.
a vanished nation haunts the whole of Germany
.
Starbucks and public viewing stand for progress
(what they used to call bread & circuses)
Rotkäppchen Sekt brings a prickle of nostalgia
comic figures on traffic lights signify remembrance
and the ladybirds? — a timely gift of coincidence
Berlin August 2009
.
Kultur in post-Wall Berlin
.
CREDIT CRUNCH love bites
.
The rising cost of loving
for Richard L.
It comes as a surprise
to realise
that prices don’t obey
the law of gravity
.
mesmerised we watch
their upward trajectory
like jet trails vanishing
into the skies:
twin tracks
of progress and destruction
.
day by day
a mounting curve
of waste and want
graphs and bar charts
illustrate our plight
without filling the gaps
where ends don’t meet
.
loving, meanwhile
isn’t getting cheaper either
if you add
the wear and tear
of fractured hopes
to the extra cost
of crisis care
patching up families
and hunting new sources of surplus energy
to warm up hearts and souls gone cold
.
the dominant mode of global discontent
and wars of attrition
drains away
the flow of passion
.
sad to report: a bunch of flowers
cheap sexy underwear
foot massages
scented candles
or a night on the town
have lost their power
to banish the prophets
of gloom and doom
.
everybody’s talking about silver linings
predicting resurgence of human values
& the probable return
of love that fled
in the hour of reckoning
when the gas bill came
.
a new language
of fabricated optimism
tells us there’s a way out
if we don’t mind the wait
.
but speechless lips
dried up from fear
and desperation
are no fun to kiss
.
the cost of loving
rises & rises
stimulated by insatiable demand
& heightened by mounting desire
to put our mouth
where money is missing
.
statistics reveal
in times of crisis
the sale of lipsticks
shoots up in the high streets
Nice February 2009
.
.
Auguststrasse Berlin 2011
Once
there was intimacy
swathed in deep colour
shimmering between them
a tropical feather
.
starved of pity
betrayed by envy
the rainbow turned grey
leaving a man enclosed
in his rubber armour
and iceberg pride
.
outside a woman is straining
to get warm again
recalling an orangerie
where tenderness met frailty
as a peacock spread his tail
Nice January 2009
.
. 
.
.
Or was it Astarte?
for H.
I saw her once
or twice, not more
watched her toss her fiery curls
shining copper through stained glass
in the late May sun and I knew, old friend
she would burn your fingers
and then your heart
.
minx with a skin
of paprika and cream
freckles in sprinkles over a pert nose
youth straining the blouse
across her breasts
a drop of lemon already souring
the corners of her mouth
.
when her eyes looked past me
— the invisible older woman —
I felt a shudder, her demon hovering
on the borderline to a wilderness I’ve never known
.
So many women I’ve seen
come and go,
guests a while in your nomad’s tent;
each time you rebuilt
the goddess temple
and worshipped the image of Eve
till the sands shifted
.
You didn’t need us
to tell you
it wouldn’t work again,
you said it yourself:
.
postcards from islands
where winters are mild
mails from the city
of hash cookies and old cheese
trying to tell a story
in a long line of ever shorter stories
the latest ending
almost in its beginning
.
Young and always love crazed
your seeds sprouted poems
now you smile at yourself
with aching lips
for letting Venus
— or was it Astarte? —
fool you again
.
doting on a razor edge
comes too close to dotage
you pulled away in time —
but left shreds of being
in her restless claws
.
Resignation is only
a face you put on
before you go out;
inside you’re nursing
hurts that won’t heal
and melting the wax for the seal
on your own will
to love and suffer freely
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You won’t give up the quest.
Maybe the goddess will descend to meet you
halfway up the mound
or maybe you’ll rediscover
your second self reincarnated
by the pool of youthfulness
in the painted garden
of an old master
Nice / Amsterdam January-June 2009
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CREDIT CRUNCH Epitaph
El mal viene a quintales, se va a miticales
Trouble comes in gallons & goes in droplets
— Sephardic proverb
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I AM A HILL OF POETRY. I AM A HILL OF POETRY. I AM A HILL OF POETRY
… like planetary orbits, some cycles last a split second and some take their time…
I AM A HILL OF POETRY
poem cycle in progress
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The title of this cycle is taken from The Song of Amergin:
“…said to have been chanted by the chief bard of the Milesian invaders as he set foot on the soil of Ireland
in the year of the world 2376 (1268 B.C.E)”.
