Mr. & Mrs. Patriot keep losing their hats,
While the air is alive with what sounds like screams;
Wherever you look there are falling tiles & rotten beams
& the coasts—you read—are rising tides & melting caps
Man, is it coming down or what! Storm surge smothers
The land, dams break; we can’t dig enough ditches
Everyone seems to have caught something or other
Trains tumble off their bridges
Alex will be reading at our Berlin weekender, 16th-17th October … details here.
Jakob van Hoddis (1887–1942), the anagrammatic pseudonym of Hans Davidsohn, was born in Berlin. The publication of his poem “End of the World” in Der Demokrat in 1911 was an immediate sensation and stands as one of the earliest, and most famous, examples of literary Expressionism. In the wake of his father’s death and that of his close friend, the poet Georg Heym, however, he soon began to show marked signs of psychological disturbance, which would see him in and out of institutions for the rest of his life. As a Jewish, “mentally ill” Expressionist poet, with the advent of the Nazis in 1933, things could only get worse. At the end of April 1942, along with the rest of the patients and the entire staff of his sanatorium near Koblenz, he was sent to Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. There were no survivors.
Alexander Booth is a poet, translator, collage artist & printmaker who lives in Berlin. Recent translations include work by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm & a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus. His latest collection of poems, Carnation, appeared late last year.
