[Text nur in englischer Sprache]

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Friday, 17 April 2020, 12:14 PM

Dear Monika,

I hope this finds you well and healthy and somewhere in a good place. How is it there, and how are you dealing with the situation? And what happened with your job applications?

I’m good; a little bit worried because we’re expecting a baby, but the situation in Montenegro is under control. Our government acted on time. It was afraid to replicate the scenario in Italy, and our health system has already been in trouble even before this crisis. We have 300 cases of COVID-19 and have been in home isolation for a month. It is much easier to follow distance recommendations in smaller cities and states, but we are all still learning how to function this way. I am afraid that our democracy will suffer more, and so will the economy because we are dependent on tourism revenues.

Anyway, Luise from the JUNGE AKADEMIE has a proposal for us. She recently read our conversation for a digital platform and found it very relevant to this situation. She suggested we do a “Coronavirus Update”. If this sounds interesting to you, she would like you to write a short introductory text about a very present and imagined future, and maybe add some questions for me or reconstruct something we have already done. We can try to contextualise the conversation. But I don’t want to label the text with this particular situation. I might add something that can be read that way too, but I don’t want to push it just because it’s very topical. Hope this makes sense.

I’m very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Sending my best to you,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Monday, 20 April 2020, 2:58 PM

Dear Barbara,

So nice to hear from you, and congratulations! I hope you are and will continue to be in good health.

Well, the job application – probably not, but it’s still unclear. I had to return early from the US and I’m teaching via Zoom now. It’s a strange situation. I don’t see a lot of people ‒ just my brother and a dear friend of mine ‒ to go for a walk, and so on. Yes, it is impossible to make a correct prognosis about what is going to happen, and how long this will go on. We just don’t know.

Hmm, I’m not sure about the coronavirus/future topic. At the moment, there are so many pandemic diaries, podcasts, movies, readings … I’m a bit fed up with them. And I know a lot of people who feel the same.

I would love to restart our conversation, but I would like to suggest another topic. Maybe we could just talk about time. Long time, short time, deep time, past time … back in time, forward in time. Talk about good poems about time. Translate time into writing? Or at least into better time? Of course, we will be influenced by the current situation, but I don’t want to add yet another coronavirus-focused conversation. It could also be interesting to talk about the changes without talking about the pandemic (if that’s possible … I don’t know …). Or do you have another suggestion? Is there something you would like to correspond about?

All the best to you, have good days!

Monika

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Saturday, 25 April 2020, 11:22 AM

Dear Monika,

Sorry for the late response, I was waiting for confirmation from Luise. She really liked your idea, so we can go with it. It sounds very interesting to me, too, and definitely more open to a number of levels of understanding.

All the best,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Saturday, 25 April 2020, 5:09 PM

Dear Barbara,

Ah, that’s good. I hope you’re fine, and that everything is going well.

Concerning time and a sense of time: At the moment I’m reading Helga Nowotny’s Eigenzeit, a book about the development of structure and our sense of time, but I didn’t find an English version online. It came out in 1989.

But then I found a more recent book of hers, which came out in 2008. It’s enclosed.  It’s titled Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future. There are already some traces of the financial crisis in the year 2009 in this book. So it could be interesting, to read it together and have an exchange about it? With the distance of 12 years? But this is just a suggestion. You can take a look – if you like the idea. We can still correspond freely and on other topics …

All the best,

Monika

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Sunday, 26 April 2020, 7:22 PM

Dear Monika,

I’m more than fine. I hope the same for you.

I’m sending you my thoughts.

I read the first part of the book Emergency of the New, and it’s very interesting how sign language puts time into space. I thought about the relationship between time and language, especially poetry as a place with its own temporal mechanisms and correspondence, with linguistic constraints that must be set in time.

If imagining the future, and I would say the past, is a cultural activity, we can say that poetry deals with how to think about the future (and the past). I forget which poet said that poetry is the art of bringing something into speech that couldn’t possibly be said/drawn. It’s maybe about finding a way to write about time.

