Hendrik Jackson in Conversation with Benjamin Stein

On the occasion of the publication of "Tiferet" by Benjamin Stein – a cycle of seven elegies – Hendrik Jackson asked how this book came about. What emerged was a written conversation about the possibilities of poetry within and beyond the literary establishment. The book has since been published by Verbrecher Verlag and is available in bookshops.

Jackson: Having published four – or, depending on how you count, five or six – volumes of prose, you are now bringing out a book of poetry. What drew you to verse?

Stein: I have always read eagerly and widely. When I was eleven, my mother gave me a volume of love poems. I was perpetually in love. It started as early as nursery school. The objects of my adoration changed, but each time it felt like everything was at stake. I couldn't say a word. Those love poems were a deliverance. A poet gave me the words I didn't yet have. I wanted to be able to do that too.

I found a writing circle for schoolchildren, led by Ulrich Grasnick. There you could learn the fundamentals. What actually is a poem? How do you make one? It was expected that you would read your own work aloud to the others, and regularly at public events too. That way we learnt a great deal about rhythm, sound and delivery, and that every now and then you have to get up on stage. It was a very good school. We also learnt constructive peer criticism, unsparing yet in a protected space where we were among ourselves. And since everyone was in process and we weren't reviewing published books, every critique meant an opportunity to improve the text. You could work on the degree of failure. I still look back on that with gratitude. When a poem of mine appeared in a newspaper for the first time, I was certain: I had to become a poet. Nothing else was even an option.

Later I moved up to the adult circle, which met at the home of Ulrich and Charlotte Grasnick. There we also read discoveries from our reading to one another, and we analysed and discussed language and poetic devices. There were étude assignments, such as: try a sonnet, try telling something in hexameters. There were also prose assignments: How does one write a short story? Or: How can one construct a narrative? These were all things that in German lessons didn't come up until the final years before the Abitur, or never at all.

Charlotte Grasnick once brought along a volume by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who wrote poems disguised as prose. That inspired me enormously, and when I began to write my first novel, I understood myself as a poet doing so. When Katja Lange-Müller once remarked on a chat show that writing was no art, since we are all literate, I was outraged. I wanted to make poetry, whether in verse or prose. Everything had to meet artistic standards – in form, structure, sound, and – if it could be managed at all – in originality too.

Jackson: I went through this same "training ground" of communal reading and critique as well, perhaps even in parallel with your group in Berlin, in the literary salon "lauter niemand," but also together with the early Kookbooks authors. Certainly not every poet needs this kind of exchange, but it can, as the history of literature also shows, release extraordinary synergies.

What I find interesting in your case is this connection to love, to the presence of another. I too once had an almost glamorous idea of the poet's existence, so powerful in my early years that it was partly a burden. And yet such conceptions provide a motivation that lingers, even after you've recognised the illusion or the delusion in it.

That's also interesting because you now lead a rather withdrawn life as far as the literary scene is concerned – you neither participate in the so-called social networks nor make much of a splash in the establishment. What is your motivation for writing these days? How did the return to poetry come about – the return to the origins of your writing?

Stein: Each of my books had a kind of existential occasion. They felt necessary in the sense that they turned a pressing need. The novels I planned without that necessity – lovely ideas – were never written in the end. And rightly so. I cannot stop asking what the point is. If I see no point, I let it be. I actively resist writing then. I have four children, I run a company. There is no shortage of tangibly meaningful activity.

That I am writing again after a long hiatus is probably an indication that there was once more a need to be turned. When there is something to be said, that something finds the form it requires. I was somewhat surprised that it found the form of poems, but I am glad of it – as though a circle were closing.

You mention the literary scene and the establishment. I am indeed very reticent there. I share inspiring encounters with many writers, deep friendships in some cases, but that takes place in private, not on stages. With you it is presumably different. You are very active in the scene and observe far more, and more closely. What effect does that have on your motivation? Does this presence also make it a kind of competition for you?

Jackson: At the beginning I avoided everything to do with the "establishment." For me, the establishment meant everything that went on beyond the "true" circles. Only then the two increasingly interpenetrated, and ultimately the establishment supplanted those circles. And I too was involved in the establishment from the start, for a simple reason: I had the peculiar idea of making money from writing. That, of course, can only work through subsidies. I now view that system of subsidies even more critically, and the individual players and the "competition" more calmly. Back then it was about asserting yourself. There was a pressure that was also imposed from outside. At the same time I had something almost like a mission, and I found it perfectly normal that people gave us money. By now I find these justifications for subsidies rather odd. And I have withdrawn somewhat from these rather closed circles; like you, I do what occupies me at any given time. If you look at it soberly, there is something undignified about the spectacle the establishment puts on, though the individuals involved are often least to blame. In any case, it is good to stay out of it if you can afford to. At the same time, I feel a writer shouldn't do too much work on the side – that's not good. After all, he represents a different world.

