whose world

I was browsing Amazon yesterday looking at “world poetry” and there was a book, a translation of a book, by an (east) German guy named Lutz Rad-something and the review was brief but indicated he was worth checking out so after work I went over to the biggest bookstore in town – HUGENDUBEL – and had to search out the poetry section, which had been moved since I’d last been there. It’s now located in a small drawer behind the cash register where they keep the rags and window cleaner. Anyway there was no Lutz Rad-something in there, which was disheartening since this is Germany last I checked. So I browsed the other books which were mostly crap. If you dislike it when English poets use lower-case letters as a rule (which I don’t mind – be my guest), you’d go hari-kari if you saw “serious” German poets doing it. There seemed to be lots of juvenalia poetry there – innocuous, insipid “i put an envelope in your absence” kind of cat-lover poems. To be honest I’ve forgotten now what it was about and can’t be bothered to go back and check. Luckily there was a bit of Ernst Jandl, which is hard to translate, which helped me forget briefly all the assholes who talk too loud on their cellphones.