It’s also interesting how we observe “time” in cultural and social constructs. Nowotny wrote that, but she was talking about science and facts. I would call it a fashion of the time – a general daily routine that is dictated by cultural and social norms and economic factors, as well as one’s lifetime path, and what is considered to be “proper” and at what age. And how this is understood differently in Africa and Europe, for example.

I also wonder if curiosity can be understood in literature today the same way that she wrote about science. Are we also overloaded with the imperative of making something innovative? I see that my generation is. Sometimes that can lead to something new and interesting, but not if it’s the only driving force in creativity. And there are some new trends in publishing: One of the market’s rules is that you must be present in the public/culture ‒ publish frequently enough. On both scores we are doing much less in science and the arts by doing more. The same is true of physics: if we speed up everything, at some point we are going to get the opposite effect. But I went too far, so I will stop …

Too bad I can’t read her poetry book.

I’m excited to hear what you think.

All the best,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Friday, 1 May 2020, 9:05 AM

Dear Barbara,

Sorry for being so slow at the moment. I will write you back this weekend.

All the best

Monika

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Monday, 18 May 2020, 2:34 PM

Dear Monika,

I hope everything is going back to normal ‒ the new normal.

I read the book. She described many things that I can feel, but I couldn’t express that feeling properly, about how we can predict the future. But never before had I thought that with more knowledge, more innovation, the future would be fragile and more uncertain. But it makes sense. Especially since the speed with which changes and innovations come does not allow us to see the consequences.

What do you think about the book?

All the best,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Monday, 18 May 2020, 6:10 PM

Dear Barbara,

Sorry for my delay, I only managed to get to our correspondence today. I’m having a hard time concentrating and everything takes so much time. I will try to write to you tomorrow.

All the best,

Monika

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Tuesday, 19 May 2020, 2:00 PM

Dear Barbara,

Yes, what is new? It’s hard to tell. In German there’s the notion of Neubeschreibung – Neubestimmung – in English it would likely be: redescription, rearrangement, redefinition. There is not necessarily innovation in redefinition – rather repetition or iteration: you do it again. What has once been defined, you define it again, maybe in another way.

Neubeschreibung has been used mostly in a progressive way, talking about gender roles or about outdated sociological claims concerning the work environment. For instance,when the internet asks for a redefinition of workflow. Eine Neubestimmung. But of course, what is new does not necessarily have to be good. Looking to the future for improvement has been natural to me.

Also in a poetological way: that a good poem manages to redefine (and refresh) forms of signification, new ways of making sense. Of course, new ways of making sense could also mean bad developments, in terms of sexism, chauvinism, racism. Then I could intervene by claiming that sexism, chauvinism, racism is nothing new. They have been with us for hundreds of years. A world without them would be quite new.

Yes, to think about the future as something that is not only in front of us, but around us and behind us at the same time. “The future is. Its content, its shape, and its fullness – the images we construct of it – always have significance only in the here and now.” (Nowotny)

And in a book about the poetry of the Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan (Memories of an Impossible Future by Marie Huber), I just read the following passage: “Narrative poetry has the récit as its constitutive element and thus depends on the unfolding of time, more precisely, on the double temporality that underlies every act of narration: the chronologic time of events and the time of their configuration in what is recounted. Following Emile Benveniste, a third time may be added to the time of events and to configured, narrative time: the instant du discours, which – as the fictional moment in which the speech of lyric “I” merges with the instant of reading – becomes the placeholder for a meaning that is constantly renewed.”

The notion of renewal – as a function of the speech of lyric “I” in poetry – with which I can kind of gulp the whole Sprachgeschehen of the poem – as if it was mine, to see what it does, if I read it in a non-fictional personal and identificatory way, to (temporarily) embody the represented conflicts.

