Joshua Weiner Reviews Christian Lehnert's Wickerwork

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the classic which unnerved us with its exposé of the human and environmental impact of pesticides and other poisons we were dropping on the planet, was published in 1962, 13 years after Aldo Leopold’s A Sand Country Almanac, widely viewed as the foundational work of environmental ethics.  In terms of writing, 1949-1962 is pretty much ground zero for responding to the Anthropocene, the era of accelerating human impact on the planet, which likely began with nuclear bomb-testing around 1945.  I was born in 1963; grew up in the rural burbs of central Jersey—what I knew about nature I discovered on my own tramping through woods and fields, and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, featuring Marlon Perkins.  I never wondered why Richard Scarry’s animal characters wore clothes and lived in human dwellings doing human jobs, or why Disney shows were more interesting when they didn’t have any people in them.  During doctoral student days, around 1996, when I was working at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, one of the poetry fellows told me he was thinking a lot about ecopoetry.  Whazzat, I asked.  We’re trying to figure it out, he said.  Fast forward thirty years. We’re now fully steeped in the Anthropocene’s ecopoetical mood, in which the human must be ‘de-centered’ in any poem that looks outward to the planet’s nonhuman and insentient population.

Anglophone ‘nature poetry’ as we know it best—from the English Romantics through Transcendental Thoreau, the green imaginary of Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers’ anti-humanism, and the ecological poetics of Gary Snyder with its promotion of interconnectedness drawn from Indigenous wisdom cultures—; however inspiring such poetry has been (the argument tends to go) it continues to over-value the human subject and its intelligence: Nature may be our mother sustenance, but we appear to be the only ones who perceive it, and are shaped by that feeling.  Nature takes care of itself; we are the ones who experience caring about Nature.  At least, that’s what we see when we look around.

The German poet Christian Lehnert (born in 1969) is making his own way in the tradition of Naturlyrik, out from under the long Romantic shadows of Goethe, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, and Novalis, and side-stepping the late 20^th and 21^st century poetry of environmental awareness, from the likes of Peter Huchel, Sarah Kirsch, and Michael Krüger to Lutz Seiler’s writing out of the post-Socialist industrial devastation in Thuringia and Jan Wagner’s imaginative identification with the nonhuman.  Lehnert, director of liturgical studies at Leipzig and a former Lutheran minister, sizes up the human figure as one creature among multitudes, all of whom share a crisscrossing of divinely endowed attributes of agency and action.  Lehnert’s translator, Richard Seiburth, sees the poet launched on a counter-project to bring into poetry a natural world perceived as a multi-layered infolding with the human, a vision of interdependence without hierarchies.

Most of Lehnert’s book—a selected works chosen by Sieburth—takes the form of distichs that sometimes have the closing rhetorical force of an epigram, but often remain somewhat more open, and octaves that develop contrastive images or figures set against the two-liners.  For example, first we get Potato sprout:

A long pale tendril / feeling its way through the dark

To get a sense of what it was / that never left a mark.

Then we get Digging:

The unshaped / softness / of the damp soil

That absorbs everything / being nobody’s foe

And nobody’s form. You plant the spuds /

Their sprouts are glassy / as diode’s glow—

The soil could care less / what touches it.

As far as it’s concerned / everything derives

From the selfsame sun / even lime / even the wide

Dire post-hole leading down to cold loam.

In another section of the book, the distichs float free from pairing octaves, and drift (though never too far) from the spotlight focus on the nonhuman:

Transformation

The grey snow melts away, feeds the mud, and pours

into the soil, lending an ear to every spore.

Or

Storm

The snow lies deep, I need to breathe, this is what G-d

sounds like—a spindled branch, a shiver, a hum, a nod.

One may feel an allegorical imagination at work, but it’s governed by the source materials—the poetic sensibility offers up an imagination that is itself a kind of naturalist’s touch.

Here’s how Sieburth’s rendering opens the book (in the text, Lehnert’s original is printed in a light grey font sitting below the translation located on the top half of the page, as if the German were a subterranean root system for the poem’s branching into English).

Montagu’s harrier (Circus pygargus)

The harrier opens / to the storm / without a flicker of emotion.

Climbs a gust of wind / and settles into motion.

The harrier (a kind of hawk) opens to the storm with an ease conveyed in the lines’ graceful rhythm, the falling cadence of each line’s opening clause—(we may feel here the percussive beat of effort in the raptor’s initial exertion as it enters the stormstream)—giving way to a rising rhythm as it reaches altitude ‘and settles into motion.’  In providing the scientific name, Lehnert evokes the harrier’s buoyant circling.  Sieburth’s translation lends the bird vigor in the verbs, but also a kind of equipoise that implies equanimity—however open to the storm, the bird is no emblem for the Romantic Sturm und Drang with all its powerful emotion of high flung spiritual adventuring, but rather hangs chill with an Attic coolness.

