Anja Utler feels/senses the language; still undifferentiated, preconscious world where the human body and the surrounding landscape are fused

Anja Utler, engulf – enkindle, Trans. by Kurt Beals, Burning Deck, 2010.

"Anja Utler’s poems touch the ground where feeling and thinking begin to take form and burst from the body, burst into language. Their interweaving pulls us into an almost still undifferentiated, preconscious world where the human body and the surrounding landscape are fused. Stretching syntax and semantics, Utler's poems trace speech to its roots in lungs, throat, tongue, and let it emerge as sound and song."

"Riveting in English... The tension is everywhere rippling, ripping, wrinkling" — Forrest Gander

“Utler’s small but epochal masterpiece.” — Thomas Poiss

“An astonishing work for a young poet, startlingly assured in the way that it bores down into the language and allows the language itself to become an actor in the unfolding of the poem's 'story', rather than simply an accomplice.” — Tony Frazer

"This is very rare: Anja Utler feels/senses the language. That’s why her writing is so tough, so lightning-brilliant, so precise in its empathy. Hence the sibylline clarity and the startling wealth of her poem.” — Thomas Kling

“An astonishingly smart and yet deeply sensuous book.” — Paul Jandl

"engulf — enkindle is a stunning book of poetry. It literally stunned me into absolute submission; it is the book of poetry I’d been wanting to read for years. It’s a small volume, and I read it in one sitting, faster than I normally read poetry, because I couldn’t slow down. The language sunk its hooks into me and pulled me through the book, like rafting down rapids. If some of this sounds violent, that’s no mistake – the book is full of sensual violence, done to the body of language and the body in the poem.

want now: you – drive into me
want to push to the edge, hang, you
haul all my: shale, scrape
it off from: the head, from the shoulders
to rootstock throat gravel: you split me
give me – as if severed – sharp
countours – fangs wolffian ridge
questions too – will i? –
i – take you to me
balances I

The stacatto lines, broken by strange punctuation, expose themselves as duplicitious; the punctuation is superfluous, and yet it’s not. It’s a violation of the line, of the rules of grammar, but it forces a rhythm on the almost unwilling reader. It’s pleasurable and distressing simultaneously, mimetic of the poems. The I in the poem submits to the violence of the you, while exerting her own controlled violence over the reader, and the poem and ultimately her poetic body.
Like most “experimental” texts this work demands more of its reader, a different set of tools and strategies. It is a text that has been splayed wide open, disgorging multiple readings. This extract from the second poem could be read as describing what the poetry itself is doing:

II
– percieve: just at the opencuts: set free
furrow – to stand, sense, to drift now am: pitching to you
through the: fissures [. . .]

[The bracketed ellipsis is mine.] Pay attention to the slippery shifts of meaning across and through the punctuation, the way caesura is inserted into the lines and creates tension with the phrases that follow the colons. Feel the tension that is created by the speeding up and slowing down of the lines, the gaps in meaning and thwarted grammatical expectations (the missing subject for “am” for example).
This is poetry that demands several readings, at least one of which must be aloud. When I teach poetry, I always ask that the students read the poems out loud, as well as to themselves, and if I suspect they have not done it we do it together. Great poetry creates sonic space on the page, and visual space in the voice, and the movement between these opens up new meanings. Traditionally, this happens behind the semantic content of the poem, but Beals’s rendering of Utler’s poetry prioritizes its lyric qualities. In engulf – enkindle, the poems hinge on sound and silence, on rhythm and breaking, with meaning following. Try listening to this without reading along, and see what kind of difference it makes.1

XI
finally, startled from sleep, find:
the larynx deseeded is
hollowed: hands palpate,
it: fumbling, feathered, from
ribcage entwine themselves
deeper into the: reed swallow: light,
gurgling, darkly well, dimly
they: keel towards hulls towards hollows
weave: cavities, gorges of
stalks of fingers of (..)
so to speak: towards the bittern – neting place,
in the singing reed so it’s called – grow
entangled as – flotsam and jetsam – stitched
up to the: glottis rustling
almost trembling i hear you again: say
song you say song – what is: song

Kurt Beals is a genius. I can’t imagine how these translations could have come to be otherwise. He may have been working at an advantage; Germanic languages share many rhythm and sound paterns, two of the most impressive features of this translation. Still, the strangeness of these poems, which demand so much of the reader, must have demaned even more of Beals. To create this kind of complexity in translation is nothing short of stunning, an acheivment compounded by the shifting registers and pacing of the language.
This is an uncompromising work of brilliance on both Utler and Beals’ parts. It’s sharp and sexy, challenging and riviting and absolutely relentless. This is the poetry I’ve been waiting my whole life for." - Erica Mena

