ENGLISH POETRY

Works: JIP, Erik Oña, UMS and Adam Roberts. Texts: Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Amy Lowell and Rae Armantrout

UMS'nJIP and the ‘Lied’. Since 2007, UMS'nJIP (Ulrike Mayer-Spohn and Javier Hagen) have performed over 300 commissioned works and given 1,500 concerts in more than 40 countries, having performed certain works over 100 times – a feat almost unique in the world of contemporary music. Alongside their work as performers, they are also composers and have received 35 international awards for their works. Their personal affinity for the ‘Lied’ and the duo’s talent (voice, recorders and electronics) provide fertile ground for a very distinctive approach to a genre which, like no other, has succeeded in creating a symbiosis between text and music.

Whenever the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is discussed, mention is almost always made of her anachronistic nature. The poet, who lived in almost complete seclusion during the final decades of her life, wrote poems that are unrivalled in their delicacy, tenacity and eccentricity. Seemingly out of step with their time or decades ahead of it, these poems belong not only, in subjective terms, but also in fact to those time capsules occasionally unearthed in the history of literature, which have only come to be received in a variety of ways after a considerable delay.

The eminent American poet, salon hostess, critic, women’s rights activist and book collector Amy Lowell (1874–1925) is a representative of Imagism. Imagism was a revolutionary counter-movement, setting the tone for literary modernism, in opposition to the Victorian poetry of the time (to which Amy also contributed) with its dramatic, strictly metrical and rhymed poems that sought to convey meaning. Imagism sought the opposite of all that: concise language, precise imagery, free form.

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish writer. His groundbreaking works *Dubliners*, *Ulysses* and *Finnegans Wake* in particular brought him great renown. He is regarded—having consistently employed the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique—as one of the most important figures of literary modernism. His debut collection, Chamber Music, published in 1907, however, surprises with strangely romantic tones that give a glimpse of what fascinated poets such as Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats about this collection of poems; at the same time, this particular musicality has, to this day, served as the starting point for a wealth of partly legendary musical settings, from Samuel Barber to Luciano Berio or Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd).

Rae Armantrout, born in 1947, is a native of the West Coast. Her influence on contemporary American poetry is immense, perhaps comparable to that of Elke Erb in the German-speaking world. The duo performed Adam Roberts’ song settings for UMS’nJIP alongside the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship at the legendary Zinc in New York, before an assembled and enthusiastic East Coast poetry community.