time poem
a note on recitation
recited in real time, the “time poem” would take an entire year: were you to begin on january 1st, you would recite only a single line a day until december 31st, then, on that day, a single line an hour until one p.m. then every half hour until, beginning at 11:30 p.m., one line every minute and, beginning at 11:59 p.m., one line every second. in effect, this could probably only be realized as a long-term event or in private. at a public recital, the intervals, if to be made clear, would have to be distinguished from one another in stages: starting from a minimum of one second, the seconds would have to last one second each, the minutes two seconds, the half-hours three, the hours four, and, last but not least, the days five or six (always calculated from the end of one line to the next). employing this model, it would take more than thirty minutes. the most practicable solution, of course, would simply be to recite all the lines in one continuous sequence.
1 january, 12 a.m. : bang!
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1 february
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1 march
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1 april
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1 may : the milky way forms
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1 june
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1 july
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1 august
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1 september
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9 : the solar system comes into being
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14 : the earth forms
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25 : life germinates
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1 october
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1 november : continues
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1 december : atmospheric oxygen
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19 : fish begin to swim in water
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24 : sauria crawl ashore
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29 : primates appear
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31 12 a.m.
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1:30 a.m. : appearance of ramapithecus, our distant ancestor
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10:30 p.m. : the first humans struggle to survive
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46 : light a fire
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59 minutes, 0 seconds : paint cave walls
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20 : practice agriculture
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35 : build cities
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50 : sumerian and egyptian culture
51 : the alphabet
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56 : dawn of a new era
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59 : humans land on the moon
so
one
and one
doubtful
desired
admired
thousands
swellions
shrillions
so
make
yours and mine
one
The Folded Clock is available from Twisted Spoon Press. You can order a copy here.
Gerhard Rühm was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930. A writer, composer, and visual artist, he is truly one of the key figures of the postwar European avant-garde. With his earliest work dating to the late 1940s, he was one of the first practitioners of concrete poetry and a founding member of the legendary Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s. His lifelong study of music has had a lasting impact on his multifaceted work with its amalgams of music and language and image and text. The result has been a decades-long exploration of a broad range of forms — poetry, prose, radio plays, drama scenarios, musical compositions, visual compositions, collages, and graphic art — drawing on a lineage that can be traced to Dadaism, Surrealism, and Dark Romanticism. His more recent work cleverly incorporates pornographic motifs while skewering the Church and regularly invoking the aesthetics of ugliness, vulgarity, and banality. Rühm has received numerous awards, including the Austrian State Prize in 1991 and the America Award in Literature in 2022. He currently divides his time between Cologne and Vienna.
Alexander Booth, originally from Virginia, is a poet, translator, collage artist, and printmaker who lives in Berlin. The recipient of support from the German Translators’ Fund and PEN America, his translations from German include work by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Jürgen Becker, Lutz Seiler, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
minor literature[s] 