Written originally in Old Goidelic, the only surviving versions are in colloquial Irish translation.
The phrase ‘I am a hill of poetry’ represents knowledge and is assigned to the month of September,
which has the vine as its tree and is the month of the titmouse and the poet
“the least abashed of men as the titmouse is the least easily abashed of birds.
Both band together in companies in this month and go on circuit in search of a liberal hand; and as the titmouse climbs spirally up a tree, so the poet also spirals to immortality. And Variegated is the colour of the titmouse, and of the Master-poet’s dress.”
— Robert Graves, The White Goddess, pp. 205-208, p. 299
Note: This cycle of 13 poems is based on the lunar calendar Robert Graves describes in The White Goddess.
Each month is associated with specific natural/mystical characteristics and a particular tree.
The 13-poem cycle consists of a poem for each month based on a specific person’s birth date and character.
Karen Margolis
:
I am a hill of poetry
for L&K
b. September 1952
I am a hill of poetry
my tip houses an eagle’s nest
where dreams hatch into song
my base flows into the well of life
to join the subterranean rivers
in caves that echo with the playing of a dulcimer;
my belly is filled with the runes of ages
and the hand of the bard strokes my mound
like a mother caressing the head of her infant child.
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Precious ores run in my deepest veins
mingling with the pulsing rhythms of the earth
in lustrous ecstasy. Rhymes
flick their tongues from the mouths of lizards
lying sundrenched in my surface crannies.
In summer grass covers my gentle slopes,
in autumn the tree gods shower me with colour,
in winter my thoughts are naked, unashamed,
and when the year wakes to spring again
I’m still there, breeding lilacs and hexameters.
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I am a hill of poetry.
Enter my gates carved by the singers of psalms
to let in the light at the winter solstice.
Crawl through the tunnel maze to my ancient mystery:
the journey is long and hard
the rebirth into poetry is spiked with pain
and promises only rediscovery
of what life takes away
each day we grow farther from childhood.
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I am a hill of poetry.
Come inside me. All my passages spread out
like starry beams. In my hollow core
bowls of incense fill the air with perfume
a bed of feathers is waiting for your weary tune.
Lie down. Close your eyes.
Shut out straying conversations.
Drift on a tide of rapturous melancholy
down to castles hung with tapestries
where troubadors tell tales of victories;
weave the stuff that dreams are made of
with the words that flood your mind
press them between the pages of a book
that closes only at the edge of time.
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I am a hill of poetry.
I stand here by the grace of nature.
One day the earth will open up and swallow me
into the canyons of desire.
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© Karen Margolis 2012
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International Women’s Day=International Women’s Day=International Women’s Day
8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012
Pioneering women // Mathematicians // Friends // Jewish // women
Margarete Kahn & Klara Löbenstein
A tale for Women’s Day and every day
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Regular readers of these pages will know that I have a soft spot for feminists and social revolutionaries, and an abiding passion for mathematics. International Women’s Day is the perfect occasion to celebrate all this by rescuing two pioneering women from the depths of obscurity.
Margarete Kahn and Klara Löbenstein were friends, secondary school teachers – and mathematicians. Born in small towns in Germany in the 1880s, they became two of the first women in the world to receive a doctorate in mathematics.
They might have lived happy, fulfilled lives to the end were it not for the Nazis. Kahn and Löbenstein were Jewish. Like many other brilliant German Jewish scientists and scholars under Hitler’s dictatorship, their achievements were denigrated and their lives destroyed.
Their story is told in a little book (only in German, unfortunately), published recently by the Berlin house Hentrich & Hentrich, which specialises in Jewish themes, particularly German-Jewish history. It is part of the “Jüdische Miniaturen” cameo series, slim volumes that fit easily into your pocket and offer enough to satisfy general readers. They also manage to pack in sufficient solid research and references to keep academics happy as well.
The format has one main drawback. Pictures tend to be overly small and grey, as the book about Kahn and Löbenstein shows. Nora Pester, Hentrich & Hentrich’s enterprising director, also laments the lack of surviving photos of our two mathematical heroines. Personal records were lost along with lives under the Nazis.
The packed room at the launch of the book about Kahn and Löbenstein in Berlin in February 2012 is evidence of Hentrich’s success in drawing a big audience even for such a specialised theme.
The launch was really entertaining. The book’s co-author, York-Egbert König, filled in the biographical picture of two women from prosperous Jewish backgrounds who were able to take advantage of the drive for women’s rights and gender equality that began in late-19th century Germany.
