Season 2: The Ecologies of Sound

The goal of the Sensing Sound in Literature-Talents faculty project, based in the English Literatures and Cultures Department, was to challenge students with an auditory, intermedial engagement of poetic texts from Northern Ireland and Ireland through a radio broadcasting collaboration with HORADS 88,6, the hosting of a traveling Poetry Jukebox, and a performance of poetry on stage. We approached the sense of sound as a unifying and democratizing force to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement as an expansion of our 2022/23 School for Talents faculty project on the tactility of Irish literary texts.

Our target audience was composed of Anglistik students enrolled in seminars on ‘Ecologies of Sound: Poetry & Radio’ and ‘Performance Poetry’ (as mentors) and of year 9 Hölderlin-Gymnasium Stuttgart pupils (as mentees) led by their teacher Rebecca Mahle.

In a School for Talents outreach workshop on Friday, the 28th and Saturday, the 29th of June 2024 at the University of Stuttgart, as part of the Sensing Sound in Literature Faculty Project at the English Literatures & Cultures Department, Jessica Bundschuh, together with two visiting writers from Cork, Ireland, Jim Crickard and Daragh Fleming, in addition to Isabel Schmier, a stagecraft and performance specialist, led a ‘Performing Metaphors’ Workshop with 60 participants. Isabel Schmier started us off by taking all the participants outside into the neighboring Stadtgarten or city park to practice some warm-up exercises from tongue twisters to articulating poetic meter out loud.

This outreach workshop, in which University of Stuttgart students mentored 9^th grade Hölderlin-Gymnasium pupils, asked participants to consider how poems can exist, and flourish, off the page, in an auditory realm as performance pieces. Since both Jim Crickard and Daragh Fleming are performance poets, they began by performing their works with humor and pathos, like “Shaving Off My Eyebrows” or "My Brain's Secret Love For Spectrum", a poem about embracing neurodivergence. In this way, they taught us how to avoid cliché and focus, instead, on grounding and engaging imagery. On Saturday, we watched a series of recordings of performance poets, like Cíara Ní É, Shaunna Lee Lynch, Sabrina Benim, Felispeaks and The Bee. Taking our cue from these accomplished performances, we concluded by taking to the stage ourselves and performing works in teams in front of family and friends who cheered on the performers from Hölderlin Gymnasium and Universität Stuttgart!

One of the exciting rewards of hosting six Poetry Jukebox poets in Stuttgart was the opportunity to bring together the poets and translators from the Ambiguities/Ambiguitäten Poetry Jukebox curation from Maria McManus’s Quotidian playlist. While in Stuttgart in April and May 2024, each of the six Irish poets met their translators, took a picture together, and read at one of the public events the poems pairs in English and German: 1. Paul Maddern/Nadja Hieber; 2. Linda McKenna/Selin Balikci and Aliena Horvath; 3. Scott McKendry/Danny Naumov; 4. Charles Lang/Elmedina Kolgeci; 5. Susannah Dickey/Sui Lung; and 6. Sacha White/Nina Günter. For the last two poets in the series in May, we memorialized these international exchanges with an interview. Thus, on 16 May, at the HORADS 88,6 broadcast studio at Hochschule der Medien, we conducted two interviews between poet and translator: Susannah Dickey and Sui Lung and Sacha White and Nina Günther, which was broadcast on HORADS 28 May and 1 June 2024 and uploaded to the HORADS blog. This interview is archived as a Soundcloud podcast for the Ambiguities/Ambiguitäten curation of the Poetry Jukebox, Ecologies of Sound.

Six visiting poets who featured on the Ambiguities Curation of the Poetry Jukebox came in April and May 2024 to Universität Stuttgart from Ireland the UK to speak in six different English Literatures and Cultures seminars; these guest lectures and workshops were underwritten with an additional grant from the Program for Art in Public Spaces from the City of Stuttgart: Paul Maddern: ‘Poetry: The Valleys of its Making’; Linda McKenna: ‘Making Maps for Where the Lost Might Be’; Scott McKendry: ‘Eejit Grammatology’; Charles Lang: ‘Poetry Beyond the Stage’; Sacha White: ‘Auden’s “Miss Gee” & Writing Ballads’; Susannah Dickey: ‘The Poetry of Dialogue: Character, Conflict & Closeness.’