Stein: I don't quite agree. When you say "establishment," we are talking about literary production under market conditions. That means continuous production driven by the need to pay next month's rent, applications for funding, events, many dependencies. Then you are not only an author but also an entertainer, a diplomat, a promoter, a supplicant too – and dependent on reputation, public perception and commercial success. If one chooses that, I find it legitimate. But then one also needs this establishment, with everything about it that may grate. It is not the only option, though. Kafka, Döblin, Benn – to name just three – had day jobs. Their works were created nonetheless, and I believe one can tell from these works that the authors stood in the midst of a life whose centre was not literature. It is a little bold, but can we write only what we know? Personally this approach suited me better, and I have never regretted the decision to earn my living and my family's in another profession. It certainly influences one's motivation. I only mean to say that these are all legitimate choices for the individual, but in every case one must be prepared to bear the consequences.

Jackson: I understood you to mean that your poetry takes shape through a confrontation with the world. And "world" here means more than one's own inner household. "Elegy" seems to lament more than a private tragedy, then. What is it about?

Stein: The mother of my older children once said to me: You're not really an artist – you just copy straight from life. Let us assume that was only meant as a charmingly barbed remark. But even then we surely cannot deny that everything we write begins in us and with us. Otherwise we would be reporters. Yet I still think that the private can be the occasion – and often is – but in literature, whether novel or poem, the private is only of interest when it fits into something artistically shaped that points beyond one's own experience. It is then no longer about a specific childhood drama or a specific bereavement, but about what is exemplary in it – the phases that mourners typically pass through, for instance, or perhaps getting stuck in a particular stage of grief. Take a line like "the leash of childhood drawn taut." How many of us, long since adults, have experienced those moments when we sense that we are further from autonomy than we care to admit, and instead are still chasing after the old battles with our parents, on childhood's short leash? Do you know the feeling when you're reading and a line, a sentence really hits you? You have to let the book drop, you can't read on. I find that sort of resonance effect compelling.

I believe the world we move through is, quite independently of me, in a lamentable state. And that is what it is about. What does that mean? What does it mean for the person who presents itself as "I" in a literary work? What can this I do?

Jackson: There are two questions embedded in what you've just said that have been occupying me lately – or again. I'd like to go deeper and range a little wider. These are two very fundamental questions. First, these moments of shock, of being struck, perhaps of catharsis. That happens rather rarely.

You find a sentence, perhaps even in the midst of an otherwise fairly mediocre book, and then: a cry, something that cuts to the marrow. What happens there? Is that my innermost core? I've observed that in such shattering moments it's usually about some kind of deliverance for me, a dissolving of boundaries. Is such a shaking a criterion for literature? What does "criterion for literature" even mean? The closer you look, the more everything begins to swim, and the genres dissolve. Literature, even very well made, is often not literature – and other things become literature for me: an overheard sentence, an apt word, or even just an image I catch sight of. Or when I dwell on a beautiful thought and precisely don't utter it. Not to write something down and to keep it to oneself can, to adapt an idea of H.C. Artmann's, also be a poetic act.

The second question concerns the transcendent. There is the possibility of simply writing down everything one encounters – biography takes the lead, however much one then abstracts and adds ideas. All other ordering criteria initially seem arbitrary. But from a supposedly objective, transcendent standpoint, the biographical selection is of course highly contingent: why should readers care what I have experienced, where I find myself in the space-time continuum? They would have to know me already and be somehow connected to me for that to be relevant. Unless I convey a more objective "truth" – but then I am really in the realm of science or philosophy. What, then, is literature to tell if it wants to be neither purely biographical nor purely exemplary? In the latter case it would almost have to speak in archetypal allegories. In between, however, lies the vast, immense field of "unfounded" contingency. What do I select from all this concrete material, and why – especially if I'm not after illustration? Literature should, in my view, precisely not be "exemplary," should not make the material into a means for an abstract end. An unresolved question for me. Every time. Some then opt for conceptual art, where arbitrariness is directly posited as absolute; others continue to justify themselves biographically.

The wonder that resides in childhood in your cycle "Tiferet" – which seems to threaten to come to a standstill in the adult – appears to me to have much to do with this question of contingency, of relevance. Childhood as an almost mythological space in which everything is given, unquestioned, however many questions may swirl about within it: where are we, who am I, and so on. By contrast, the "adult" world seems only to have fallen into ever more hopeless confusion. Perhaps these insane operations of the adults, these wars, this violent efficiency, are even attempts to restore the felt order of the past. And they only make things worse because they ignore the balance.

