Entgegenkommen: Dialogues with Barbara Köhler

Georgina Paul

Jan. 2000 · German Monitor Buch 48 · Rodopi

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This volume presents the first collection of critical essays on the work of the contemporary poet Barbara Köhler (b.1959). Köhler's first collection Deutsches Roulette attracted wide critical acclaim on its publication in 1991, when its poetic articulation of a last days' consciousness of the German Democratic Republic hit a nerve with the German reading public. The radicalisation of her poetics in her subsequent mainstream publications, Blue Box (1995) and Wittgensteins Nichte (1999), together with her interest in pursuing work at the periphery of the publishing scene, perhaps explains the relative lack of critical attention accorded her work up until now. The seven critical essays in the volume provide an overview of the various aspects of her work to date (poetry, essays, text installation in the public sphere), as well as debating from different theoretical perspectives (including feminist and media theory) the reconceptualisation of the subject and of intersubjective relations that lies at the heart of her poetological project. The volume also includes texts by Köhler from the late 1990s - two poems from her 1998 artbook publication cor responde, and her extended reflection on gender relations in the German language, Tango. Ein Distanz -, a conversation between the author and Georgina Paul, and, as a coda, an essay on translating Köhler that presents versions of one of her best-known poems 'Rondeau Allemagne'.