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The book launch (l to r): Christina Prauss, York-Egbert König, Iris Grötschel, Martin Grötschel, Renate Tobies
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Kahn and Löbenstein were brave pioneers. Although women were formally allowed to study higher mathematics at universities, they had to persuade individual professors to let them attend lectures. Some were far from eager to take on the ladies.
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Göttingen University
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Mathematics Institute, Göttingen University (new building erected 1929)
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Their breakthrough came when they were accepted to study in Göttingen under David Hilbert, one of the greatest mathematicians of the early 20th century. Hilbert championed women’s rights against the conservative academics who wanted to keep women out of traditionally male preserves. “Some of you gentlemen,” Hilbert wrote in his text, On Women Studying, “are not well disposed towards women studying at university. I ask, you, however, to suspend this dislike in relation to the study of mathematics.”
David Hilbert
Hilbert was known for promoting good scholars regardless of origin, creed or sex. He supervised the doctoral theses of several early female pioneers. His most famous protegée in Göttingen was another German-Jewish woman, Emmy Noether, perhaps the greatest female mathematician of the 20th century.
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Emmy Noether
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After the First World War, one of Hilbert’s colleagues argued that men returning from the front to study might be put off by the presence of women in the mathematics department. Hilbert parried with the remark: “A faculty is not a swimming pool.”
Still, the universities were not exactly swimming with lady mathematicians, and Kahn and Löbenstein were among the few who gained doctorates in the first decades of the 20th century. An extraordinarily large proportion of these women – 13% – were Jewish. Added to which, our two heroines were explorers: they wrote their dissertations in the relatively new field of topology. Hilbert guided them to work on difficult problems he was trying to solve and praised their achievements highly in his final reports on their doctorates. I’ll spare you the details – the book offers a fascinating account of Hilbert’s 16th problem in the topology of algebraic curves and planes, and Kahn and Löbenstein’s contributions to the discussion of this.
In those days there were very few mathematics posts in universities; doctoral graduates usually went into secondary school teaching. After passing their teaching exam in 1910, Kahn and Löbenstein continued their pioneering careers by joining the few Jewish women who became senior teachers, the highest attainable step on the career ladder. (Official discrimination made it impossible for Jews, male or female, to become department heads or head teachers in schools.) The two women kept in contact, but their lives took separate tracks as they followed their teaching careers.
Margarete Kahn eventually taught in Berlin; after the Nazis came to power she was dismissed from her job. She finally shared the terrible fate of millions of European Jews and other Holocaust victims. She was deported to Piaski in Poland in 1942 with her sister, Martha, and then murdered. Her exact place of death is unknown.
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Rudolstädter Strasse 127, Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Grete Kahn’s last address before forcible relocation to a house for Jews
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Doorway of Grete Kahn’s apartment block at Rudolstädter Strasse 127
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Klara Löbenstein was forced out of her job and returned to her home town, Hildesheim, after 1933. By then, at the school she had attended as a girl, Nazi officials were calling for “German arithmetic” to be taught instead of “Jewish mathematics”. Löbenstein managed to escape to Buenos Aires in 1941, but researchers have been unable to find any trace of her after that.
A plaque in the pavement marks the last address in Berlin where Grete Kahn lived before the Nazis forced her to move into a “Jews’ house” prior to deportation.
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Pavement plaque for Dr. Margarete Kahn, deported 28 March 1942
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Note the date on the plaque: 28 March 1942 – almost exactly 70 years ago. The plaque is one of thousands embedded in streets all over Germany to mark the sites of deportations of Jews or Sinti and Roma by the Nazis. At the Hentrich book launch, Martin Grötschel, professor of mathematics at Berlin’s Technical University, explained that the plaque commemorating Grete Kahn was installed on the initiative of a group of Berlin mathematicians during “mathematics year” in 2008.
In the end, Nazi barbarism reduced two of Germany’s finest women scholars of the early 20th century to statistics in the lists of victims. Rescuing Margarete Kahn and Klara Löbenstein from their anonymous fate and retelling their story is a good way to assert the power of living memory – and to carry the banner of women mathematicians into the future.
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Margarete Kahn / Klara Löbenstein
by York-Egbert König, Christina Prauss & Renate Tobies
Jüdische Miniaturen series, Hentrich & Hentrich Berlin,
in cooperation with Centrum Judaicum, 2012
© Karen Margolis 8 March 2012
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remembering Rosenstrasse…remembering Rosenstrasse…remembering Rosenstrasse
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“Give us our men back!”