Here we touch on a point that is unexpected for me: the transcending quality of literature seems, from this perspective, not to lead, as is so often proclaimed today, to questioning "order," to being critical (and extending the project of the Enlightenment), but rather to establishing order in the first place, against a self-empowerment that leads to an all-relativising contingency. That would place us almost in the Platonic tradition, only with reversed polarity: poets as the myth-tellers, the demiurges of the true order. At first glance this sounds conservative, yet this transcendence stands in opposition to every political programme – including, and above all, those that seek to instrumentalise transcendence.

Stein: I do not regard tikkun – healing, as it is meant here – as a regression to some earlier state. I find that mechanistic: the broken leg heals, is almost as before, and one can walk again. No – all doors to the past, to what once was, are barred. We are speaking here of processes of consciousness. These are quantum-mechanical phenomena. When our consciousness regains integrity through a healing process, it does so because it has changed – because, for instance, a trauma could be integrated. It still belongs to us, but it no longer prevents us from living through extreme symptoms like depression, panic attacks, or the like.

Children are certainly far more open than we adults to possibilities of reality. Why shouldn't one be able to speak to birds? Why shouldn't a wish, wished hard enough, be able to influence the course of things? The muscles of imagination are tensed and in action, if only because so many inexplicable gaps want to be filled with something. To preserve or restore this openness and undiminished imagination – which costs us adults effort – I do consider genuinely important. But we seem to have enough trouble as it is simply noticing and processing the loss of this openness, of a certain kind of freedom of thought, during childhood and adolescence. And it is not an idyllic state either. We are dependent and extremely vulnerable. Everything is new, uncertain, capable of hurting us. Disappointments lurk everywhere. That is exhausting and often frightening. That is presumably also why children perceive time differently, far more stretched out than we do. Their consciousness performs incomparably more work in the same amount of time than our adult consciousness does.

But now to the two questions you raise. First, criteria for literature – by which you may mean criteria for evaluating literature. I'm not sure, though. I would want to distinguish between literature in general, as writing with artistic ambition, and poetry. One area of criteria I see in form. In narrative prose, everything is possible today. In the classical poetic genres – drama, epic and lyric – stricter rules have always applied, and they cannot be shaken off without loss. When it comes to dramaturgy, this is still most readily understood. But when we come to rhythm (metre) and sound (rhyme, alliteration, etc.), objections are quickly raised. Yet I think these elements are needed, today as ever, because I understand poetry as the spoken, the performed word. It may well be that, as in contemporary music, novel soundscapes are being introduced into poetry too. Off the top of my head I can't think of an example, though – perhaps you can.

A further criterion for poetry seems to me to be the handling of language and subject. The German word captures this well: Dichtung condenses – dichten means both to compose poetry and to make dense. Dense does not necessarily mean short, but concise. Take for example the famous first chapter of Proust's Recherche. Here he demonstrates – novelist though he undoubtedly is – his method, and frames the chapter with poetry. I believe there were sixteen versions of the first sentence: "For a long time I used to go to bed early." That is the quintessence of the narrative in this first chapter, which branches into many side channels yet keeps returning to the early bedtimes of childhood. And the chapter is rounded off by the immortal madeleine scene, only a page long, which renders the mechanism of multisensory memory so concrete that as a reader you taste and smell the madeleine and the lime-blossom tea. And one really should read that closing passage aloud. The memory rising in slow spirals from the depths is palpable in the sound. That simply as an example of poetry in prose.

To the second question, that of transcendence: which situations and, where relevant, personal details are pertinent to a text must be an artistic decision, taken case by case. Our own memories will probably always be closer to us than those of others. But in fact we do not know whether Proust himself tasted that madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea as a child and later as an adult, and whether we owe the Recherche to that circumstance. But I'd wager he did.

It is a good exercise to keep a private journal, ideally written by hand and never to be published. The details then pass through a double filter – that of your selection and, through your body, onto paper. One quickly notices which recorded observations and experiences had something substantial attached to them.

Jackson: May I press you on that? Poetry differs from literature, which more broadly encompasses all artistic texts with ambition, through form – through a stricter set of rules?

Stein: That, and a compressing engagement with language. This can look very different. I would call it, above all, a charging – through devices such as allegory or metaphor, or a deliberate displacement of a term from its usual context. A line from "Tiferet" comes to mind: "decked out in St. Patrick's green." In a prose text that would be a perfectly simple, innocent, descriptive sentence. In the poem it acquires, in context, a different meaning that reaches beyond the mere wording and reveals something about the state of the I who speaks of it.

