HAUS FÜR POESIE

The English poet Helen Mort (born 1985 in Sheffield) made her debut with the book Division Street (Chatto & Windus 2013), which was warmly received. After the book was released, Carol Ann Duffy wrote, “Helene Mort is among the brightest stars in the sparkling new constellation of young British poets.” The poems reflect on a youth in harsh South Yorkshire and the miner’s strikes during Margareth Thatcher’s despised government. With her second collection, No Map Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus 2016), which was published three years later, Helen Mort took a radically different path. The book is devoted to the theme of climbing from a decidedly feminist perspective. Influenced by her father, she herself began climbing in the Peak Districts and Yorkshire Dales during her childhood.

The collection can be read as a kind of homage to the pioneering female climbers, such as Jemima Morrell, a Victorian travel writer who hiked through the Swiss Alps in 1863, or Alison Hargreaves, a famous Scottish climber, who died during a storm while descending K2 in 1995. In an interview, Helen Mort said, “I started writing about female climbers after i discovered a brilliant book called Mountaineering Women by David Mazel and began to reflect on how many of the early heroic mountaineering tales i used to read were by men.” Another important influence is John M. Harrison’s book Climbers, a book about climbing in northern England, which has already become a classic in the twelve years since its publication. Mort sees a natural connection between writing poetry and climbing, as both provide “instructions for the body or the voice.” Mort also writes about climbing in her novel Black Car Burning (Vintage 2020) and the memoir A Line Above The Sky (Ebury Press 2023).

 A few years ago, the Norwegian poet Endre Ruset (born 1981 in Molde) met a Japanese haiku poet at a poetry festival. This encounter sparked a deep engagement with the popular poetic form that emerged from tanka poetry some seven centuries ago. Ruset started writing haikus himself, and chose an unusual subject: the Japanese ski jumper Noriaki Kasai. This choice stems from his longstanding obsession with the winter sport—something he shares with filmmaker Werner Herzog and writer Martina Hefter—which dates back to his childhood, when he grew up next to a ski jump and even practiced the sport in his youth. Over the years, more than 1500 haikus have been written. The book Noriaki (Flamme publishing), which contains only a fraction of those poems, was published in 2017. An English translation by the poet Harry Man was published seven years later by Broken Sleep Books. Ruset describes his Noriaki poems as “written images,” composed during brief pauses throughout the day. The connection between ski jumping and haikus is succinctly summarized by the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø in the book’s foreword: “a decent jump can last about eight seconds. The ski jumper must express himself in those seconds. That is high art.” Ruset follows Noriaki from the starting gate over the jumping table (in-run) to the take-off and from there, everywhere: into mirrored cabinets, dreams of wallpaper birds, Masu salmon fishing, and, following a red fox’s tracks, to the end of the world.

Jump!

Noriaki

Jump!

Combo ticket for the afternoon: Combo ticket
The event will be held in English and take place at Clubraum of the Berlin Academy og Arts.
Kindly supportet by: Sportmuseum Berlin.