"Born in Schwandorf, Germany in 1973, Anja Utler studied eastern Slavonic languages, as well as elocution, in Regensburg, Norwich, and St. Petersburg.
Her first volume of poetry, asfsagen, was published in 1999, followed by münden - entzügeln (engulf - enkindle) in 2004. The year before, she received her doctorate for her thesis on women Russian modernist poets.
That same year she was awarded the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis, an award devoted to outstanding younger poets. That award jury described her poetry as "sensual sound constructions, on paper as in recitation, without being pure sound-poetry. Rather, they are language games of psychological world perception, that out of the substance of their words create shafts of illumination through which our curiosity, but also our bafflement in the exploration of language, feel their way."
British publisher-critic Tony Frazer has written of her work: "An astonishing work for a young poet, startlingly assured in the way that it bores down into the language and allows the language itself to become an actor in the unfolding of the poem's 'story,' rather than simply an accomplice."
More recent books include brinnen (2006) and jana, vermacht (2009). In 2010 Burning Deck published Kurt Beals' translation of Utler's engulf - enkindle. She also edited Heiß auf dich. 100 Lock- und Liebesgedichte (2002).

that seem to be one: partial extraction
(second movement)

I
as if thinned

raw: is the clearing is bristling and bare
to the sun: the eyes graze over ravel, scrap, as if
loose as if: scraping until: the eye catches
in clusters of liverwort: lifewort
stalks - as they're known, known too as -
agrimony, is grown over with: prickling
fruits that it: claws into the foreign tissue it
knits it - it's said - back together, skins over
as if: it adhered, blued the: hide to the sclera,
tarsi, cornea should: be severed be
sanded see: how the stalks, stranded
at forest's edge, glow

II
the slagheaps, seen

from afar: these plains whose: backbone whose
ridge has to bend to: bring up from the soil
- so it's called - scraps of stone that - one
knows - were of no use - depleted - now they are
made smooth beneath sheets of grass: an even peak that
enwraps them like gravel in roots: the steles that: shoot out
so to speak that: are windwheels on wings that
radiate: light to be focused reflected through air (...)

now and then still: beset from below the sapped
cavity crusting over that: darkens - no doubt -
in earth-smoke in dead nettles grows wild and - over
the face, as a shadow, like lightning - pours out

III
all but - untangles

just blindly to fool: finger through them the: shoots
that: spear, splay towards each other
the: needles, swept through: to have cut
through them stepped through - it's said - seedling cultures
of spruces and spruces shot up so they: cross
hook their branch tips in tangles dig through them to
feather out: suddenly

stand at the clearing - there: windwheels spread far
from each other they: circle on grass: lift themselves clear -
and not see: these twigs in the back, broken through how
they: tremble still prick: up the neck

IV
as if divested

stands - standing - not run through, no not
even scraped through the: protective tissue
propped up against limestone cliff railings is braced
against: edging - know that: will not topple
will not; fall towards it - towards this basin
where it: backs up - chocked - slags, does not
even know of the pine trunks that: bend - far off,
waterstressed - spilling their
seed: into their, lapping image their own
aiming far: past the eyes

V
exposed - nearing

not even: entangled by breath yet just: haltingly
enter enduring the: mudflats this clay crust,
silicious, congeals - two days now fished dry -
grazed: to the ground - the feet scrape -
are enflanked: by clay veins that: enmire them like
bushels: of fish remnants gills - overlooked - that
already freeze crackle, but soft, in the early frost

VI
yet: as if averted

given: breath but - still shaking - to want to be
washed in the: oxbow - be waterlogged - palpate its
pools that are: welted, are waste they: seethe
tremble towards: poplar trunk - finger - would
lick want to colonize it as to: age in its
blazes- know: so they're called: cuts in the bark -
palpable clefts so: porous, so scaly they: shelter the
stagnant zones: deadened around calloused
fingertips they: bead up - numb - and roll off

VII
quickened

sure: to leave that behind - bleary - eddy,
the: riverscape, rushing stream so-called:
the poplars, meanders, wild bank growth
that: snare, rip, sink now - swiftly -
through the mist over the bristling field at once: plunges
drives: into the throat triggers - once more - the urge to cough

VIII
escaped, to turn back would be: - blinded -
the stems standing ripped open upward
have splayed: into dilated pupils just roughly
outlines so; they loom they spill down to the
riverbed flee behind bend after bend - carried off
it's said - glisten, to each other: as if from afar

IX
simply: in walking to count that off - mutely -
the waterforms landforms the aquiculture
roughly and further to follow the hollows, damned
and demarcated, over the field and farther almost: to the riverbed
narrow, the soaking seam already: markedly
wooded stands most of: poplars of alders that
shadow the: nettles, for instance, the lower shrub
growth the herb growth that can barely be taken in
colonized by bristly, woodenly budding (..)
believe they: are unnamed - not even grazed
by the eyes - remain standing
—Translated from the German by Kurt Beals (from münden - entzüngeln, 2004)