Katzenkopfpflaster

by Sarah Kirsch. (1979) Published by dtv. 119 pages.

8 July 2007

This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.