I see a great deal worth preserving in the classical forms. They are our tools of the trade. We should know them and practise them, so as to have them at our disposal whenever, and in whatever adaptation, they are called for.

Jackson: Forms are subject to trends. In poetry there has actually been something of a revival of "classical" forms in recent years – in the work of Poschmann, Wagner, and Rinck, for example. Perhaps I'm too poetry-addled (or in fact: certainly) – but an innocent, descriptive sentence would be almost a utopia – and in that sense almost poetic again. Isn't the problem really the hackneyed or the stupid sentence? Which is why I would maintain that everything is or can be poetry, that genres flow into one another, and that literature is precisely not a question of learnt form. Poetry is everywhere the word is grasped in its richness of relation and not merely functionally. It is precisely rule-based forms that harbour the danger of ossifying into function. Hence my idea of no longer speaking the poems aloud. Though I do not wish to make a cult of silence. One is always already speaking; that doesn't solve the problem fundamentally. But for one thing, our unconscious speaks far more "openly" and "widely" than what then finds its way into communication – a path on which it must pass through so many authorities. Now we are approaching the – oh no! – authentic. Though I would name the thing to be aimed at, or set free, differently: expansiveness. Or better still: the task is always to seek the open distance.

For another, too much has already been spoken. Yes, I am increasingly taken with your notion of simple description. "Far the poet leads the word; the poet, the word leads far," wrote Tsvetaeva, an absolute master of form and command of language. Writing can also lead one ever more toward the unspoken, toward the pauses. My latest volume ends with a copy of an environmental regulation on the Arctic. Perhaps poets should sometimes talk less and abide by regulations and be silent. Gather material, precisely not know better, but sharpen the mind, the attention. With mere "polish" and craft alone this will hardly succeed. But what I see in your cycle is precisely a call, through all form, for what is moving beyond the concept – and yes: the non-verbal.

Stein: In silence you find only the expanse of death. What remains is an I that stays with itself and has abandoned every attempt to reach a You and communicate with it. That is flight – interestingly the common meaning of the German idiom "das Weite suchen" that you quote, which means to flee. Tsvetaeva's line proclaims the exact opposite. She speaks of speech twice, but the first time it is the speech of others, which is heard; the second time it is the poet's own, which others hear. This describes how the world (for example in the form of a You) strikes us, and how, after what has been absorbed has passed through a poetic process, it is spoken back to the world (again in the form of a You) through poetry. There is no silence, but rather the effort of absorbing, reflecting, and bringing forth a response in language. Incidentally, a marvellous example of condensation, as I meant it earlier.

I don't find it surprising that classical forms are experiencing a revival. Being able to follow a rule can give you security – like a handrail, orientation. Who doesn't need that? Form also acts back upon the thought. One shouldn't underestimate that. If you need seven rhyming pairs for a sonnet, five dactyls and one or two closing syllables for a hexameter, then you are deliberately restricting the available word material. But you are also forced to dwell much longer with a thought, image, or process you wish to express – you are compelling yourself to slowness. And ultimately it is not infrequently from the remaining material that the decisive association emerges, the one that leads to the apt expression. Restriction, slowness, association – these are meditative, some would say: therapeutic procedures. The world around us wants the exact opposite from us. In that light, the use of a strict form can even be an act of resistance.

I certainly don't want formalism – form fulfilled, well done, price tag on it! Certainly not. But I do want to understand and employ the operative mechanisms of certain forms. Often today that means loosening the classical rule-set or discovering and using the essence within it. What matters is effect, above all through rhythm and sound, because they support communication. The word speaks only to our reason; rhythm and sound speak also to the anima, the unconscious. Which brings us back to poetry as the spoken and heard word.

Jackson: How exactly did you go about it in "Tiferet"?

Stein: The classical elegy uses as its basic element the elegiac distich – a couplet that begins with a hexameter and closes with an elegiac pentameter. This produces a specific rhythm and sound. It can be nicely demonstrated with Schiller: "In the hexameter rises the spring's silver column, / In the pentameter then it falls melodiously down". The metre prescribes that hexameters and pentameters must alternate and at which points in the first halves of lines one may elide syllables. It is all very restrictive. Variation is difficult, dynamism is difficult. If you follow it consistently, you get a verse narrative in an elevated tone that quickly comes across as monotonous and simply old-fashioned.

