CONCRETE COTTEN

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the American-born German-language writer Ann Cotten, an author who creates an experimental poetry influenced by the Viennese group, whose texts are enriched with vivid imagery. The study compares Cotten’s works written in German (for example, Der schaudernde Fächer, one of the reasons for which she received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, awarded mostly to authors with a migrant background) with I, Coleoptile, her first book written in English, in collaboration with the artist Kerstin Cmelka. 

Headnote

Abstract: The present paper focuses on the American-born German-language writer Ann Cotten, an author who creates an experimental poetry influenced by the Viennese group, whose texts are enriched with vivid imagery. The study compares Cotten's works written in German (for example, Der schaudernde Fächer, one of the reasons for which she received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, awarded mostly to authors with a migrant background) with I, Coleoptile, her first book written in English, in collaboration with the artist Kerstin Cmelka.

Keywords: Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, concrete poetry, German-language migrant literature, Viennese group

1. Introduction

This study is part of a wider research on German-language authors with a migrant background, which focuses on writers who have different mother tongues, but have chosen German to write their works. The research started with studying the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, awarded from 1985 to 2017 by the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts mostly to authors with a migrant background. Ann Cotten is the only American-born German-language writer on whom this prize was conferred.

Born in Iowa, USA, in 1982, Ann Cotten moved to Vienna when she was 5 years old, grew up in Vienna, and finished her degree in German Studies in 2006, when she moved to Berlin. Her interest in concrete poetry is made clear by her paper Lists of Concrete Poetry (published in German in 2008 at Klever Verlag: Nach der Welt, see Cotten 2008), therefore Cotten's connection with this area is not random.

What is concrete poetry? It is poetry where visual arrangements or graphic patterns are important for the meaning of the text and sometimes also suggest the subject of a poem (an example could be Die Sanduhr by Theodor Kornfeld, where the shape of the poem - an hourglass - already tells the reader that the text will be about how time passes). It was practiced in Ancient Greece, in medieval times, but also by Apollinaire (Calligrammes), Eugen Gomringer or the Vienna Group (Konrad Bayer, H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm). The last one had a major influence on Cotten's work.

2. Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words and Cotten's German poems

Cotten's first published work is Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007), translated into English as Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words. It is her first volume of poetry, published at Suhrkamp in Frankfurt, and consists of 78 poems. For this work, she received the Reinhard Preissnitz Prize in 2007 and the Clemens Brentano Prize for Literature of the city of Heidelberg in 2008. Both ofthese awards are meant for young artists.

Two examples of poems are relevant for Cotten's method. The first poem, Loxodrome oder die vermessenen Kurven ('Loxodrome or the measured curves') starts from the scientific term loxodrome, also called 'rhumb line', or 'spherical helix', a term used in cartography. It describes the "curve cutting the meridians of a sphere at a constant nonright angle" https://www.britannica.com/topic/loxodrome), usually used to outline the path of a sailing ship. The other poem, Die Liebe ist Sieger - rege ist sie bei Leid ('Love is victory - a source of pain it is'), has a title based on a well-known German palindrom. The author resorts to palingenesis to state that not only rocks or cheese can be melted and reshaped ("Das macht man sonst mit Steinen oder Käse, nicht?/ Doch wer sagt, dass man nicht mit andren Dingen machen kann?" - 'That is usually made with rocks or cheese, right?/ But who says you cannot do that with other things?'). This approach is broadened to include even thoughts: "und auch meine Gedanken sind ja palingen" - 'and also my thoughts are palingen'. The constant metamorphosis of thoughts and words is a feature of Cotten's texts, which actually display a palingenesis of world poetry. In a postmodern frame, she encloses various hypotexts and produces hypertexts configured as a history of world poetry. The same method can be observed on the formal level, when she uses the oldfashioned structure of the sonnet (well-known since the 13 th century):

I think I once was looking for something with loxodrome, and I liked the entry or the explanation so much, that an idea came up to me, that I could make a poem out of it. And I don't like free lines, I actually don't like poems so much, but I find sonnets okay, therefore I made a sonnet out of it. [...] And after that I tried to follow this model, and I found other words that I liked and I wanted to combine them. And they gradually harmonized until it worked, when a term is linked to a situation and word games and images. (Cotton, qtd. in in Saxe 2008)

In fact, she seems to randomly search for words in certain dictionaries and then uses them in verses. Cotton's method of working with the dictionary reminds us of the historical avant-garde movements: arbitrary words are chosen like throwing dice at a casino, not only to suggest that literature is a game, but also to submit a different reality: "ich schüttele im Auge, was ich sehe,/ und hoffe, etwas anders zu sehn." ("I shake in my eye what I see,/ and hope to see something else"). The shaking can also be the reaction of Cotten's reader when s/he opens the book and has a look at its contents: the first and the last poem have the same title, the second and the 77th also have a common title and so on. Cotten thus forces her recipients to develop a reading that is similar to the British Roger McGough's in 40-Love, where the words are arranged on two columns (McGough, qtd. in McMahan, Funk, Day, Coleman 2017: 441). But the reader has, in Cotten's case, two options. As other examples of concrete texts state, the textual frame can be decisive for the semantic level. One can either read the whole work from the beginning to the end, but return to the first title; or one can follow the scheme 1-78-2-77-...-38-39, which sends the "traveler" into the middle of a "textual wood", as the motto of the last poem (Voice over Daniel Johnson) suggests: "My voice is a little horse running into the deep woods".

