I

t may be an invented story—I heard it long ago: When Wallace Stevens, Vice-President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1955, some employees at Hartford commented: “What? I didn’t know old Wally wrote!” If Dr. Franz Kafka, a jurist in the Legal Department of the Arbeiter-Unfallsversicherungs-Anstalt, an insurance company in Prague, hadn’t retired early due to his incapacitating tuberculosis and had he achieved a literary reputation during his lifetime, his colleagues might have someday reacted similarly . . .

And now to the German poet Wolfgang Berends. He is not in the word business in the contemporary sense, by which I mean a product of a “creative writing” program at some college or university with a degree in “poetry” as are many writers today—especially in the United States. An equivalent academic track doesn’t exist in the university system in Germany—at least not yet—the closest being a degree in German literature—which Wolfgang Berends does not have. On the contrary: he studied Electro Engineering and Precision Mechanics. You might say he slipped into the literary world through a side door.

On the slope
     I climbed.
In my cold hand
     grass lies down.
Atop
      in the sea wind,
      I wrote as person
      a black song
      onto your skin,
      on earth.

The above is the opening poem of his first book, Erdabstossung (something like “Blasting Off From Earth” or maybe “Earth Repulsion”) in a section entitled “The Oldest Reports”. Attempting to render a text from one language into another, even under the best of circumstances, is always a thankless task. Translation can only be an approximation, better said, a matter of opinion, because no two languages are ever alike. This is especially the case when translating poetry that aims at being a true distillation of human language: a juncture between earth and eternity. Which brings us back to Wolfgang Berends and the title of his first book. His blastoff or repulsion of gravity is nothing less than an expression of that struggle between heaven and earth that takes place in all of us—even if we ignore it. He doesn’t.

Otherland

The senses elongate
     into frayed worlds,
     so that paths grow out of the earth,
     when we step on them.
In the wordless silence of nature
     all forces unify belief
     and the cherry blossom locks me
     into its prison of winter
     with a helpless language.

            (From “Erdabstossung”)

Tight poems, musical language, words that you can read on multiple levels. Nearly impossible, alas, to render justly in a translation.

Wolfgang Berends has published three books of poems—so far. All at Stadtlichter Presse, a German “Indie”. Erdabstossung appeared in 2010, followed by Nach Durchsicht der Wolken (something like “After a Review of Clouds”) in 2016. His most recent book is Manchmal um uns Glas (“Sometimes Glass Around Us”) in 2021.

He has a talent for using words compactly. In German the word for “word”, “Wort”, has two plurals, “Wörter”, referring to individual words. Hence, a “dictionary” in German is a “Wörterbuch”, i.e., “words book”. The second plural is “Worte” and is used to define a group of words that together yield meaning. A Berends book of poems is in the true sense a “Wortebuch”. His word combinations have a transformative power.

Better said, his poems are metaphysical, which is to say, his words poke into the ineffable. A risky place to set up camp now that in recent years finding words for the things behind the things has fallen out of favor in literary circles, replaced by banal expressions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in relationships and of course self-centered identity tantrums revolving around an emphasis on “me me me!”. Bold explorations into hidden realities interest few editors and writers. Rilke’s Duino Elegies wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s “lit market”.

No wonder esoteric poet Wolfgang Berends is an outsider in the business of poetry. His lack of an academic degree in the field of what Ezra Pound identified as “Kulchur” doesn’t make it any easier for him to find his audience or his editors—at least currently. Take note: today’s five-year-olds may one day be his readers!

Frankly, I can think of no German poet who is presently as courageous as he is. Granted, there are a number of predecessors who have (or may have) influenced him along the journey of finding his poetic voice. Johannes Angelus Silesius, a name most definitely unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, comes to mind. In fact, I don’t know if even Berends ever read his works. I do know however that he is an admirer of Paul Fleming (1609–1640). Here a poem by Fleming:

When They Were Having Fun in the Snow

Keep on playing but think of this,
      beneath the fun there’s something serious!
      You transcend, my dear, bright snow’s rule:
      The whiter you get, the colder too.

Hölderlin comes to mind as well. Especially in his late poems where he departs radically from the formality of his era. In those poems, form explodes into meaning. I’m sure that Wolfgang Berends has also read Novalis, Ludwig Greve, Georg Trakl, Rilke, Stefan Georg and most certainly Paul Celan. In my opinion, the two poets, Celan and Berends, two parsimonious wordsmiths who reach into their word purses and pick out the absolute minimum of phonemes needed to assuage the muse, both succeed in transforming verbal communication into word magic. Personally, I consider Berends’ poems warmer, more inviting than Celan’s.

Berends himself mentions Johannes Bobrowski (another poet most certainly unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world) as a salient influence. That may be, but in my opinion, the influence is superficial. When you read a Bobrowski poem, it is easy to “get the message”. In Wolfgang Berends’ poems there is nothing to “get” because nobody “gets” the mystery of existence—at least not in words.

A Berends poem is a realm of spirited word images, a No-Platitude-Zone, where you may participate in an alchemical transformation.

Birch Leaf

Air, wingsplit; barely heard
the geese that passed on
by the holy mount.

In the land where stones grow
from tundra and bog,
wind drips, yellow,
a piece of passing in my hand.
It is time to build
a nest from it.

Once again I wish
    to feel your heartbeat,
wind, on me.

Wolfgang Berends is no snob. He never plays the know-it-all. He is acutely aware that the Mystery can never be explained. And most important: he is never interested in feeding his readers some humdrum ideology. I fear there is too much poetry “out there” these days that is mainly interested in communicating some “message”.

Berends feels free to trawl his memory in search of events, places (concrete and abstract), and inner landscapes—in search of the words that might describe them. He harvests his crop from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (as all humans do) and provides them with a unique form in time and space. He seems always to be on the lookout for words imbued with magic and meant to serve as a compass in the kingdom of mystery.

In other words: Wolfgang Berends is one of us—at least one of us when we recall how small we are in this world—someone we can trust with our time and attention. “Now words hang there in the landscape, on trees, mountains, streams”. With these as his tools he practices the lonesome

calling of the Poet.

Fed on forgetfulness,
     I want to grow so light
     that I need no language
     anymore, then I shall bring
     the light to the

waves of the stream. There
     language will
     end . . .
      (from: “Stony Order” in “Manchmal in uns Glas”)