Complex Temporalities, Poetic Niches, and Insular Moments: The Poetry of Sepp Mall
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Barbara Siller
Abstract
The South-Tyrolean author Sepp Mall, born in 1955, is renowned for his intricate artistic poems. For the writer, composing poetry is a practice of deceleration: an act of both reducing speed and slowing down. Similarly, he describes the process of reading poems as a practice of standing still, of reflecting, and as a highly attentive practice of perceiving and sensing (Mall, 2022). The following article brings Mall’s long poem “Unwirkliches Blau (Rondo)” (Unreal blue [Rondo]) from his most recent poetry collection Holz und Haut (Wood and skin) into focus, and discusses in which ways the poem opens up novel spaces of perception regarding time by seizing alternate temporalities – in other words, non-human-centred temporalities, as suggested by the poem itself. These spaces of perception manifest as utopian niches in the sense of deep, small, and secluded chronotopes of imagination and perception, which brim with transformative potential as they offer a means of widening one’s perception of temporalities.
Note
The term ‘insular moments’ in the title of this article mirrors Fritz Reheis’ term ‘Zeitinsel’ (island of times, 312), which he uses for moments in our daily lives that allow us to pause and to listen to our inner self.
Note
I am indebted to Sonja Rohan for proofreading the article and for her translations.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- The Lyric Poetry of the Authoritarian Personality: Reading “America First!”
- “My Fellow-Creatures”? Empathy for Slaves in 19th-Century British Travel Writing about America
- Sommerstück: On Christa Wolf’s Rediscovery of the Idyll
- Complex Temporalities, Poetic Niches, and Insular Moments: The Poetry of Sepp Mall
- Reviews
- Benjamin Kohlmann: British Literature and the Life of Institutions. Speculative States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021. 268 pp.
- Claas Morgenroth: Bleistiftliteratur. Paderborn: Brill, Fink, 2022. 807 S.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- The Lyric Poetry of the Authoritarian Personality: Reading “America First!”
- “My Fellow-Creatures”? Empathy for Slaves in 19th-Century British Travel Writing about America
- Sommerstück: On Christa Wolf’s Rediscovery of the Idyll
- Complex Temporalities, Poetic Niches, and Insular Moments: The Poetry of Sepp Mall
- Reviews
- Benjamin Kohlmann: British Literature and the Life of Institutions. Speculative States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021. 268 pp.
- Claas Morgenroth: Bleistiftliteratur. Paderborn: Brill, Fink, 2022. 807 S.