The play with words combines terms from biology (nematode), medicine (intermission, psittacosis), anatomy (kubital), mathematics, physics (condensation, induction), philosophy (aporia), geology (Mineralien) and interferes with verses that are almost narrative and describe ordinary events from everyday life: "geh ich dann in die Küche auf einen Kaffee" ('I then go to the kitchen for a coffee') (Intermission, Störung/ 'Intermission, disruption'); "Am Fensterbrett liegt Staub, und meine Ellenbogen/ löschen kleine Kreise am Metall" ('There is dust on the window sill and my elbows/ are imprinting small circles on the metal'). This interest in words is remarkable, even though they are barely connected to literature or arts - this is her way of making poetry: anything, any word can be included in a poem, there is no (we might say) "linguistic discrimination". These are not words borrowed from other idioms, but from areas that are usually not used in poetry. However, this medley created by Cotten gives the impression of colloquial, familiar language: "I think there is virtuosity in poetry - a certain ease and familiarity, which can lead to a lightness in tone or a formal lightness, but also to the most astounding manoeuvres with the ox-cart, quite without alternative" (Cotton, qtd. in Balius and Cotten 2013).

A self-portrait of the poet is actually hard to find in her work, though her desire to be unconventional can be glimpsed in Homologie, ich/ Homology, I: "Wär ich Roboter, ich regierte/ mich, mein Gliedmaßen und die USA" ('If I were a robot, I would govern/ myself, my extremities and the USA'). Withal, she treats authorship with irony: "O Fahrtwind, fahre fort, mich zum e/ zu bringen, meine Autorschaft zu reduzieren" ('Oh wind, carry on, to bring me/ to dissolution/, to reduce my authorship'). It seems that celebrity, advertising is not for this writer - "Das Dichten, sagst du, macht dich schrecklich müde./ Das Ich-Sagen erschöpft mich mehr, sag ich." ('Writing poetry, you say, makes you terribly tired./ Saying I exhausts me more'), and that writing is not an easy task ("Mannomann, das Dichten ist nicht einfach" - 'Man, oh, man, writing poetry is not easy'). It is actually a love of logorrhea: when using a dictionary, she looks for strange words, because she does not want to write about herself.

In some of her texts, Cotten denounces the excessive use of technology in everyday life and the lack of real contact between people. The webcam is used to communicate instead of an actual discussion (see the poem Sehnsucht, Webcam/ 'Missing, Webcam'), or memories are stored on a computer and reviewed (see Kiesel, Metonymie):

Sie sehen sich das Foto

Beim Drücken auf den Knopf

(They see themselves in the photo

Pressing the button

screen)

am LCD-Schirm an.

rückt gestern links ins Bild

on an LCD-screen.

brings yesterday from the left on the

Even though Cotten seems to refuse technology, she will use it for the project called Glossarattrappen: each time somebody accesses the website www.glossarattrappen.de another interface appears, a short text which may explain the title and can be followed by a picture. Creating these unique and random text images, Cotten forces the user to refresh the page in order to read more.

3. I, Coleoptile. (Re)turning to English?

If Fremdwörterbuchsonette had just a few words or structures in English, usually written in italics (short of; rush! more!; whatever; To A Waltz, Whiskey; Equilibrium and Stop Motion on a Trick Bike; Freedom and the Right Gesture; Redemption, isn't that a tender word, Ich mag dich, Junge, but I love your hair), many of them creating internal rhyme ("No bluff! snuff cuff rough love stuff s tough enough", "O kiff stiff lips brick kid sniff myths and nick a whiff'; "My darling, if you will be my giraffe,/ I'll promise to do things to make you laugh."), in 2010 she published her first work written entirely in English - I, Coleoptile.

It would be interesting to find similarities or differences between her use of the two languages. Writing in several languages was associated with different personalities by some scholars (see Pavlenko 2006), who are interested in the manner that each language creates distinct textual compositions: "Scholars who study translingual writing show that writers who write in more than one language often treat their languages as distinct instruments that require them to play different tunes" (Pavlenko 2006:2). Cotten herself states in Fremdwörterbuchsonette that it is difficult to express all the impulses of a being in a language: "A new idiom must arise,/ a meta-being-in-motion, a loop/ of pure impulses, for the corpses of the synapse to come across/ and absorbe us to vacuum".

