Anja Kampmann was born in Hamburg in 1983 and lives in Leipzig. She studied at the University of Hamburg and at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. She has published poems and essays on musicality and silence in the late works of Samuel Beckett in several anthologies and magazines such as Akzente, Neue Rundschau, Wespennest And Jahrbuch der Lyrik. Since 2011, she has been working at Deutschlandfunk, NZZ and other radio stations. In Leipzig, she collaborated with Forma and founded Techtonics, a series of new poetry and music events. She was awarded the MDR Literaturpreis in 2013, followed by the Wolfgang Weyrauch-Förderpreis at the Literarischer März in Darmstadt in 2015. Her first collection of poetry “Proben von Stein und Licht,” published in 2016, was nominated for the Ulla-Hahn-Literature Prize. Her first novel “Wie hoch die Wasser steigen” was published in 2018.
and so are the days
namely more like forgetting
the averted glance when
the early evening soaks into your clothes
the transitions to earlier
which you become
more like. Drifting on this old steamship toward the Atlantic, Cuba
so are the days
lightly –
the gondolas fall
fall like each step
type cases with dried moths
a collection
that fades away like a whipcrack in the dark.
The horizon is the concern here the
distance applying color the bright crackling
of surfaces of light and the spreading
of the light as it surges the sea
within its broad chest the putrid sludge
of the fishmeal factories the sea of romantic
fires on the gravel beaches travelers
now losing themselves forever
in a distant view the sea in the harbors, the docks
the container areas licking the sea
beneath cranes all heaving the
homesickness nightwards the sea of moray eels
lurking back behind a rock
the sea of the deep with a hidden image
for the dreams of the sea
that vanished in the sea bottomless
the trenches above it all a mosaic of flakes
streaming tough thick field of dirt the sea
that is so well concealed gasping for air within
its broad chest and snatching at
itself.
