Beleuchtungstechniken. Zur Erschreibung von Bildern in der Lyrik Jan Wagners

Abstract

Modern poetry is closely related to painting. It is not only passively influenced by fine arts, but it even searches for their influence in order to gauge the depth of memory performance that is yielded by the fusion of verbal and visual imagery. Like media-related chimeras, variations of this fusion emerge from the narrative and descriptive visualizations of images in lyric. The forms and variations of making poems about images result in numerously answers regarding the question what an image-poem could be. Jan Wagner’s lyric poetry is affected by images. While some poems bear a striking similarity to “Ekphrasis” as a description of a visual work of art, others, such as his short portraits of painters, reveal only few references to photography and painting. Still others document nature and landscapes simply as narratives of everyday life. In his poetry, which partially refers to imagism and surrealism, Wagner creates the illusion of seeing a picture while reading. He stages arts by using the medium of writing. The article approaches the question whether contemporary poetry attempts to animate readers’ visual perception. (WW; in German)