Sieburth explains Lehnert’s virgules (front slashes and medial caesura) as marking breath pauses, alluding to ‘typographies of German baroque verse’ favored by the poet.  (Such marks of Lehnert’s have been compared to Dickinson’s dashes and graphic ticks; but they don’t play the same prosody of hesitation, interruption, dissonance, and vertiginous plunging as Dickinson’s experiments in medial pause–; Lehnert’s prosodic markings are generally at the boundary point of phrase and clause, more classical positions of movement and balance.)  The spirit in perfect harmony with itself, without emotion (fast ohne Regung) sits in the suspension of its perfect circular motion (in der Bewegung).  Sieburth strikes a pleasing felicity in the ‘emotion/motion’ rhyme, the substring of rhyme-word emerging from the pre-rhyme enacting a kind of hinged verbal unbending, the sustained tension of movement within a held position that keeps the harrier aloft.

The opening poem sets a standard in translation for this selected works, the first in English, drawn from three volumes published between 2015 and 2022, and organized here in reverse chronology: we begin with the more recent volume, Opus 8 Wickerwork, which the poet describes as a kind of cantata or fugue as we might find in Bach, with its mathematical scale and contrapuntal structure.  Across from the harrier, on the opposite page, then, we find the pairing poem, where The summer linden (Tilia platyphyllos) stays rooted in place, its ‘memory cast in stone’ as the air, like a bird, finds its nest in the tree’s ‘tousled hair’, where ‘night and day / have come to rest.’

As a translator, Sieburth is committed without formalist dogma to Lehnert’s instincts for form: where Lehnert structures the two quatrains through bracketed end-rhyme (with the second and third line of each quatrain creating a rhymed couplet in the middle) Sieburth shifts his first stanza of cross-rhymes to stacked end-rhymed couplets in the second.  This allows him to hold onto a figurative arrangement of lines that have a deeper metaphorical meaning for the poem: where, in the first line, ‘the lung-tree / the linden / is breathing in’, in the last ‘the linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.’  The certainty of such rooted symmetries puts to rest any ‘doubt’ about the necessary dynamic of ‘growth’ and ‘rest’ (a perfect ideational rhyme in the poem with ‘nest’) . . .  To meet Lehnert in the poem, Sieburth knows that this particular poetry game of meter, rhyme, rhetoric, and stanza depends on a net kept in place; even if its tautness slackens due to the pressures and exigencies of translating at the level of poetic form, the reader needs to know it’s there.

Lehnert’s poetry is a cunning and subtle work of imaginative relationship; less a projection of human attributes onto the nonhuman, more a way of seeing the earth’s creatures as all involved in a single interweaving activity, a kind of poetic model of consilience, or unified field of vision and understanding.  Lehnert’s Wickerwork (Flechtwork) presents a weaver’s craft of folding and braiding; for the poet, it’s Adamic labor, of naming and invoking and cultivating, without any imposed hierarchy of values.  The attention he pays to the largest and smallest forms and phenomena—glowworm, moss, geese, sea cliffs, seed pods, lichen, fungus, wagtail, eel, fire, frog, thyme, skylark, poppy, algae, butterfly, amoeba, viruses, jellyfish—is free of the catastrophizing agonies that beset much so-called ecopoetics and keep human perception and its affects on center stage.  Lehnert’s own equanimity keeps open a conceptual room or space of insight where attention without hierarchy even leads to a kind of light verse, as when he speaks in the voice of E-coli (Escherrichia coli):

“So cozy are space and time / these vessels that live for my good /

who rescue and carry me / to where I float about in food.”

Typical of Sieburth’s willingness to take a risk in translation, his ‘cozy’ amps Lehnert’s ‘warm’, his ‘good/food’-rhyme expands Lehnert’s tonal register in this poem, though it remains in the key of the poet’s light touch and wit.

Lehnert’s wit hurdles intellect with intuitional spring—his sense of how the range and diversity of species are a kind of interdependent network, marked by metaphors that fuse the human faculty of language with nonhuman activity.

On sea cliffs

Mark well / it’s all down in writing:

The rain upends a silvery leaf

And turns the page / and a tree shoot

Reads this and awaits [ . . . ]

~

The creeping cinquefoil’s seed (Potentilla reptans)

It knows of roots / it knows of pollen /

Of yellow fuzz / that sneaks up stalks /

Of leaves unscrolling as they open /

Of breathing skin / streaming into the dark.

It’s borne in mind and is forgotten /

It’s a body / it’s a sign.

It’s an echo / scattered to the wind.

It’s a hand / that writes and writes.

~

Parmelia lichen (Parmelia physodes)

On this broken trunk / does it know its place

Or the body / into which it might extend?

Is it an outer sign / flecked with shade

Or the rough tongue / of words beyond its ken?

[ . . . ]

A riddling imagination working inversely, Lehnert puts the object in front of us and inquires about its inner nature—in this sense, he is perhaps a new type of Rilkean poet, walking an edge between allegory and naturalism, and resisting the gravitational pull of loaded symbol.  His metaphorical thinking is a form of levelling, in which the creation of signs is an interspecies phenomenon.