A hundred years ago, however, Rilke ventured a liberation in his Duino Elegies. He uses the elegiac distich in a very free form, with shortened lines and the deployment of semantic pauses as true lengths. He carries semantic arcs across line boundaries, so as to have more freedom in shaping the statement. And he does not shy from beginning a line without a stressed syllable when the sentence demands otherwise. Yet even Rilke's elegies will strike a younger reader today as old-fashioned. In the twenty-first century one probably has to go a step further still.

I asked myself which elements of the elegiac distich are responsible for the characteristic mood and sound, in order to lay precisely those elements as an elegiac template beneath a text that outwardly appears as free verse.

The basic rhythmic pulse is a dactyl (stressed, unstressed, unstressed). Strung together, this recalls a waltz: TUM-ta-ta, TUM-ta-ta, TUM-ta-ta. A waltz can be danced at any tempo. Also typical are the two possible line-endings in the hexameter: a single stress (TUM-ta-ta-TUM) or stress plus unstressed syllable (TUM-ta-ta-TUM-ta). The fourth typical element is the caesura in the middle of the second line, created when two stresses meet: TUM-ta-ta-TUM | TUM-ta-ta-TUM. And together these elements come in three or more metrical feet. If one departs from this template for semantic or formal reasons in the flow of the text, three such feet suffice to return to the elegiac tone. The fetters are cast off; rhythm and sound-pattern remain.

Jackson: How did the subject then change in the writing – shaped by form, "beneath your hand" (or pen, or keyboard)? Or can one not say? What tension exists for you between the form and the technology and modern world of communication that appears in the text?

Stein: There was no subject at all, no literary project, no writing. I didn't want to write; I felt something close to revulsion. But there was a private reason to think through certain things at a slower pace. For that, I thought, a diary would be good – on the condition that it remain truly private, read by no one, and certainly never made public. I wrote by hand, fountain pen on paper. That was the first revelation. I had not wanted to write, and then I saw that I literally could not do it by hand any more. The handwriting came back gradually, and then I enjoyed the writing, sensually. I believe this writing by hand was what opened me up again in the first place. The greatest relief was the deceleration, and this hour each day far from screen and keyboard.

My younger children – the older ones have already left home – observed this, and at some point my son, who is ten years old and has of course never read anything of mine and has never witnessed how I write, how a book comes into being and finally appears in print, said: Papa, I think it's lovely that you're writing again.

That struck me. It still strikes me today when I think of it. Something, I knew then, had not been well at all.

I thought of Rilke's Duino Elegies: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' orders?" He never actually tried. The question was never answered. Who knows who might have answered! And then I was annoyed. A literary idea? To hell with it. I won't play along.

All those exercises with the elegiac metre were something like writing and yet not writing. I owe it to a writer friend that I persevered with these exercises. Every week he told me: You should write. I said: Forget it – but I want to learn what lies behind this metre. He said: Then practise it and find out.

Everything that came out was dreadful. But written by hand and copied out and annotated and changed and copied out again. By hand, because it was a sensual pleasure. And then to destroy all traces of the failed attempts. What satisfaction, tearing paper into tiny shreds and putting them in the recycling!

In my novel Ein anderes Blau [A Different Blue] there is a scene in which Richard watches his older sister, who is a pianist, as she rehearses a piece. At some point she puts the score aside and says: "I won't forget it now. Now I'll begin to play. You may listen if you like." And later he remembers the scene this way: "The music doesn't start until beyond the stars; before that, it's just tinkling."

On 7 October 2023 I put the score aside. A year later I began to play.

Jackson: That is a powerful declaration of commitment to everything that touches you deeply, to the existential. It is reflected both in the objection to Rilke and in the return of writing to the hand itself, and then in the reference to a singular, fateful political event. It comes almost as a surprise after the detailed reflections on form. I'd like to pursue it a little. Everything immediate, physical, vehement – can only be retrieved indirectly in literature and art; it must enter "mediation." One can of course reference existential themes, operate with them, and then hope that this triggers an echo in the reader that is itself somehow existential. Popular fiction essentially confines itself to such trigger attempts. It doesn't pose the question of form, but hopes that readers are "imaginative" enough to go along, to feel, and to enjoy. So-called high literature has always aimed for more: in becoming aware that there is a gap between mediation and experience, it begins to want more than merely to reference the existential. Various forms of epistemological interest come into play, as does aesthetic experience – these lie close together. Now, the reflected is never the immediate; it operates through repetition, defamiliarisation, and "revision." This leads to art and literature, in their refinement, often moving ever further from the immediate, above all from unreflective enjoyment. On the other hand, there is a great hunger for subjects drawn from life, for relevance, for a connection to one's own experience, and so on. That is why – to name just one example of how this plays out socially – in criticism and on juries there is always this great relief when something is finally "about something": the frail old man, a woman's sexual desires, the migrant's fate, the impact of war and blows of fortune. It seems as though the barometer of personal affliction might serve as a scale for relevant literature. On the other hand, the "internal" standards of the inner circle also play a certain role within the establishment. And there it looks almost the reverse. Here there is a rarely admitted but widely prevalent rule of thumb: the more abstract and mediated a work of art or literature is, the more advanced it is deemed to be.

