{"id":15756,"date":"2018-01-25T09:10:10","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T13:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15756"},"modified":"2018-01-25T10:54:35","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:54:35","slug":"adios-avenidas-poetry-as-sexual-aggression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/adios-avenidas-poetry-as-sexual-aggression\/","title":{"rendered":"Adios Avenidas: Poetry as Sexual Aggression?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The question: can a poem be a sexual aggression? Or more precisely: can this, the above poem, by Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer be seen as a sexually aggressive poem & therefore condemned to be removed from the Berlin high school \u2014 the\u00a0Alice-Salomon-Hochschule \u2014 where it has adorned a side-wall for a few years now?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the poem in my English translation:<\/p>\n

avenues
\navenues & flowers<\/p>\n

flowers
\nflowers & women<\/p>\n

avenues
\navenues & women<\/p>\n

avenues & flowers & women &
\nan admirer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remain gob-smacked: for a year now hundreds of newspaper articles & radio-interventions have dissected the aesthetic & ethical pros & cons of this little, rather harmless, 20-word poem. No poem has been more intensely & widely discussed in Germany in recent history \u2014 which may be the best part of this whole insanity. But a decision has now been taken: the school\u2019s students\u2019 representative committee has come to the conclusion that the poem smacks \u201cunpleasantly\u201d of sexual agression. And the poem will be removed & replaced with another poem (&, further decision, there will now be a new poem every 5 years \u2014 something that hadn\u2019t been part of the initial idea).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Gomringer\u2019s poem will be \u201cremembered,\u201d in that a commemorative plaque with the poem in Spanish, German & English will be affixed to the bottom of the wall. As the journalist Bendict Neff writes<\/a> in the Neue Z\u00fcricher Zeitung<\/em>: \u201cThe Germans are masters of memorial-culture, this comes well to the fore concerning the Avenida-wall. The past is wiped out, but then a plaque will point to it. \u00a0This process corresponds to the German capital: Berlin is a city without tradition, it is a city of recollections. (Berlin ist eine Stadt ohne Tradition, es ist eine Stadt der Erinnerung.)\u201d<\/p>\n

Gomringer \u2014 who wrote the poem in 1950 & who is now 93 \u2014 commented on the whole affair: \u201cTo achieve such an effect with so few words, that has always been my aim.<\/strong>\u201d His daughter, the poet Nora Gomringer, has meanwhile started a guerrilla action & wants posters & handouts of the poem to be distributed & glued everywhere. You can check this out at #avenidas and read her thoughts here<\/a>. She has also suggested a sardonic improvement of the picture of the wall via a blinking neon heading that reads \u201cHere once stood\u201d above the poem (see below).<\/p>\n

Addendum:<\/strong> My certainty about the silliness of the removal & wall-cleaning has been shaken by Nicole Peyrafitte\u2019s, my wife\u2019s, take: Nicole, after reading the poem carefully a few times, did come to the conclusion that the poem is insulting & demeaning to women, that it is but an old washed-up male romantic trope that associates \u201cwomen\u201d (a generalization) here with flowers and architectural matters, in effect dehumanizing them. A macho gaze, thus, that I was not able to recognize as such. Which is true: I did not read the poem that way, thought of it mainly as a minor lyrical statement of a somewhat classical Latin-American romantic facture. What was uppermost on my mind was the question of censorship.<\/p>\n

Where I do agree with Nicole is that it is good that the poems on that school wall be changed, a new one put up every few years \u2014 actually there are so many good poems around that one a year would be better. The next wall-poem will be by Barbara K\u00f6hler \u2014 & I hope it will be from her book Neimands Frau<\/i>\u00a0(Nobody\u2019s Woman<\/em>) which tells the story of the Odyssey\u00a0form the perspective of its female characters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The question: can a poem be a sexual aggression? Or more precisely: can this, the above poem, by Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer be seen as a sexually aggressive poem & therefore condemned to be...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[1959],"class_list":["post-15756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-eugen-gomringer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15756"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15769,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15756\/revisions\/15769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}