Max Sessner, Hanno Millesi, Volha Hapeyeva

LIVESTREAM: manuskripte 234

Moderation: Andreas Unterweger.

wenn schon Zirkuswagen dann richtig – Heft 234 des Klassikers unter den deutschsprachigen Literaturzeitschriften wird in seiner Fülle dem aus einem Gedicht Max Sessners stammenden Motto gerecht.
Die grafische Gestaltung übernahm diesmal Hanno Millesi, der neben seinen tragikomischen Collagen auch mit einer typisch skurrilen Erzählung vertreten ist. Ebenso präsentiert die jüngst mit dem rotahorn-Preis ausgezeichnete belarussische Autorin Volha Hapeyeva einen Text gemeinsam mit den Musikern Seppo Gründler und Josef Klammer, dieses Projekt at.mur.at wurde im Auftrag vom Institut für Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum Steiermark und im Rahmen vom Musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst 2020 am Aussichtsdeck Radetzkybrücke uraufgeführt. Die Musiker spielen live von dort.

WHOEVER DROWNED HERE

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS BY MAX SESSNER

Dreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didn’t know existed. If this book were a house, it’d be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, it’d know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessner’s work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what I’ll end with, or better yet, alive.

-Bob Hicok

In Francesca Bell’s nimble and swift translations, Max Sessner’s poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depths—Sessner’s poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. I’m grateful to have them.

-Joshua Weiner