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Poetry for the people (symbolic picture)
Photo: Grafissimo / Getty Images
You don't want to be the curmudgeon.
The spoilsport.
The times are gloomy enough, the country needs good ideas.
We all need.
On the other hand, the impulse is very strong.
"Wanted a poet," it said on Tuesday in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung".
The writers Simone Buchholz, Mithu Sanyal and the author Dmitrij Kapitelman demand: "Make politics more poetic and poetry more political."
The first impulse in this case: What a nonsense idea.
Poets in Parliament.
What's next?
We have the Infection Protection Act set to music?
Dancing the good daycare law?
Paint the coalition agreement?
It's very easy to make fun of it.
Too easy, maybe.
Or?
One more step back.
What exactly is a parliamentary poet?
Sanyal, Kapitelman and Buchholz are modeled on the Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
She is elected every two years, currently her name is Louise Bernice Halfe or Sky Dancer, her indigenous Cree name.
According to the statute, she should write poems for important occasions in parliament, organize events, and refill the parliamentary library.
And their field of activity also includes: "The performance of other (...) tasks at the request of the President of the Senate, the President of the Lower House or the Parliamentary Librarian".
Well, that can mean anything.
But since it is about lyric poetry, you can for once really put every word on the gold scales: The fact that a political body can make "demands" on a poet runs counter to the idea of art.
Isn't she resistant?
Undermining the balance of power rather than accompanying it?
How should art do it justice?
The applicants Sanyal, Buchholz and Kapitelman also suspect their own blind spot, of course.
"Irritation" and "disruptive factor" are already desired.
Phew, lucky again.
The burden that would rest on the shoulders of the future parliamentary poet would also be monstrous: How do we build bridges, how do we heal the cracks in our society, how do we let everyone who live in Germany participate in shaping our democracy, how do we break them we use structures that have become unusable because they only use a small part of the population, but harm everyone else, and how do we - as a result - not only make the center of Europe, but ideally the whole continent a more peaceful, fairer, climate-saving place? “Art has to answer these questions, it says in the“ SZ ”. That may be well meant. But how on earth is art supposed to do justice to that?
It is significant that the article is not illustrated with a photo of the Canadian poet, who is the subject of the text - but who, at least in this country, nobody would know.
But with the American pop star poet Amanda Gorman, who became world famous through her appearance at Joe Biden's inauguration.
This is the dichotomy that art overtakes when it is nationalized.
Either it doesn't matter because nobody notices it.
Or it gets a completely oversized, almost salvation-historical charge.
That may work in the US.
Such a mixture of committed and at the same time pop culture affine art is hardly imaginable in Germany.
Maybe rightly too.
Who still remembers lines from Gorman's poem?
And what color was her dress?
Yes, the political language could use poetry.
The piles of word garbage and flood avalanches could be artistically removed and stopped, the jargon could be seen through and broken open.
But lyricists don't have to sit in parliament to do this.
And certainly not speak for this.
You can do that at your desk too.
We may not listen enough to them as they work.
That we don't pay enough attention to them.
More power of lyric poetry - nobody would argue with that.
And every idea to achieve that is good at first.
Placing them at the center of power and making them the extended arm of parliament may not be the best solution.