»ein Kreis auf meinem Arbeitstisch«: Die Schnipselpoesie Lydia Dahers

Abstract

After successfully completing her literary apprenticeship with 3rd place at the 2005 German International Poetry Slam, Lydia Daher has continually sought new and often experimental platforms for showcasing the potential of language. Among her major projects, she has published several volumes of poetry, a number of music albums, and most recently Daher applied an innovative method of ‘sampling,’ reminiscent of HipHop producers such as DJ Shadow or The Avalanches to produce a volume of text and picture collages entitled Und auch nun, gegenuber dem Ganzen – dies (2014). Each collage relies on the textual (and pictorial) material of just one literary review taken from the literary supplement of the most recent edition of a German weekly newspaper. Although Daher is aware of each text as the most recent part of sequence that stretches back through the literary review, the reviewed novel, and the novelist’s source material, she recognises that this structure is mere illusion. To describe the completed collage, I invoke the theoretical framework of the palimpsest, for the collage is less a succession of parts than it is a structure of co-existence. Like the influential cut-up artist, William S. Burroughs, Lydia Daher further recognises that the surface structure closely mirrors the palimpsest of human perception.