The unknown can be bad; can be good. There is a dialectic of curiosity and flight impulse. Like those polish horses, the Koniks, which are more curious than anxious, so they come closer when they see you entering their space, even though horses are flight animals. Nowotny writes that curiosity needs space. Flight does too. “Curiosity aims to explore a space that must still be furnished for us.” Like the space of reception, and the space of interpretation, the space of aesthetic experience. There needs to be space – if an artwork does not allow room for interpretation and misinterpretation, there is no real experience. By the way, just recently in the forest a small fawn, a real Bambi, ran towards me and my friend, twice, as if attacking! And it was so eerie, to feel attacked by a flight animal!

It is difficult if one model is taking over, like the pandemic model at the moment. It gives the grid for any interpretation, like a new dictionary which I have to use, all of a sudden. A certain monothematical impulse, which comes along with the feeling of loss of control.

Is the future space expanding because I can’t make plans anymore?

Is culture more in contact with the past than the future? “Culture is usually set in relation to the past and serves to preserve legacy and tradition. (…) The science of the future is economics.” (Nowotny)

Why is time passing so quickly at the moment? What has changed? Why am I having such a hard time thinking through all this?

Sorry, I have to make a break here. There’s a Zoom conference going to start in less than 15 minutes. An evaluation of students in Switzerland …

There are many more points I wanted to make, but I found it very important to send this in time.

All the best,

Monika

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Tuesday, 19 May 2020, 6:00 PM

Dear Monika,

In our language, I currently only have access to an online dictionary, and in it “new” is defined as an unused, rather utilitarian explanation, but which would mean that it is not necessarily innovative or redefined, but something closer to an alternative, which has not been applied so far. We also have some words taken from English, but you covered them completely.

Nowotny wrote, “Language is sometimes able to assimilate the new that is already present but not yet named.” With which I can agree, but I don’t understand then why culture “is usually set in relation to the past.” I think culture sets up a dialogue between the past and the future. On the one hand, it is true that it leans on or emerges from the past, but it also seems to me to be its other foot in the future. And so change occurs, because those cultures that remain in the past become extinct ‒ customs that, for example, could not withstand social change have almost disappeared.

Perhaps “new” is not a suitable term to describe the situation. It seems to me that other senses come to the fore, much like when our eyes are blindfolded.. With limitations, we are forced to focus on other muscles, for example, which we did not use so much before, and now they have to carry all the weight at once.

It’s an interesting question about the impossibility to imagine or plan even the near future. On the one hand, the future space is expanding, but as if it is happening only on the surface, we know that the situation can go in so many directions. But we are not able to explore, act on those directions. It just opens before us so abruptly that we do not have time to get to know it.

I will give you a banal example for this feeling that time passes quickly without me being able to think it’s true. When I return home and my husband has arranged and reorganised our things in it, for the next few days, I waste time because I no longer know what is where. I have that same feeling at this moment, and just when I think I managed to catch and sort something out, we are already in another phase, which has suddenly been reorganised again, unbeknownst to me.

I read the text. The author refers to Hannah Arendt and her writings about loneliness and isolation and the reason why we are having a hard time thinking this is true is that we do not make those personal or mental connections that make us think. There is also, no space left for randomness, something that can trigger some creative or mental process. “Our common sense, such as it is, tells us that this intersection of social, political, economic, and public health circumstances has never occurred before, and yet we are resorting to naked logic in our response.” (Masha Gessen)

Do you have some poets you can suggest to me who deal with time in their poetry?

Do you feel like your work time has sailed right into your private time? In isolation, it’s like I’m expected to have free time, but instead I feel like I need to defend the time I call my own.

I feel stuck with the question “what has changed?”

I’ll continue to think about that …

All the best,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Sunday, 31 May 2020, 10:10 AM

Dear Barbara,

Yes, what has changed? Sometimes I am afraid that I have changed. No, that’s the wrong temporal form: that I am somehow stuck in the process of changing. Again, looking back to the 28th of May when I started this email which I am only now continuing to write – and I realise it’s already the 31th of May – I wonder again where did all the time go? Into the internet? Into sleep? Eating, walking, writing letters, cooking, going for groceries ‒ ah, I remember really long waiting times in the queue in front of the post office. Actually I should praise it, the queue at the post office, for restoring a sense of time to me.

