Poetry

I have written poetry in German since 1953, and in English since 1967. Between 1967 and 1992, my writing of English poetry has been continuous, a practice I have returned to in 2024.

Historically, my German poetry is influenced by the poets Gottfried Benn and Paul Celan, my English poetry by William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov, but also by that of Nadine Boughton, deceased in 2024, whose poetry executor I am.

As the acoustic poetry readings on this site suggest, for me poems are word machines that carry music, both in terms rhythm and melody, as well as line breaks and punctuation. I find it difficult to acknowledge something as a poem that is not also a musical whole.

While my German poems originally were collected in a volume called ‘Tönungen’ (Soundings), my English poetry written up to 1992 was collection in four sets: Tremblings (1967 to 1979), Untold Harmonies (1979-1991), Karmen Poems (1992), and Prose Poems (1988-1992). In 2022, I published a selection of these poems at the Frieling Verlag, Berlin, Germany, in the form of a bilingual edition (i.e., with English translations). This publication is found at https://www.frieling-verlag.de/shop/lyrik/schlesische-sprachschmiede—silesian-language-smithy/ and https://books.google.com/books/about/Schlesische_Sprachschmiede_Silesian_Lang.html?id=dYOizwEACAAJ

2014 Gloucester Writers Center Reading [introduced by Nadine Boughton]

2019 Gloucester Writers Center Reading:  [Video]

2022 Gloucester Writers Center Reading [ Video in German ]

Click here to download complete collection of English poems [before 2024]

Click here to download complete collection of German poems [until 1992]; please note that the Frieling Publication of 2022, mentioned above, is a selection from this larger collection.

Click here to download e-book, Digital Esthetics , go to slide 24