The scene is Rosenstrasse, in Berlin’s city centre:
69 years ago, a group of brave women and a few men stood outside a Gestapo deportation centre for days, demanding the release of their male relatives inside. This remarkable show of civil disobedience has gone down in history as one of the rare occasions when people openly dared to defy the Nazis – and succeeded.
- Avitall Gerstetter, the only woman cantor of the Jewish Community in Germany, opens the memorial event with a Hebrew song
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The demonstration took place in the last days of February 1943 at the former Jewish Community Welfare Office in Rosenstrasse. The men were interned there following police raids on factories in Berlin where Jewish men or people of Jewish extraction were still employed doing forced labour. By then, most of Berlin’s Jews had already been deported to concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe and other parts of Germany, as part of the plan to make Berlin Judenfrei (emptied of Jews). Most of the men detained in Rosenstrasse had escaped deportation up to then because they were married to non-Jewish women or were not classified as “full Jews” on the Nazi racist scale.
The men and their families had been living in fear for years. They had watched Berlin’s Jews being taken from the city in successive raids and transportation convoys. As soon as the women heard where their men were being held, they gathered in Rosenstrasse. They knew that the men faced deportation and almost certain death if they failed to get them out. During those days, almost 7,000 Jews were deported from other assembly points in Berlin to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
Starting on 27 February 1943, the women, and the small group of men supporting them, stood outside the building for days, chanting or keeping silent vigil. Give us our men back, they shouted. Let our men go! The word spread, and more people joined the protest; the Nazis bosses held angry meetings, and to this day nobody really knows what political calculations and bribery and corruption led to the unprecedented outcome.
Finally, after just over a week, on 6 March 1943, the order came for the internees’ release.
On that day, Goebbels noted in his diary: “There have been some regrettable scenes outside a Jewish home for the aged, where large numbers of people gathered, and some even took the Jews’ side. I ordered the security forces not to carry on with evacuating the Jews at such a critical time.”
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These events have since become embodied in a myth about civil courage under the Nazi dictatorship, most famously in Margarethe von Trotta’s fictional film “Rosenstrasse” (2003): moving, sentimental, and pilloried by historians. But like so many myths, the grain of truth is powerful enough to resist embellishment and to keep re-seeding. Over the years, contemporary witnesses and relatives of those involved have repeatedly retold the real story until it has become canonical.
Part of the reason it has endured is that it symbolises a spirit of resistance by ordinary citizens that was almost completely lacking in Nazi Germany and is seized on all the more – by Germans who don’t want to be eternal inheritors of evil, and by Jews living in Germany who want to find reason to forgive. And by anybody who wants to assert the possibility of free will and personal decision making against any dictatorship, anywhere.
Late in the afternoon of 28 February 2012, over a hundred people gathered in the freezing cold in Rosenstrasse for the annual commemoration of the women’s demonstration. The building where the men were held was demolished by an Allied bomb at the end of the war, and later replaced by the trademark concrete slab housing of communist East Germany.
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- Official presence (1): Barbara Loth from the Berlin Senate office for work, integration & women
- Official presence (2): Christian Hanke, mayor of Berlin’s Mitte district
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The remembrance ceremony was held at a small park nearby, around a memorial made in 1995 by the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger. It shows women mourning and protesting; the chiselled inscription reads, “The strength of civil disobedience and the power of love triumph over dictatorship. Give us our men back. Women stood here, defying death. Jewish men were set free.”
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- Historian Barbara Schieb argues for the authentic version and dispels some myths
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- Mario Offenburg, chairman of the local Adass Yisroel synagogue, was among the speakers who referred to recent revelations about neo-Nazi murders of Turkish people and members of other minorities and police failure to bring the murderers to justice
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After the speeches and song, the remembrance ceremony continued at the nearby museum, Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind, where Eugen Herman-Friede, who survived the Nazi persecution in hiding, retold the story of his mother, Anja Friede, a Jewish forced labourer who was one of the few women arrested in February 1943 and interned in Rosenstrasse.
Next year will be the 70th anniversary of the women’s demonstration in Rosenstrasse. A special event is being planned…
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Some of the authentic stories connected with the Rosenstrasse demonstrations are told in two nearby museums:
Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind and the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre, both at Rosenthaler Strasse 39, (next to the Hackescher Höfe), Berlin-Mitte.
