Kai Pohl's Stars Over Astrakhan Unites 40 Years of Countercultural Poetry

Your new poetry collection, Stars Over Astrakhan, has just been released—100 poems spanning four decades. The earliest dates back to 1988, the most recent to 2024. Let's start at the beginning: How did your journey with poetry begin?

My initial encounter with poetry—thoroughly soured by German class in school—actually came through music. After finishing my apprenticeship, I began immersing myself in song lyrics, East and West German rock, whatever I could get my hands on. Eventually, I started writing my own. Then I discovered Brigitte Struzyk's poetry in her 1984 collection Life on the Edge (Leben auf der Kippe), published by Mitteldeutscher Verlag, and thought: This is what I want to do. That's how I transitioned from my early, rather naive song lyrics to writing poetry.

Kai Pohl, born in 1964, is a poet and writer based in Berlin. His newly published collection, Stars Over Astrakhan, brings together his work from the past 40 years. He edits the Prenzlauer Berg Collection and serves on the editorial team of the fusion magazine Downward! (Abwärts!). His texts have been set to music by artists like Herbst in Peking and Alexander Krohn, and his poems have been translated into six languages. Website: www.pappelschnee.de

In the late 1980s, were there specific institutions or informal networks in the GDR that supported your poetry? People you could exchange ideas with?

Back then, Junge Welt had a column called Poets' Office Hours (Poetensprechstunde), where you could submit poems. Selected works were published with commentary. And once a year, there was the Poetry Seminar in Schwerin, which I attended twice. In 1988, Brigitte Struzyk was my seminar leader—a stroke of luck. That's where I met people I stayed friends with for years afterward.

Then came the turbulent 1990s. It's a broad question, but how do you think the fall of the GDR affected your writing? At the time, East Berlin saw the founding of magazines and publishers aiming to preserve the underground, countercultural spirit of the GDR era.

My first post-reunification job—experienced from a distance—was driving for Basisdruck-Verlag. I borrowed books from the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg and photocopied them at night in the publishing house: works by Frank O'Hara or Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's Silverscreen anthology. My first poetry collection, the chapbook Egypt, or the Freedom of Free Fall (Ägypten oder die Freiheit des freien Falls), was published by Hinkelsteinpress, featuring brand-new poems, including a long piece titled Zero Hour (Stunde Null). I contributed texts and images to the fanzine Rude Look, run by Axel Monte and Thomas Stemmer. I organized readings with friends from the poetry seminar and new acquaintances: a performance group in Prenzlauer Berg, a visual artist from the U.S. living in Berlin, a Swiss writer visiting the city. The first half of the '90s was wild—everything felt new, everyone was buzzing with energy, experimenting. In 1996, I went back to school to study communication design. I'd always enjoyed graphic work and wanted to refine my skills. A decade after my stint as a driver, following a self-imposed five-year break from writing, I reconnected with the editorial team of Gegner—naturally at Torpedokafer, the Prenzlauer Berg bar that was basically the Basisdruck canteen.

Basisdruck was founded in the GDR as a left-wing opposition publisher and produced the literary magazine Gegner, focusing on radical literature and resistance to capitalism. How do East and West influences intersect in your poetry? Or is that distinction meaningless anyway?

Well, in a way, it doesn't say much. Ever since I started writing, I've read every poem I could get my hands on that I found even remotely fascinating: Blok, Yesenin, Pasternak, but also Bukowski, Cummings, Ginsberg; Heine, Hölderlin, Han Shan, but also Elke Erb, Gisela Kraft, Inge Müller… and so on. Great poems are still spells—not in the sense of magic, but as sources of strength, agents of change, sequences of words that make things happen. When thoughts can be rearranged, reoriented, and transformed through language, it makes sense that transformations are also possible in reality beyond symbols—liberation from compulsion, oppression, and depression, for example. I still remember how freeing it felt the first time I read Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's texts in Escalators in August from the Weiße Reihe series published by Volk und Welt. Here were unfiltered perspectives and radical metaphors, but above all, a rejection of everything smooth, conformist, and contradiction-free in the appropriation of lyrical material.

You can spot a Brinkmann poem right away.

I find it remarkable how some writers manage to maintain a consistent style over time, always viewing things the same way—essentially writing the same thing again and again. For me, different writing techniques have inspired all kinds of experiments; without them, I'd have grown bored quickly. After all, I'm my own first reader!

If, for you, poems are agents of change, that suggests a political power inherent in poetry. What would define left-wing literature for you? Is it about content, form, or also the formats in which it emerges?

At a time when system apologists preach that there is no alternative and corrupt psychological manipulators are implanting the Great Reset—inspired, among others, by WWF founder and fairy-tale uncle Klaus Schwab—into people's minds, the key is to keep consciousness sharp. Engaging with poetry, reading and writing poems, is a kind of mental gymnastics, a workout for the synapses against sluggish thinking. At their best, poems are socially relevant critical reflections and free associations of thought: undogmatically anti-capitalist. They may embellish, but they must never whitewash. Freeing the mind and text from lies would be a good start. Meeting the gravity of the situation with humor, mocking the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, grasping pain at its root, harnessing the power of language instead of helplessly gluing ourselves to screens. It is time! Onward, onward, for yours is the day! Do not be frightened by the frail flesh! And if the enemy attacks you honestly, do not fear his chatter!—as Thomas Müntzer once said. Countering this chatter with words alone isn't enough, but without words, nothing will happen. We need formats in which revolutionary utopias can take effect against the powerlessness of the individual, as Joseph Weizenbaum put it—where collective awareness exposes and eliminates the lust for power, greed, ostentation, and lunacy of the self-appointed elites, as Sibylle Berg demonstrates in her 700-page opus RCE.

Back to your collection Stars Over Astrakhan: Was there a poem you came across while compiling it that particularly surprised you?

There actually was one poem I had already decided to include, only to remove it at the last minute. Instead, I chose The Dilemma, a paradoxical six-line piece that throws a stark light on the relationship between labor and consumption: go to workto pay for the caryou needto get to work.

Kai Pohl: Stars Over Astrakhan*. 100 Poems. With illustrations by Paula Krause, a foreword by Jayne-Anne Igel, and an afterword by Brigitte Struzyk. Autumnus Verlag, 184 pp., hardcover, €18.90.Book launch: Thu, Dec 4, 7:30 PM at Baiz, Schönhauser Allee 26A, Berlin.*