Review: Green Hour: “ANDROIDE AUGEN. POETRY AND SHORT FICTION. A READING” (Dr. Nora Zapf)
Listening to poetry, or to prose, differs much from the quiet act of reading that involves only the reader and the text before him/her/them. For scholars of literature the author tends to be a risk factor, someone who may cause irritation when we speak with her, or him, or them, about the topics, conflicts, and strategies, that we, the experts, have identified. The presence of the author adds authenticity to her text, it promises to link a particular poem, or prose text, to an equally particular life that made it happen in the first place. The author lends her voice, and her reading body, to the linguistic artwork that readers claim to be their own by the very control they have over it: now it is her who is determining the pace, who emphasizes particular words, narrows the meaningone may derive from intonations.
Listening to Nora Zapf’s reading of her own poetry and prose was pure joy. The audience hung on her every word as she took us on a rollercoaster ride on Munich’s public transport system, leading listeners down down down the stairs until our knees, too, ached under the pressure of time, space, and the daily obligations of an academic, a parent. Zapf’s prose (she read from her “minifictions”–“Android Eyes” was an exercize in verticality, in exploring that part of our environment that runs its tunnels below our feet, that gigantic, technological infrastructure that moves people, bodies and souls. Zapf’s poetry, by contrast, allows readers, and listeners, more time to walk through, and meditate on, clusters and fragments of words and sounds that often evoke a smile, or even laughter, but more often amazement: how can it be that we relate so strangely to the world that we are a part of? How do we talk about that relationship, and how (and where) we are moved by it–and what would happen if we rebuilt the city of words that surrounds us in new and exciting ways?
written by Kirsten Twelbeck