Five visiting poets offered outreach open workshops to pupils from five different Gymnasium; each pupil received a printed booklet including all of the poems in English and the translations in German and they were encouraged to write creative exercise like: ‘Describe to a stranger 100 years in the future an object, phenomenon, animal, mode, or expression that no longer exists at the moment of being read in May 2124. Find a way to communicate with a reader who has no familiarity with your subject matter: put yourself in this stranger’s mindset of encountering the object for the first time, so that you, too, witness your object with fresh eyes; capture your object’s lovely strangeness, perhaps via metaphor, making new connections to other objects. And consider how language might function differently in the future, how it might compresses grammatical variety or employ compound nouns or adjectives more frequently.’

One hundred years after the partitioning of Ireland and the creation of Northern Ireland as a separate state, twenty contemporary Irish and international poets project their visions of this troubled place, one hundred years into the future. They follow a noble tradition that can be traced back to the Bards of the ancient Irish courts, where poets were revered, feared even, as prophets and tellers of truth. These poems express the contradictory, often ambiguous, versions of ‘the truth’ or ‘the narrative’ that live cheek by jowl, firmly held, oppositional, adamantly defended. To enhance a sense of linguistic hospitality and ambiguity, these poems have been translated into German and Ukrainian for Zeitgeist Ireland 24, a season of Irish arts and culture in Germany throughout 2024.

To hear the translations from the Maria McManus' Quotidian curation of Ambiguities, visit the Soundcloud playlist. You can also find the original poems in English here.

As part of Zeitgeist Irland 24, a season of Irish arts and culture in Germany throughout 2024, an initiative from Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland, Germany in Berlin, the department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart hosted a bilingual Poetry Jukebox from January through May 2024!

The Poetry Jukebox was situated on the downtown campus of the University of Stuttgart, at Keplerstrasse 17, 70174 Stuttgart, between the two main college buildings (Kollegiengebäude), KI and KII. [See photo below].

As part of Sensing Sound in Literature, a faculty project supported by the School for Talents, community outreach is a vital component of the Poetry Jukebox, a public arts project available 24/7. As such, it is designed to break down barriers and expand the reach of literature. To reinforce this objective, Jessica Bundschuh invited Gymnasium classes in spring 2024 to attend a brief introduction workshop outside, in front of the Poetry Jukebox itself, as part of the ‘Uni und Schule’ program.

This bilingual Poetry Jukebox – having come to Stuttgart by way of Belfast – was devoted to fostering a dynamic, auditory, and immersive connection to Irish and Northern Irish literary texts. Through the non-profit arts organisation Quotidian, Belfast poet Maria McManus, Artistic Director and founder of Quotidian, commissioned and curated ‘Ambiguities’ by tasking twenty poets from Ireland and Northern Ireland to project their vision 100 years into the future, while embedded in the context of a turbulent present of the centenary of Irish partition, the climate crisis, and other social upheavals. Launched in autumn 2022 in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais and in Belfast as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival supported by Arts Council, the Poetry Jukebox project arises out of a partnership with Poetry Ireland.

The twenty poems in the ‘Ambiguities’ Poetry Jukebox playlist (the English and Irish audio can be heard on SoundCloud) have been translated and recorded by Anglistik students from the University of Stuttgart enrolled in Jessica Bundschuh’s winter semester 2023/24 seminar ‘Ecologies of Sound: Poetry and Radio.’ These translations  appeared (in audio form) in German (with one poem in Ukrainian), alongside the original audio in English and Irish to reinforce the translational focus of the ‘Ireland in Germany 2024’ initiative.

The translations of the Poetry Jukebox poems can be found on our blog. And modeled after UCD's Virtual Poetry Wall, we also welcomed participants in the Poetry Jukebox workshops in April and May 2024 to share with us their responses to the writing prompts from our visiting poets of Susannah Dickey, Paul Maddern, Linda McKenna, Scott McKendry, Charles Lang, and Sacha White. The guest lectures and workshops of these six Poetry Jukebox poets wer underwritten by the Program for Art in Public Spaces from the City of Stuttgart.