Maren Kames

- Germany -

Maren Kames was born on Lake Constance in southern Germany in 1984. She studied cultural sciences, philosophy and theater studies, as well as creative writing at different universities in Germany. Her first book 'Halb Taube Halb Pfau' was published in 2016 and got a lot of critical acclaim for its formal exceptionality, performative approach and musical language. Her second book 'Luna Luna' was published in 2019. Both books oscillate between poetry, prose and drama. They were adapted as radio plays and for various stages and won several prices. Amongst many other scholarships Maren Kames was a fellow of Villa Aurora, Los Angeles in 2019. Her third book 'Hasenprosa' is a wild novel and was published this year by Suhrkamp Verlag.


Berlin, November 9, 2013: Maren Kames wins both the audience prize and the poetry prize at the Open Mike, a “competition for young German literature,” with a breathtaking performance. Winning this competition carries some weight since this is how authors such as Jenny Erpenbeck, Judith Hermann, Zsuzsa Bánk, and Tilman Rammstedt started their writing careers. Two days later, Maren Kames reads from her prize-winning texts in a club in Frankfurt. As a literary critic and scholar, I had the privilege of hosting the evening. And what can I say? I haven’t missed a published line by Maren Kames since. And I wouldn't recommend any other reader miss them either. That’s because Maren Kames takes risks and can do something unique in contemporary German-language poetry: in her three books to date, she has spelled out the emotional cultures of our moment and, by looking at the singular subject, is developing a fundamental poetry. She does not think of this in terms of the individual poem or the singular cycle. (And yet, she renders each line as it were the only thing that mattered in the world.) She constructs poetic worlds that have a wide scope. Kames composes concept albums; you could say, along the lines of pop music. Or in the tradition of Novalis’ Romantic universal poetry, which unites each and every literary genre.

 

You plunge into Kames’ worlds (or you let yourself fall into them) like Alice in Wonderland, down the rabbit hole. In Kames’ debut Half Fowl Half Swallow, you land in a white world of paper and ice: “the land is white on all sides. There’s hardly anything visible, almost everything is swallowed by these sheer masses of snow.” (Half, 11). In the case of Luna Luna, you are enveloped by an indirect, doubling light of moon-silver from the title on (the black pages are printed in white). In the novel Hasenprosa (Rabbit Prose), which was published in 2024, you descend through a meadow into an autofictional world of childhood and memories where you suddenly find yourself surrounded by grandmas, grandpas, father, mother, and siblings. The act of descending and falling in turn forms an essential aspect of the self-reflection of the texts: “a flock of pelicans would be good now, a plunge, a hint of progress - but it remains bland.” (Luna Luna, 13).

 

Textures as an Obstacle Course

As a reader, you traverse through the textual landscapes as if through an obstacle course. This is why, Kames falls in line with the poetics of poets such as Paul Celan, Friederike Mayröcker, Thomas Kling, Barbara Köhler, and Monika Rinck and develops them further: “apparently the territory must be crossed, colonized wherever possible,” as is succinctly suggested in Half Fowl Half Swallow. Kames’ debut begins with the sentence “EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IS FROM NOW ON.” in the bottom right corner of a page that is otherwise blank in order to weave the reader into the present of their performative act of reading. Two snow white pages follow. And then—please turn the page—all that’s there in the middle of the white of the next page is “(e.g.).” What’s unfolding here is but one story of many possible stories, as you walk “the land along my scorched white fears,” which “is called Antarctica (hot huh?).” One exemplum “is called Antarctica (is called what?)” Yes, Antarctica. A continent that lines of text jut out from like clods of earth from the white of paper. Or, in reverse, the white on the paper shimmers from the individual, tightly printed pages like a ray of light out of the black of the printer’s ink.

 

Kames’ compositions also radiate a sense of fascination as they are concise expansions of the textual space: “I’d like something that pulls out all stops,” declares a line from Half Fowl Half Swallow. Here, Kames has expanded the landscape of her book with QR codes to individual songs and, most notably, sound collages, which she created over the years by transforming the texts she once wrote for the Open Mike into elaborate audio pieces. For Kames, reading means having the phone at your side, so that the analog can be seamlessly interwoven with the digital. As with the expansive installations of William Kentridge, it’s no longer possible to process every impression in these moments. But even though you begin to swim or shimmer, it’s never the case that you get uncomfortably lost in the worlds of Kames.

 

Poetry of Sound and Soundscapes

“I scribble” is how Kames incisively describes her writing process in Hasenprosa. Working with language games, her poetry primarily stems from sonic impulses. Kames creates soundscapes. Her poetry proactively employs the voices and moods of others. It is a poetry that is in dialogue with its predecessors and companions: a poetry that takes up the impulses in a mode of situational directness, transforming them, and dynamically bringing them into a realm of openness. You never know where these conversations will lead—since there’s an admirable intellectual speed that pulsates through Kames’ verses. They’re buzzing with astonishing ideas, crazy thoughts, wild allusions, iridescent images, mysterious references to and renditions of individual songs and rhythms. It is with this form of poetic thinking that Kames directly inherits the legacy of Friederike Mayröcker, to whom she dedicates a moving homage in Hasenprosa. Kames’ sound compositions also incorporate traditional types of acoustic references and renditions. Even the very first sentence in Half Fowl Half Swallow is a quote from the song “Re: Stacks” by Bon Iver. And those who take this seriously and play the piece will be carried by the rhythm of “everything that happens is from now on” through the first lines in the book. With her deft combination of media, Kames turns the reading into something rhythmic, allowing it to sink into silence, only to swell into polyphony shortly thereafter. With its double disyllabic nature, her second volume, Luna Luna, continues that of Half Fowl Half Swallow —as does Ma-ren Ka-mes or Ha-sen Pro-sa. In Luna Luna, too, the sound art emerges from overlaying, superscriptions, protrusions, interfolding, surprising twists, distortions, creative misunderstandings, and pulsating rhythmic analogues. It begins with Nick Drake’s “pink, pink, pink moon” which Kames short-circuits with the aid of Janelle Monáe’s “Pynk” into an anti-naïve “pink femininity.” Maren Kames joins this two-part harmony with the wonderfully melodic phrase: “in my more glorious days I was / pretty lunar / and insanely restless / limbs cracking and handfast, / my treetops wild, / it was buzzing / a pleasure / and punishment / at the same time.” The greatest of pleasures is to be expected from Kames’ emotional fictions. May we await it with pleasure.

 

Essay by Christian Metz

Translated by Shane Anderson