With thanks to Thomas Schliesser
© Karen Margolis 2012
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…death of an aunt=mourning Etta…death of an aunt=mourning Etta…
::
- Stray, Jerusalem, October 2011
Mourning Etta
…………………………..
Teaching me to sing
itsy bitsy teeny weeny /
yellow polka dot bikini
on Muizenberg beach
or was it in the garden in Germiston?
:
And hey, hey galia
bat harim, daughter of the mountains
in Jerusalem
:
Let’s trace our lives of meeting
sharing stories, memories
and the petty squabbles
of patriotism and politics
and parting again
across three continents
:
with you ending smaller
sun-dried but unfaded
in a city of gold
turned to dust
thick velvet layers of dust
on the Scrabble trophies
and your mother’s shabbat candlesticks
tarnished legacy of Memel
:
mould filled the hollows
where the pomegranate pips
had dried out
:
Till death in a stone shawl
edged across the naked floor
and climbed into bed beside you
The cats kept guard
:
Nothing left to steal
no secrets to betray
no more need to fear
that they would come
and take you away
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Etta Margalit
(b. Memel 1926, d. Jerusalem 2012)
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- Etta, Germiston, South Africa, 1960
- Etta, Hampstead Heath, London 1966
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- Etta, Jerusalem, October 2011
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- Strays, Jerusalem, October 2011
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- Farewell Etta (Jerusalem, Succoth 2011)
Etta, for you I walked around the holy city with my camera aimed at street level, taking snapshots of stray cats.
The cats miss you. So do I.
zolstu hoven a lichtigen gan aiden — may you have a beautiful paradise
© Karen Margolis February 2012
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERHARD RICHTER / HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERHARD RICHTER /
A Painter of Our Time
80 years old on 9 February 2012
Gerhard Richter – Panorama
Retrospective – Nationalgalerie Berlin (cooperation with Tate Modern, London & Centre Pompidou, Paris)
Photos from vernissage in Berlin, 11 February 2012
“Richter has… consistently explored painting’s relation to reality” (exhibition booklet)
:::
Cruising through Richter’s imaginative world in Mies van der Rohe’s sea of glass and marble on a snowy night in Berlin.
Lit by a crystal moon outside and a thousand ceiling stars within.
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In his own words, Richter’s art is “the attempt to probe the possibilities of what painting today is still capable of achieving”.
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- Richter the illusionist: play it with mirrors
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- Richter the humorist: answer to Marcel Duchamp
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- Night of the image
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- see it, capture it
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- seeing isn’t believing
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- Bonbons for oldies
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- K’s favourite
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- Through a glass mistily: some of the 4900 colours (Version 1)
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Text & photos © Karen Margolis
Berlin, February 2012
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++++ Song of Age +++++ Song of Age +++++Song of Age +++++
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Two new poems for a work in progress
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Writing a poem on a rainy afternoon
Paper and pen I take to bed
and lie with them
like an invalid
or a lover
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© Karen Margolis 2012
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Anything’s possible
“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
− T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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anything’s possible
she said, typing the words
into the box marked reply
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a finger click carried the message away
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an electronic pigeon
delivered it
instantaneously
to a mailbox, where it waited
obediently for pick-up
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we’re all creatures of habit
clinging to old words
for communication
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what keeps us bound to a constellation
that serves marginal ads instead of inspiration
and absorbs our input into clouds?
– we even have the cheek
to call our electronic jottings
after the song of birds
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How can I tell you
in a new millennium’s shorthand
of a life spent working to buy time
(just another word for freedom)
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now we’re figures from each other’s pasts
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your words waking
waves of tenderness
for you, and the girl I was:
pure heart in her smile
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I long to throw a thought in your direction
and wait to see
laughter spreading across your lips
starting small at the corner
and ending on target on the far side
(the wicked side)
making ripples, the lineaments
of age to come
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Let’s leave the Baltic
to its icy winds
and refugee memories
anyway, the present
was always our meeting point
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moi, je préfère
the swing of promise in my step
walking away
down the Rue de la Liberté
to greet the gulls on the promenade
crying out their messages
whatever the weather
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Let’s leave our masks at home
and meet alone
with our smiles wide open
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© Karen Margolis 2012
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Poems © Karen Margolis 2012
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+++ A Place to Remember +++
- Authentic site – before unveiling
Marzahn Memorial Site, Berlin – former Nazi internment camp for Gypsies
Berlin’s newest memorial exhibition fills a void in the historical picture up to now.