On the internet, I’ve been reading a lot about the protest movements against racism and police violence in the US. Bad governance is getting worse. I still remember the night (I was in Cologne then) when Trump was elected. I stayed up until one o’clock, got up again at four in the morning and looked at a graphic which made it more and more likely that Trump would actually win. It was hard to get used to it in the beginning, but after that I got used to so many things. Including the hard fact that racism is still a driving force, not just in American society, but also in ours.

It’s better not to get used to it. But since racism’s often structural, it’s also subtle – and of course very, very obvious, too. Getting used to – the high adaptability of humans. But maybe only on the surface? The “new normal” might be the surface, and underneath it? I just wonder what could curiosity do? Curiosity for a society with less racism. What would it look like?

Curiosity might be the first thing that vanishes in a depression. Everything is starting to be just the same. I tell myself: stay alert, this is not a meantime, a time in-between, this is also pure time, don’t just wait until it’s over. And then I try to write about a group of poems which are using the current coronavirus vocabulary, but the main figure is a rather despotic duck. “Poems, dictated by ducks” is the working title: Gedichte, von Enten diktiert. The Bird Flu is also playing a certain role in them.

Hmm, poets dealing with time in their poetry? I think in poetry, generally, the time structure is complex and more open than in conventional forms of narration. The presence of remembrance (in present tense), the sudden emergence of thoughts, the future, all in synchronicity – and, on the semantic level: dealing with loss. Trauerarbeit happens in time. I remember when my father died, for months I thought it was still February. No sooner than the work of mourning started, time started again.

But there are also approaches of natural passings of beauty, like Michael Donhauser’s Variationen in Prosa – which I read as an ensemble of poems, regardless of the title. They deal with time, and yes, also with loss, and the changing of the seasons, and in a slightly altered grammar – also with the temporal sense of language. They are very beautiful, even comforting in their very own way. Then there is a book by Esther Kinsky, Am kalten Hang – but neither of them have been translated into English yet. Ah, and Daniel Falb, in his new book, Orchidee und Technofossil. It deals with huge amounts of time: theoretical time, geological time, Nachhaltigkeit (sustainability), catastrophic time and the paradox role of the archive.

This week I went to the Uckermark for two days. Hoping to find time again, no, better: to re-gather the length of time that, I felt I missed since beginning of March. I wouldn’t have thought that this would be my biggest problem in a pandemic, that time is slipping away, even though I’ve spent most of it alone. The landscape helped. And there was wind and there were lakes and there was a beautiful garden with cherry trees – and no internet. A lot of animals, too.

I will think about translated poems. There is a book of poems by three poets: Maggie Nelson, Denise Riley and Claudia Rankine. Its title is a line from a poem by Denise Riley: “Die deeper into life every second.” Again, it is a poem in relation to loss. There’s the book Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. And there is a book by Monica Youn, Blackacre. Rather dark. I’m sorry, I can only think about poetry books that are somehow taking notes while on a journey through mourning, or dealing with loss. Let me think harder and of something else.

Ah, there’s a book about the time of growing, by a Greek poet: Eleni Vakalo’s Before Lyricism, edited and translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich. I like those poems a lot. They are written in larger, loosely connected groups. The first part is called “The Forest – Poetic Fiction (in the style of an expressive ballet)”, written in 1954.

Thanks a lot for the Hannah Arendt text. I read it with interest. I’m not sure if the situation is really comparable, but some traits, of course, are similar. And I like your example about the rearranged kitchen, where nothing is in its place any longer. Maybe it’s the extension of adaptation – that is followed by the next adaptation – like gliding. Where is the reference? What is the reference point? The grip? To lose your grip is considered a sign of declining mental health, because you need to have a mobile mind to react to the changes. But now I feel some structures are moving too fast, or moving in a confusing way … I would not have thought that this would be the problems I’d encounter: a lack of concentration, forgetfulness and a loss of time.