I think this is where we meet – in an objection to that. Vehemence and relevance must shine through in literature. However reflective the writer may be, he must in a certain sense work against that reflection, with it and against it – at least against its abstracting and distancing character. Somewhere the concrete is waiting, that which directly concerns us – for a revival? A "repair," a healing? In any case, more must happen with it than its being used merely for effects, for a sentimental experience, or on the other hand serving only as an occasion for ratiocination and wordplay of an illustrative kind. But what? The answers are of course various: you write of condensation, I of expansiveness (which may seem opposed at first, but probably shows some kinship on closer inspection). These are only approximate bearings; perhaps the specific temperament decides. Or could you say more precisely what it is for you?

Stein: Juries, critics' preferences, outer and inner circles and their group tastes – I don't want to concern myself with those. I can observe openly and absorb, sound out ideas in conversation with individual fellow artists, as with you now, engage in a creative exchange. But in the end I must decide entirely on my own what I want to say and how. If I insist on the right to artistic autonomy, I have in return the obligation to exercise that right.

There is undoubtedly – and this is nothing new – a hunger for authenticity. I simply cannot make out clearly whether the core of this interest is a desire for insight, for identification, or simply voyeurism. The most absurd notion is that an author must vouch with his entire life story for the authenticity of a book. It is virtually a mockery of the artistic process when authors are expected to engage in serial production, instead of being granted, or indeed required, to reinvent themselves from work to work. I understand that the market brings this about. Some years ago I had a conversation with the editor at Gallimard who oversaw the French edition of Die Leinwand [The Canvas]. He told me candidly that they could not publish the other novels because they were so different. Each new book would be like a fresh debut, requiring a new readership to be found.

I am convinced this also shows a contempt for readers, as though they would not pick up a new book by an author simply because it is not Part Two of a book they have already read and valued.

What I expect of poetry is that it leads whatever material it draws on, wherever it comes from, through a doubting, reflecting, shaping, and transcending process. That costs time and effort, and even with these ingredients there is never any guarantee of succeeding in "saying something true" at the end. One can only try, and there are probably only varying degrees of failure. That is how I feel about it, at any rate.

Jackson: Without a living exchange, many fantastic writers would never have existed. In that sense, the inner circle can be quite important for certain people. But that need not apply to everyone. These are decisions you make, and they are ultimately irreversible. And therefore hardly to be judged as good or bad.

In this context, your notion of "failure" does raise questions. Failure against what standards? Failure to say something true? Where do you get this enormous demand you place on yourself – and above all, for whom and for what? If the circles and the establishment don't matter – I do hear a certain cult of genius in this. Far from the masses and the vanities, he chisels away at truth for future generations of silent fellow-readers and fails tragically.

So: standing apart, gladly – but truth? Failure? Intensities are everywhere – there is only one life – how is one to fail in it? If I keep my distance to a degree, it is surely not in order to smuggle all the grand concepts of society back in through the tradesman's entrance and simulate the battle of the giants, but in order not to throw my life and my words to the wolves of reification and exploitation – in short: to rescue the concrete, which is everywhere – if only you let it be. Or I am ambitious and want to negotiate something, to find a truth for all – and then into the fray!

Stein: Cult of genius? I really have to laugh now. I am simply a little shy of people and damaged by group dynamics – first under socialism, then in Orthodoxy. I have had and continue to have wonderful exchange with colleagues, but in associations – arenas of ego and ideology – things quickly become unbearable.

I also have the impression you are playing an intellectual game when you take the doubt for coquetry. Assume, as a thought experiment, that the doubt is real – so real that it is hard to decide: can I actually publish this or will I only make a fool of myself? I may be wrong, but I suspect geniuses are not afflicted by this kind of doubt.

I notice, though, that we urgently need to sharpen some terms. You understand "speaking truly" as something quite different from what I mean. When "Tiferet" says, "Why then was it hard to say something true?", the point is not the proclamation of universal truths, but the reflected sincerity of the I.