- Young descendants of former internees helped to unveil the plaques
- Introductory plaque
Situated near the north-eastern edge of the city, the permanent open-air display commemorates the victims of the Nazi internment camp for Gypsies on the site from 1936 to 1945. The camp was set up to keep German Sinti and Roma out of the way while Berlin was polishing its image for the 1936 Olympic Games.
The story of the camp is told simply and movingly in ten plaques erected on part of the grounds of the original camp. Individual biographies of former camp internees are the key elements that bring to life this neglected chapter of Holocaust history. At the centre is the figure of Otto Rosenberg, who was interned in the Marzahn camp as a boy at the start of an odyssey that took him to Auschwitz and other death camps. He was the only survivor of eleven brothers and sisters.
- Remembering Otto Rosenberg
In his memoirs, Otto Rosenberg recounted how the Marzahn internment camp began:
“Then one morning, it could have been four or five in the morning, we were rousted out by SA and police (…) We were loaded onto a lorry. Our caravan was also taken along. (…) We were shipped to Berlin-Marzahn. Officially the place was called ‘Berlin-Marzahn Rastplatz’ [literally, ‘resting-place’]. The Lot. (…) They just unloaded us. We were detained. They said nobody is allowed to leave the lot. There were ditches everywhere. The meadows around us were fields irrigated with sewage. And wagons constantly arrived and pumped sewage into the ditches. The smell was terrible.”
Otto Rosenberg, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, London 1999; German edition: Das Brennglas (with Ulrich Enzensberger), 1998.
Another major figure in the story is Gamba Franzen, who arrived at the camp as a young mother:
“We lived and suffered there under extremely degrading conditions. There were shortages of everything. (…) I gave birth to my children in Marzahn camp under the most wretched circumstances. I was only given 1/8 of a litre of skimmed milk a day for my infant children. Two of my children died of malnutrition at the ages of six and seven months.”
- Remembering Camba Franzen
Many internees had to do forced labour under inhuman conditions in local factories. Others were subjected to racist persecution and Nazi genetic research.
Children were excluded from the education system and isolated from their former school friends.
- Child internee
Several thousand people were interned in Marzahn internment camp for Gypsies from 1936 until the deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in spring 1943. Few of the deportees survived.
Camba Franzen was more fortunate. She was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, and lived with her family in Berlin until her death in February 1998.
Some of her descendants, including jazz musician Tschabo Franzen, were among the guests at the official opening of the memorial site on 12 December 2011.
Many German Sinti and Roma received little or no compensation as victims of Nazi persecution. Otto Rosenberg became a prominent Sinti leader and campaigned tirelessly until his death in 2001 for compensation for Gypsy Holocaust survivors – and for a worthy memorial at the authentic site of the former camp for Gypsies at Marzahn. His daughter Petra Rosenberg, who followed in his footsteps as a Sinti spokesperson, has now achieved this wish.
- Petra Rosenberg – daughter of former camp internee and Auschwitz survivor Otto Rosenberg. Today she heads the Berlin-Brandenburg regional association of German Sinti and Roma
- Off with the sheets: far right, exhibition director Petra Rosenberg
Roma musicians Oana Chitu and Dejan Jovanovic gave a haunting performance of singing with accordion as the plaques were unveiled mainly by young people, many of them descendants of former camp internees.
- Holy water and a blessing for the new memorial site
The permanent exhibition at Marzahn Memorial Site – Otto-Rosenberg-Platz, Berlin-Marzahn was officially opened on 12 December 2011.
It was conceived and written by project director Petra Rosenberg, who is chairperson of the Berlin-Brandenburg Association of German Sinti and Roma.
Helga Lieser designed the site landscaping and the exhibition plaques.
The exhibition is bilingual: German/English. Karen Margolis translated and edited the English version.
