Benn's Poetry: "A Hit in the Charts": Song under Conditions of Media Technologies

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ONCE ART HAS DISSOLVED into media technologies, certain kind of poetry nevertheless returns. It comes and stays not with reading or mnemotechniques, but simply through radio and audio equipment. This unending and unforgettable oblivion affects our very theories, which are very much written artifacts. When it comes to poetry, almost all theories forget what Jim Morrison's song called Texas radio and the big beat. Gottfried Benn, at the apogee of his lyrical postwar fame, was invited to his alma mater where he had, fifty years before, studied philosophy, modern languages, and literature. At first sight, then, his case would confirm Foucault's suspicion that modern poetry is just closed loop or feedback system inside academia.1 And indeed, Benn's Marburg lecture on Problems of Poetry, having received almost all its poetological key words from correspondence with Ernst Robert Curtius, the great scholar of European literature, climaxed in the concept of absolute poem (I 524).2 Poetry, according to Benn, functioned as a creative transformation, as an attempt of the arts, within the general of their contents, to themselves as their and to create new style out of this experience (I 500). Whatever was known of Benn's poetry therefore suffered academic and philosophical interpretation whose impact on the humanities departments, especially under the verdict of Martin Heidegger, lasted at least as long as the so-called neighborhood of thought and poetry (known to be very German arrangement) and was not renovated and replaced by the more recent theories of socialization and psychoanalysis.3 Still, neither history of Being nor that of the soul could analyze the fact that Benn's Marburg lecture started out with reference to occasional poems published in Sunday papers where they attract attention, being printed in italics and within special typographic frame (I 494). The lecture proceeded to prove already mentioned degeneracy of contents by addressing its own conditions of media-history and technology: Today's lyrical I, that is, the pseudonym of the lecturer himself, was