Wulf Kirsten

Wulf Kirsten Poems

Wulf Kirsten Biography

Wulf Kirsten (born 21 June 1934) is a German poet, novelist, and publisher. He is known for his nature poetry and his essays on the history and culture of Saxony. The son of a stonemason, Kirsten was born in Klipphausen, Meissen. He worked as salesman, bookkeeper and labourer before graduating from the Workers' and Farmers' College (Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakultät) of Leipzig in 1960, and then completed a teaching degree in German and Russian in 1964. At the same time he worked on a freelance basis for the compilers of the Dictionary of the Upper Saxon Dialects, providing them with more than a thousand words from his own household. After obtaining his degree, he worked briefly as a teacher, and then in 1965 moved to Weimar to work for the Aufbau Verlag publishing house, where he would stay until 1987. To further his career as a poet, in the years 1969 and 1970 Kirsten spent nine months studying at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature, under the tutelage of Heinz Czechowski and Georg Maurer. Between 1968 and 1977, he wrote several volumes of poetry, followed in 1984 by a volume of two prose works. Much of the poetry is collected in die erde bei Meißen (1986), which received the Peter Huchel Prize in 1987, and helped introduce him to West German audiences. During the upheavals of 1989 and 1990, Kirsten became involved in the New Forum at Weimar, but he was quickly disillusioned and retired from political activism. Between 1992 and 2010 he published his work through Ammann Verlag in Zürich, which issued his collected works in 2004 under the title Erdlebenbilder. He lives in Weimar.)

The Best Poem Of Wulf Kirsten

Tough As Nails

whether you want to or not, you need
an open ear for the hardships of
temporary fellow passengers,
then you experience jammed in and
pressed position where the shoe pinches
for fellow humans who overflow with
chattiness, here you can collect
examples of the urge to share,
wedged in the mass of humanity,
second class open carriage, concentrated
short notice by chance, here you still
live with the certainty of not having
lost the ground beneath our feet, that's
what pacifies the fellow travelers' torment,
you can't have you head in the clouds here like
certain people as soon as they are abducted
to other regions by the impotent omnipotence
or selected as representatives and just
merely capable of listening to themselves,
intoxicated by the prepackaged
phraseology, rather be a dear train
traveler and register the lamentations
of unavoidable phenomena of
long-distance travel, bustling
savvy sales representatives
like the man next to you, for instance,
from the animal feed industry,
who doesn't have it easy,
if his lament isn't just bluster,
now he won't just go and
pour out his heartbreak
like Mother Hulda making the bed
till no fluff is left in the ticking:
what occupies me is a merciless job,
oh, you have to be on your toes
if you want to keep up, the agricultural
co-ops in the east are tough as nails,
the guys are tough as nails, truly hard as nails.

Translated by Bradley Schmidt

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