Thomas Kling has inherited the legacy of previous generations of poets more effectively and relaxed than anyone else. The unmistakable tone of the author, who was born in Bingen am Rhein in 1957 and died in 2005, resonates to this day, oscillating between writing and orality. In the work edition that has now been published, there is still a lot to discover. Of the more than two thousand pages, around 850 should be unknown to most readers. The afterwords by the four editors - my colleague and companion Marcel Beyer, the literary scholar Peer Trilcke and Frieder von Ammon, and the art historian and German scholar Gabriele Wix - are very instructive.
The designation "Kling-Sound" is appropriate.
As an almost sparkling mixture of ingenious composer and accomplished voice DJ, Kling combined practically everything that came to his ears and in front of his eyes and, in a retextualizing way, reissued it, so to speak: dialects, sociolects, technical and foreign language particles and again and again sounds, Neologistically promised, often unsightly noises such as the rustling of the radio with poor reception or the crunch of a wasp crushed on the window pane.
Kling moves the background to the foreground, brings to the fore the overheard and overlooked, the disturbing and repressed.
His readings are legendary
In doing so, he uses the process of merging times and spaces, or better: blending "double exposure"; his poems become language and thought accelerators, they serve, according to the title of his early volumes, the “verprobung heart-strengthening agents” (1986), they are “taste enhancers” (1989) or fuel rods (“fuel rods”, 1991). Kling does the “language / fire under the back”, as it is typically called in the poem “Prometheus” from the year 2000, that is, from the working period of the volume “Sondagen”.
Kling's poetry readings, where he preferred to perform his “language installations” in a black and yellow striped wasp sweater, are legendary. For him, appearing on stage was a "live act": in his lecture, which varied in pitch and sound, sometimes whispering, sometimes whispering, sometimes hissing, the lyrics unfolded their full force, and since 2015 you can listen to them on the wasp-colored CD "Die burned Performance" , on which a third “wasp” poem about his poetic heraldic animals can be heard. In “wasps 2” from the late summer of 1982, they fly with their “lowered bull's head” in “low flight over the squares of the plum cake” and are martially reshaped by Kling into “cruise missiles”. Against such vermin, and by this he also means ambiguously the "wespn-Menschn", i.e. unpleasant or even more clearly: unworthy of life,only poison helps: "numb bodies, anesthesia, paralysis / the nervous systems, twitching for ten minutes: cold-blooded / warm-blooded animals die at the dirtiest without any noteworthy warning."
1.57 marks per 500 grams
When Kling conquered the literary scene with poems like this in the eighties, the irritation threshold of listeners and readers was much higher than was the case during the provocative avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Kling, the blanket "avant-garde bashing" was a thorn in the side of his time. He disliked the “grim to bitter condemnations” of the avant-gardists as “utopian-enthusiastic, spiritually fanatical and war-hungry, foggy stirrup holders and tongues of the totalitarian regimes of the century”. It is well known that at some point in his grandfather's bookcase he got his hands on Kurt Pinthus' anthology "Menschheitsdämmerung" by the "Generation Verdun". That he was devoted to Expressionism not only as a young reader,but his own early writing also clearly bears expressionistic traits, can be studied in his first collection of poems, “the state before the downfall”. It was published in 1977 by a small art publisher founded by his school friends and is now opening the first volume of the work edition.