Poetry, discourse, boat trip
Floating Alphabet
The boat will depart from the dock right at HKW at 8.30 pm. The trip will end at about 11 pm.
During the boat ride, no passengers can be let on or off the boat.
There is wheelchair access to the lower deck. For more accessibility information, contact: barrierefrei@hkw.de or call 030 – 397 87 175
“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist” – this simple and enigmatic line begins one of the most influential poems of recent literary history: alfabet by writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009) attempts to name and correlate all things of the world. In Inger Christensen’s 1981 long poem alfabet, poetic language blends with mathematics and science. Based on the Fibonacci sequence, an infinite series of numbers that describes both plant growth and reproduction within a rabbit population, the poet systematically counts her way up in words through all that “exists”: from blackberries to bromine, from memory’s light to afterglow. The world is born again through language alone.
On a boat trip on the Spree – past the Hansaviertel, around the Westhafen and back – poets explore the facets of the poem from alchemy to anthropocene landscapes to classless language. They will read the complete poem on the upper deck, the lower deck will give room for conversations and talks.
With Ricardo Domeneck, Daniel Falb, Christian Filips, Monika Rinck, Cia Rinne, Michael Salu, Lorenzo Sandoval, Daniela Seel and others