Hmm, I don’t think I ever really made a distinction between work time and private time – not in terms of writing. It was easy to differentiate when I was still working at the Radio Station. The office was clearly business, but when I came home and started to write or work on my poems, it was private. And also in difficult times, it was always work that helped me (and close friends, of course). I made a half-hearted joke: Work will always be there for you. And it was true. But now it seems, that I am no longer there for work, and I am only trying to keep everything intact and sound.

I hope you are well and in good spirits. I am looking forward to hearing of you. You are always so fast! I really admire that.

All the best,
Monika

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Sunday, 31 May 2020, 10:15 AM

Dear Barbara,

I copied all our correspondence into a file. I don’t know if we want to keep it so personal (to publish  it as is) – but in a way, I also like showing how time goes into it, and all my excuses for being late kind of fit into the subject. But maybe this is not such a good idea. Or could it also be reformulated in a more impersonal way?

Have a good time!

All the best,

From: Barbara Delać

Sent: Wednesday, 3 June 2020, 4:47 PM

Dear Monika,

I like this form and think it’s very interesting to follow. As we talk about time, someone else can actually feel how time is passing, and affecting our thoughts and state of mind. But just like you, I’m also not sure if it’s too long, or too personal to publish.

I am very good. There are also some internal changes that are happening in my body and mind, given that I am in the eighth month of my pregnancy. So, for the last three months (since I can physically notice changes), I’ve been in shock about how much time he has, and how big and strong he gets. There was a huge contrast between my “stuck” time and his. It’s the same with nature. We can spot more birds than ever; the sea is recovering from no cruise ships and yachts. As if this situation had lasted much longer. The time I spent outside the house was like going back to my childhood. In the 1990s and early 2000s, my country did not invest in tourism, the traffic was not bad and our small towns had a very light and peaceful Mediterranean energy. But I haven’t gone swimming yet this year, and that is strange. In my mind, it can’t be June already.

And I’m still not writing. We haven’t had any new or active COVID-19 cases in a month. But our new political space has again taken over nationally and become the number one topic. As I told you in February, there are tensions between Serbia and Montenegro, the church and the government, and it is getting worse, especially because the elections are coming and they are setting things ablaze. Bad governance is definitely getting worse everywhere.

I think we are more focused on how to adapt things to us, not the other way around. As if we all have a protective programme that cannot completely protect us from outside influence.

I like the idea of a despotic duck. It can also refer to the language of the duck in Orwell’s 1984. It’s definitely a new kind of speech, with repetition, counting and fear. Our media is also full of conspiracy theories that are distorting facts with some crazy imagination.

Now I will stop writing, because I have to send you this email so that Luise doesn’t have to wait too long for my response.

Thanks for the recommendation. I will look for these poets.

I really enjoyed reading your thoughts.

All the best,

Barbara

From: Monika Rinck

Sent: Thursday, 4 June 2020, 11:45 AM

Dear Barbara,

Thank you – I’m going to reread everything now, and then I’ll send it to you to forward it to Luise. It is more than a paragraph, though, I feel …

More soon, in a bit,

Monika

Reading list

Helga Nowotny: Eigenzeit. Frankfurt am Main, 1989.

Helga Nowotny: Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future. Translated by Mitch Cohen. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005.

Marie Huber: Memories of an Impossible Future. Mehdi Akhavān Sāles and the Poetics of Time. Amsterdam, 2016.

Michael Donhauser: Variationen in Prosa. Berlin, 2013.

Esther Kinsky: Am kalten Hang. Gedichte. Berlin, 2016.

Daniel Falb: Orchidee und Technofossil. Berlin, 2019.

Claudia Rankine, Denise Riley, Maggie Nelson: Die Deeper Into Life. Modern Poets 6. London, 2017.

Kim Hyesoon: Autobiography of Death. Translated by Don Mee Choi. New York, 2016.

Monica Youn: Blackacre. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016.

Eleni Vakalo: Before Lyricism. Translated bKaren Emmerich. New York, 2018.