Let me give you an example from a poem by Mayakovsky that ends with a stanza often quoted but not found in his collected works, because he deleted it. The poem is "Homeward!" written in 1925 during the voyage from New York back to Soviet Russia. It begins: "Home, thoughts, homeward bound. / Coil, sea round soul, / round and round. / Who's always clear-headed, / steady and sure – / is, so I think, / simply a fool." And it continues with lines like: "I flung myself / into communism / from the heights of poetry." And further: "I consider / myself / a Soviet factory / built / to produce / happiness." In short: he describes with brio where he sees himself as a poet in the great work of communist construction. This culminates in the famous lines: "I want – my pen in the weapons register!" Later, in an open letter to a poet, he denounced the entire poem and in doing so revealed the deleted final stanza. In the letter it reads: "To one of my clumsy hippopotamus poems I append the following paradise-tail: 'I want: / let my homeland understand me. / But if it won't – well then, / I shall / pass my homeland by, / as the slanting / rains / pass by.'"

Deleted from the poem, but disclosed in an open – that is, public – letter: what had once stood there. He had, precisely in that "paradise-tail" which registers the shattering of his own self-understanding, said something true – and struck it out. But the poet knew it was true, and felt it ought somehow to be said openly.

Perhaps here we arrive at an ingredient of poetry we have not yet mentioned: tendency. Mayakovsky postulates this in his poetic manifesto How to Make Verse? as follows: "Poetry begins where tendency is." I read this to mean: poetry should – for all the doubt, all the uncertainty in the world – show its colours, with an I that says: this is how it is. And what is compelling for the counterpart then lies in taking a position in relation to this "tendentious" utterance.

Jackson: "Speaking truly" in invention. Plato already called poets liars because they invent, imitate, create illusions. When I watch good actors, I am always astonished at how precisely they know how to imitate life, based on empathy. As though life could be repeated and enacted at will. Yet why does almost no one (apart from a few spiritual counsellors, who usually call it something else) think of reversing the process? That is, to withdraw from life, from the situation, from one's own role, and no longer empathise with it and experience it as inescapable? The Stoics took this to an extreme and demanded apatheia. But isn't that in a certain sense the role of the poet? Chekhov said the writer must be cold as ice when writing. Or does the writer live a thousand lives? Must he feel each of his characters – and how then does this lived experience differ from that of a "real" person, if one can empathise with every situation? There is, I hear this coming through in what you say, and these are also the experiences I have described, a great need for something "inescapable," for something one undergoes unavoidably and that, for all the play, is no play at all. It need not, as I understand you, necessarily mean a priority of "life" over "art," but something – in the tangle of signs and interpretations – that breaks through to an existential experience. One might say in pseudo-Kantian diction: something that must accompany all my possibilities – and at some point comes to bear within me or breaks out of me. And literature, in the weave of contingencies, simply makes this more visible, extrapolates it.

But wouldn't tendency be something that precisely seeks to force this, to narrow it politically to a particular programme?

Stein: I cannot present proof, but try as I might I cannot imagine that Chekhov's remark was meant as a call to apatheia. Cold as ice, to my mind, simply means not surrendering to one's own suffering or – in the form of pity – to that of others, when depicting what is happening at the level of the world or the individual person. The Stoics themselves insisted that it begins with self-knowledge. Who am I and how did I come to be? And then to "do what is right" regardless. As a rule it is easier to recognise dynamics in others before one recognises them in oneself and perhaps succeeds for once in no longer being at their mercy.

There is also poetry that erupts entirely from the unconscious. Perhaps that is even mostly the case. There are far fewer inevitabilities in our lives than we care to admit. The past is inevitable; the future is not. That may not be true, but I would like to believe it. Yes, of course it can happen that Annushka spills the sunflower oil – but as a rule we spill it ourselves.

I don't see tendency as necessarily politically connoted. That is very probably how Mayakovsky saw it. I understand the concept far more broadly, as the opposite of apathy, which I consider cynical and entropic. I find that the Stoics meet the Kabbalists here: expend energy, take an interest, take a stand. One needn't relate this to the great world stage. It applies between individuals just the same. In apathy there is no relationship.

And as for Plato: poetry is not photography, and not even photography is a one-to-one reproduction of reality. Of course "speaking truly" is possible within invention. That is the basic idea of the parable. And today we can go much further still – into dreams, the unconscious, the hypnotic, the unreal, the fantastical – in order to arrive at a deeper understanding and development. I would rather not automatically attach a political or artistic programmatic agenda to that. Those are questions of power. I am interested in understanding and development.

Jackson: I find your use of "entropic" interesting. It sounds – correct me if I'm wrong – as though emotion and engagement hold things together, opposing something to the randomness of existence – also through decision and direction. In the sense that you say: "There are far fewer inevitabilities in our lives than we care to admit."