- Much to learn in Marzahn
© Karen Margolis 22 December 2011
with thanks to Thomas Schliesser
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THE RHYME IS THE REASON
- Tel Aviv, October 2011
The rhyme is the reason
für Thomas Brasch
the rhyme is the reason
it rings for itself
whatever the season
it sings for itself
it lifts the lead curtain to let in the day
and lights up the corners where silverfish play
…
the rhyme is the moment
where sword crosses pen
it eases the torment
of love now and then
it carries the words in a current so strong
that their force overpowers
and pulls you along
…
the rhyme is the fortune
of poets in garrets
who harvest the wild moon
to stave off their debts
it warms up the room with a magical glow
and turns on the tap for the vision to flow
…
the rhyme is the purpose
the end in itself
it skates on the surface
and turns on itself
it tangos and polkas and trips off the tongue
and hums in the memory after it’s done
…
© Karen Margolis 1991/20011
- Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, October 2011
It is the women who bring me flowers
It is the women who bring me flowers
it is the women
who stand
full-handed before my door
proud like the palms of Jericho
dripping rich dark oasis dates
© Karen Margolis 2011
- Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem October 2011
two cities
when the plane touches down
on the eastern side
of the walled city
and I ride the bus
through another frontier,
my hands will ache with winter
while my heart fills
with homecoming warmth
even as the stares of the people
turn the blood to ice.
…
home: fling open the door,
stand on the balcony six floors up;
look down on the railway lines
watch the S-Bahn rattle by
under the leaden lid of sky.
…
today – shabbat — sitting sunning
on the rough roof
of the ancient walled city,
hearing the wailing from the minarets,
sensing the silence
of the shuttered shops
(a political closure, not
a commercial break):
staring out over the domes of gold, the spires
that rise from the rock
under the ageless blue sky,
the light in its clarity
(that light which makes miracles credible)
caused my mind to unlock.
…
home: push open the gate
studded with bullet-holes 40 years old,
sleek black bitch puppy, barking
races me to the garden
where the gold-green grapefruit grow;
drink fragrant coffee in the afterglow.
…
When the plane touches down
on the unholy earth
of that unrepentant country,
and I ride the bus through the Monday bustle,
my body will echo (trembling)
my heart hold close
– tight as your arms around –
the gifts you gave me:
your home. your love. your city.
© Karen Margolis 1988/2011
- Jerusalem October 2011
- Jerusalem Armenian Quarter October 2011
- Jerusalem New Gate October 2011
- Jerusalem New Gate October 2011
- Jerusalem New Gate October 2011
- Tel Aviv, October 2011
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100T poets for change+++100Tpoetsforchange+++100T poets for change
Tempelhof Park & the Seeds of Change
- Poem forest Tempelhof Park 24 Sept 2011
It was a perfect day. The weather goddesses smiled on us as we entered the main gates of the old airfield at Tempelhof. Our poetry forest close to the entrance grew by inspiration and improvisation. Down the slope, the three poetic graces of Neukölln, Anna, Nina and Lucia, set up the sound system while poets and audience parked their bikes, spread rugs and jackets, unpacked their picnics and waited for the show to start.
The poetry forest grew. On the site where an iconic airport rose up in the 1920s, where Hitler’s terror troops marched on parade, where Stuka dive bombers were assembled in underground tunnels for the Nazi Luftwaffe, the scene of one of the last battles of World War 2 in 1945 and the landing place of the raisin bombers of the US Air Force airlift bringing vital supplies to Berlin’s people during the Soviet blockade at the height of the Cold War in the late 1940s — there, on 24 September 2011, we decorated symbolic tree trunks with scrolls, planted poems in bright woven pots and hung out verses while poets read works and made speeches in many tongues. All in harmony and synchronisation with 100T Poets for Change, a worldwide movement started by US poet Michael Rothenberg.
Our poems for the day, displayed in English and German, included Shelley’s Ozymandias – the warning against all delusions of grandeur the world over — and Heinrich Heine’s satirical epic, Deutschland – Ein Wintermärchen (Germany – A Winter’s Tale), a ballad for free thought and against state oppression written in 1844.
- Planted poems: Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
P.B. Shelley, 1818
Ozymandias
Übersetzung:
Ein Wandrer kam aus einem alten Land,
Und sprach: „Ein riesig Trümmerbild von Stein
Steht in der Wüste, rumpflos Bein an Bein,
Das Haupt daneben, halb verdeckt vom Sand.
Der Züge Trotz belehrt uns: wohl verstand
Der Bildner, jenes eitlen Hohnes Schein
Zu lesen, der in todten Stoff hinein
Geprägt den Stempel seiner ehrnen Hand.
