“The poems of Rainer Maria Rilke express the music of language. Yet their musicality is idiosyncratic in a way I know from no other poet: It is woven into dense sequences of imagery. And thus it is that the visible begins to stir and move with the sounds; Rilke’s verses become dances. They evoke an archaic unity akin to the Greek choros in cult performance rituals, the choir singing and speaking and circling in rows on the stage. Rilke’s feet dance lithely, unpredictably in untrammeled meters, like so many free dancers of his day. And in many cases it is the outermost point of life, the last [glimmer of] openness where language is no more from which these poetic energies emerge.”
This is Christian Lehnert’s take on Rainer Maria Rilke, whom he has studied for decades. For Lehnert, “the catkins dangling from the leafless branches of the hazel trees” at the end of the tenth Duino Elegy become a portal to the multidimensionality of a synesthetic form of reading. Lehnert, born in Dresden in 1969, is a poet, essayist and theologian. His most recent publications are Opus 8. Im Flechtwerk (In the Wickerwork), which was included in the 2023 Lyrik-Empfehlungen (Poetry Recommendations), and Ins Innere hinaus. Von den Engeln und Mächten. (Out into the Inside. Of Angels and Powers). Lehnert has won accolades such as the Hölty Literature Prize, the Eichendorff Literature Prize and the German Prize for Nature Writing.
Tickets: 8 euros/6 euros (discount rate). Lyrik Kabinett members receive free admission. For more information, please visit the Lyrik Kabinett website. The event will be held in German.
LMU and the Lyrik Kabinett have worked together very intensively for over 30 years. The more than 70,000 works subsumed under the Lyrik Kabinett Foundation are available via OPAC to everyone related to LMU. Numerous events provide a fascinating insight into the current poetic landscape.