I agree with you to the extent that it is right and important to focus on one's own possibilities. Beyond that I see it – probably – somewhat differently. The spectrum of human possibilities precisely in the realm of action and reaction, in the realm of affects, I don't find particularly large. The great game of recognition, of power, rejection and control may at first seem manifold, but ultimately the margins here are not as wide as they appear – I would actually say the reverse. Human hubris! For below the level of recognition by others we are bound to bodily needs, to our five senses, to everything that affects us and that we therefore cannot control. Add to that the unconscious. All of which, in life, is usually embedded in the aforementioned setting of recognition, power, and satisfaction (satiation). These elementary needs may suggest necessity to us: we don't have all that much influence; we have inherited the default settings and they are hard to correct or expand. That may explain the feeling that one can halt entropy by attending to the "elemental." At the same time, freedom is precisely more limited there. You can choose the yoghurt pot, but you can't escape the eat-shit-machine. And that is rather dominant over all "choice."

Self-knowledge, which you also introduce (though you then very quickly move to action), stands somewhat opposed to this. It requires distance and probably also a degree of apathy. From there, when we turn to the aesthetic, we quickly arrive at contemplation and disinterested pleasure. Isn't the path of literature and art rather this? To prepare possibilities that we cannot even glimpse within the cycle of needs and affects? Even catharsis serves, in my view, more to open new spaces, to show the human being his state of being at the mercy of things and to let him recognise it, precisely to lead him out of the entanglements and the "tireless" play of the affects. Out into the open. This openness, I would argue, is precisely opposed to the wear and tear in the affect-machine (that is, in a certain sense, to an "entropy").

I keep hearing, when I tell something "from life": write about that exciting subject, that's interesting! But I rarely or never do. There is an immense amount of literature that concerns itself with such "relevant" topics. With most of it I feel uneasy, because it doesn't rise far enough above its material – doesn't handle it freely enough. Which brings us once more to the question of form …

Stein: First, the most important point: to begin with oneself. So often one thinks: if only he or she would change this or that about themselves, then everything would be fine. I say this to my children again and again: you cannot change other people, only yourself. Yet precisely this circumstance means an enormous empowerment. The key is our consciousness, the way we perceive the world. Humberto Maturana described this in his scientific work on autopoiesis – how our possibilities of perception determine which world, which circumstances, which constraints we believe ourselves to inhabit. That is also very much relevant to literature. The potential poetry of the Surrealists around François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau concerned itself with this. A situation is not just one situation, but as many situations as there are observers. Ryunosuke Akutagawa demonstrated in his short story "In a Grove" that there are as many truths as there are actors and motivations in a situation. And I would add: every individual observer has the possibility of altering his perception of a situation and thereby has the power to shape reality. This has a virtually demiurgic potential, but it works only upon us and for us.

I speak of this in "Tiferet," at the beginning of the fifth elegy, where it concerns the ability of the angels to see all possibilities of development – because they stand outside of time. But sadly they also see which decision we will have made. And that is their grief, their torment. They know we could have taken a different path, and yet we take the path of suffering.

Let me give you an example. Suppose someone flings a barbed remark at you. It depends entirely on your perception of the situation and then your response to it whether a hostile quarrel develops or a conversation that strengthens the relationship. The mere reply: I just heard this or that from you – did you really mean it? – is as a rule already enough to defuse the bomb. Look at our conversation here. We are not of one mind on many points, but things are proceeding without bloodshed. Then again, we don't live together and we don't have children in common. In such a situation it would be considerably harder to react like that. But then no one is claiming it is easy. That is why I end "Tiferet" with "The journey is long and most trying." At least it is long. We haven't hanged ourselves. But easy it is not.

Since you return once more to the question of form, though, I want to mention one more aspect we haven't touched on yet, one as hard to grasp as transcendence, tendency, and "speaking truly." Tiferet literally means: beauty, radiance, splendour. It should not be underestimated that poetry also brings beauty into the world, into our lives. Form plays a role in that too. I think at once of the "Sonnets of Death" by Gabriela Mistral. In these two sonnets she gives voice to an obsessive, all-pervading, consuming love – in the face of the beloved's death. All this comes across even in Albert Theile's translation into German, which I consider successful. In the Spanish, however, these sonnets are also rhymed, which Theile forgoes. And it is precisely this strict form that elevates once more, as though Mistral were, through beauty, outwitting loss, outwitting death. Is that not subversive and healing at once?

This conversation was conducted in writing in July 2025 and first appeared in German online at lyrikkritik.de.