Und auf dem Sockel steht die Schrift: ‚Mein Name
Ist Osymandias, aller Kön’ge König: –
Seht meine Werke, Mächt’ge, und erbebt!‘
Nichts weiter blieb. Ein Bild von düstrem Grame,
Dehnt um die Trümmer endlos, kahl, eintönig
Die Wüste sich, die den Koloß begräbt.“
(Übersetzung: Adolf Strodtmann 1866)
- Blowin’ in the wind: pages of Heine’s classic ballad, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale”
Back at the mike, with a growing crowd of poetry lovers, eager readers, inline skaters, joggers, ice cream lickers, bikers, hikers and curious bystanders, Lucia declared, “War is not sustainable”, and gave a bravura performance of Spanish poems from her own pen. She was followed by a host of other poets, local and from far afield, reading in German and English. Poems intimate and personal; or angry, sorrowful and political. In the background, silhouettes of the historic airport buildings, and the green, green grass and tarmac stretching away into the distance.
- “… the lone and level sands stretched far away.”
Happy birthday Anna Blume
Everybody was having a good time except the men from the park authority and Ordnungsamt (public order office) who had nothing better to do on a peaceful sunny afternoon.
They arrived on four wheels, dismounted and demanded to know why we were having an unlicensed gathering. We’ll give you 10 minutes to clear up and get out, they said.
That’s order for you, Berlin style.
But poets are inventive folks. It took less than a second for a bright spark to dream up a birthday party for Nina, one of the reading organisers, aka Anna Blume. When the men in official T-shirts came back, our skilful poetry diplomats negotiated a truce. And the show could go on.
- “10 minutes to get out!” – park warden and security guard take a dim view of poetry. Thomas listens politely.
Meanwhile, back at the mike, jazz musician Paul Brody lifts his trumpet to the skies to blast an impromptu “birthday tribute” to Anna Blume. Loud and clear. The audience whoops and cheers.
- Happy birthday, Anna Blume!
(Connoisseurs of German art & literature might recognise the name: “Anna Blume” is a famous dadaist poem written in 1919 by the great avantgarde artist Kurt Schwitters.)
100T poets and their Berlin sisters and brothers can’t be beat…
10 minutes later…
- Smiles all round – a creative truce
… and the happy birthday girl herself – Nina aka Anna Blume:
After that successful interlude, the rest was poetry party with loads of spontaneous participation from young & old.
- Swahili saying – an added bonus
“It means ‘I feel as good as a banana!’”, she said.
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- Hölderlin cited by Thomas Schliesser
- everybody welcome – chalks provided by 100T poets Berlin
- Street poem by Karen Margolis
Street poem:
THE PEN IS MIGHTY
Wrote a poem
to reach a man
– he ran
- Wrote a poem…
- as afternoon shadows fall…
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Almost time to leave Tempelhof Park…
But no Berlin event — and especially an international one like 100T Poets for Change — is complete without the café to round it off.
Central European culture at its best and richest.
Café engels, close by Tempelhof Park main entrance, welcomed us and opened its space to poets of the world for the weekend in a temporary exhibition to mark the big day of global poetry.
The rest is pictures and unforgettable memories of peace, sun and poetry on a late September afternoon in Berlin.
- café engels: T-shirt to go
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- Curator Thomas Schliesser with special creation: 100T T-shirt
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- Visiting artist Kurt Stadler from Graz, Austria, installing his specially created 100T Poets for Change T-shirt
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- Dmitry Sokolenko’s postPOST Mail Art (centre)
Pure poetry, art & café culture:
- Poetry fan Dieter S. admires the work of his great love, Heinrich Heine (hanging beside: Chanticleer Magazine, ed. Richard Livermore)
- Poetry tastes better with fresh ciabatta; left to right: art works by Thomas Feuerstein, Dmitry Sokolenko (XIX), Thomas Schliesser (Bad Bank) and Dmitry Sokolenko (Mail Art); bottom row: Wall poem (Karen Margolis, photo Holger Kulick)
All credit to Dmitry Sokolenko (XIX and postPOST Mail Art), Thomas Feuerstein (Parallel Arbeit), Richard Livermore (Chanticleer poetry magazines) and Thomas Schliesser (numerous artworks).
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A big thank you to Michael Rothenberg for the grand idea, Terri Carrion especially for visual support — and our Berlin friends Cathy Saxon and Dieter Staecker.
Extra thanks to Nina and Matthias and all the angels from Café engels, Neukölln.
Special thanks to Thomas Schliesser for mounting the exhibition and co-organising the big day in Berlin.
© Karen Margolis
Berlin, 25 September 2011
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