Although Cotten declared that she does not approve of collaborations (Cotton, qtd. in Balius and Cotten 2013), I, Coleoptile, a book of poems, is the result of her collaboration with Kerstin Cmelka. Cmelka lives in Berlin, like Ann Cotten, and is a photographer, a writer and filmmaker. She is often involved in performances, and (like Ann Cotten) goes to poetry slams and happenings: "I want an art that again includes craftwork and junk and that does not distinguish between performing and visual, high and low art, or any other hypocritical bureaucracy." (Cmelka, qtd. in Colvin 2016). Any type of language can be an instrument for Cotten, and she shows in this work that she can also play with images. Cmelka is inspired by the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the photos of Ann Cotten and Kerstin Cmelka reproduce scenes from the movie The Lady and the Hooligan, a Russian silent film from 1918, co-directed by Mayakovsky, where he played the role of the hooligan. In the movie, the hooligan falls in love with a teacher and decides to attend her classes and to stalk her. When one of the students becomes disrespectful to the teacher, the hooligan reacts and attacks him, but the whole group of students seeks revenge afterwards. With the help of other men, the students stab the hooligan, who dies just after kissing the teacher. Watching the movie, one can see that actually it is the students that act like hooligans (indolent, lazy, bored and not willing to study), not the hooligan.

A coleoptile is the first leaf of a monocotyledon, forming a protective sheath about the plumule, and the volume contains several poems about emergence, starting from the process of a leaf s growth. The coleoptile is splitting as the leaves expand, is a protective layer for an embryo, but, at the same time, after the plant comes out, the coleoptile is useless, it becomes a discarded residue. It can be considered a rite of passage, coming to age. The coleoptile even has a name - Enzo, and its evolution is constantly followed by Cotten, in parallel with the photos.

Each cover of the book is actually part of the text; it does not function as a simple paratext, because the inside front cover and the back cover make up the frame of the volume. In On beans, another poem in the book, Cotten describes her "ideal object of study": "It is the green bean, or fisole. Its shape is not public or private, neither phallic nor vaginal; if anything, it resembles the vague idea of a soul or astral body as it might inhabit (or contain) one or several human corpses". The back cover includes Jokes (grown up) (is it a joke for grown-ups or a grown-up joke?): "What does a sun do when it sees a shiny blade of grass? - Make hay." This is the key for the whole work: to grow up is to dry, to lose your shine - "Enzo dries, tries, dies".

4. Conclusion

What can we say about this writer's methods when using different languages? Writing both in English and German can validate Cotten's belonging to both the German-language and the English-language literary canon. Cotten's English texts are not as narrative as the German ones. She has more elaborate expressions in German, as if seeking to be more rational, to argue, to be more substantial. In English, Cotten uses verbal images - she poses in English, giving snapshots from the English language, borrowed from everyday vocabulary to poetry. Although in English her poetry can seem fractured (but more rhythmic), she can more easily give interviews in her mother tongue. What is interesting about this author is her permanent transgression between languages, creating a reality of her own, in a scenario which has only wordplays as protagonists.

Sidebar

Roxana Rogobete is currently finishing a PhD thesis on German-language migrant literature. She earned her Master's Degree in Romanian Literature at the West University of Timişoara, after spending a year as an Erasmus student at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests include intercultural literature, migrant literature, the carnivalesque.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

Balius, Jeremy and Ann Cotten. 2013. "Jeremy Balius and Ann Cotten. Click: A Conversation with Ann Cotten" in Cordite Poetry Review, 6 (1) September 2013. [Online]. Available: https://cordite.org.au/interviews/balius-cotten/ [Accessed 2017, May 16].

Colvin, Rob. 2016. "Artists Pick Artists: Kerstin Cmelka" in Hyperallergic, 21 September 2016. [Online]. Available: https://hyperallergic.com/310792/artists-pick-artists-kerstin-cmelka/ [Accessed 2017, May 16].

Cotten, Ann. 2007. Fremdwörterbuchsonette. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Cotten, Ann. 2008. Nach der Welt. Die Listen der Konkreten Poesie und ihre Folgen. Wien: Klever Verlag.

Cotten, Ann and Kerstin Cmelka. 2010. I, Coleoptile. Berlin-Oslo-Dublin: Broken Dimanche Press.

Encyclopæ dia Britannica. 28.04.2017. "Loxodrome". [Online]. Available: https://www.britannica.com/topic/loxodrome [Accessed 2017, May 14].

McMahan, Elisabeth, Robert Funk, Susan X. Day, Linda S. Coleman. 2017. Literature and the Writing Process. 11th edition. London: Pearson.

Pavlenko, Aneta. 2006. "Bilingual Selves" in Pavlenko, Aneta (ed.). Bilingual Minds. Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd., pp. 1-33.

Saxe, Cornelia. 2008. "Eine Vorliebe für Wörterbücher. Die Dichterin Ann Cotten". 28.01.2008. [Online]. Available: http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eine-vorliebefuer-woerterbuecher.1153.de.html?dram: article_id=181616 [Accessed 2017, May 14].

www.glossarattrappen.de [Accessed 2017, May 14].