The pensive hazel

She thinks and yearns / and stands in the wind

And hangs her concepts out in the winter sun.

Like little scrolls they slip her mind /

An imagined All / with a full run / of signs.

[ . . . ]

It’s a natural step for Lehnert to read the book of nature not only as a worldly work of linguistic vitality, but as a cosmogonic text:

The night is far spent (Romans 13:12)

The herons with their silver throats /

The star that drives its pulse into the gravel

Around the icy stillness of the pool.

A path becomes clear / though it still leads to nothing /

Where shadow waits for light to give it form /

Where the word falls silent / ringing false within the void /

Where I make do without an inner home /

And fall like rime and gleam like stone.

We might hear that ‘I’ as the poet speaking in his search on a spiritual path into a divine light of dispossession; saying as much sounds facile, but the work of ‘making do without an inner home’ suggests a difficult release: as the poet sees the natural world enacting itself in terms associated with the human, so he sees himself in cold correspondence, a self rhyming with rime and stone.

This theological aperture in the poetry is an ecumenical dilation deep enough to include Jewish Kabbalah.   In “The breaking of the vessels / or Of particulars”, Lehnert rediscovers the primordial shattering of spiritual forms that once unified gendered principles of creative-godhead-energy in ‘a salamander’s gleam’ as it ‘slithered through the pond.’

[ . . . ]

A tiny sunstruck creature / quivered and spun

Its shingled skeleton / through the spawn.

A shimmer of the waves / as if the wind

Had gotten scent of life / so seaweed-green and soft.

Tiny bolts of lightning / driven / through the dark—

The day / no more than / a dance of sparks.

Sieburth’s attention here to image and movement finds the formal means to capture Lehnert’s appeal, while simply implying the kabbalistic notion of the human role in tikkun, the restitution and reconstruction of a fallen world.  This work of repair has little to do with the ego-driven modern appetites for dominion and domination, and everything to do with the humility, however endangered, of a vital stewardship (that is, of service) to be fostered even in exile.

The poet’s exile from the center of a culture and a society is as much a choice as a set of circumstances—where one hails from, and chooses to leave, or remain.  In Cherub Dust (Cherubischer Staub, the second volume Sieburth draws from), Lehnert offers a kind of poetry journal made up of epigrams marking time of year and location, mostly devoted to his native homespace of Breitenau, on the German-Czech border. Many of these couplets tighten further the metrical end-rhymed forms by following a determined structure of poetic naming:

End of October 2015, Oehlsengrund, Eastern Ore Mountains

Late fall, slope in flames, the sun no longer warming.

Thus the name of the oak leaves: eyelids in mourning.

~

January 2016, Achterwasser, Usedom

A silent thaw, the snow watery, less awake.

Thus sleep is called: an unsuspecting lake.

Another kind of riddling, then, in which natural description takes metaphorical steps toward a position of final transformative leaping through the bordermark of the colon, the punctuation of portal:

June eighteenth 2016, wooden wall ornaments, Breitenau

The tendrils on the walls, always identical in design.

Thus the name of the future by day: a room with no sides.

~

June eighteenth 2016, in the eastwind over the heights

Storm sweeping around the house, noise pouring in.

Thus the name of the future by night: free fall from a cliff.

Sieburth’s willingness to attempt, in English, to match rhyming Alexandrines in German sometimes requires his slanting the rhymes, but the effect can be a boon.  Here, for example, the open rhyming on the internal vowel sound in the end-words (design/sides; in/cliff) lends a sense of dropping, of definitionlessness, and dissolve—a formal expression of the poem’s meaning.  Lehnert is given, in the original German, to tighter more exact rhyming—: in these two, for example, he rhymes ‘immer’ with ‘Zimmer’, and ‘überall’ with ‘freien Fall’, not only ringing the bell of acoustic correspondence, but mixing the syntax at the line boundary with some classical panache by rhyming adverbs with nouns, thus keeping the movement lively even as the lines click together like Lego blocks: that’s a different formal expression of the poem’s meaning that you only get, in these two examples, by knowing the German, and they’re a typical kind of rhyming in Lehnert’s poetry.

But that’s how good translators work—that’s the work of translation: finding ways of bringing the meaning and the experience—in this case, formal meaning and experience—into the target language.  It was one of the dimensions of translating Nelly Sachs’ Flight and Metamorphosis (2022), for example, that gave me the most profound pleasure.  Sieburth is well acquainted with it, having translated more works from French and German than the internet can tally.  (I count two dozen.  A bunch of them—Henri Michaux, Georg Büchner, de Nerval—I have in Archipelago’s pleasing editions of squared trim size and textured paper—but that count doesn’t even include the poetry of Michael Palmer, that he translated into French, or performance texts by Artaud.  His translation of Johannes Boborowski, coming out soon from NYRB, will refresh that work long since gone stale in the translation of Matthew and Rebecca Mead, who also translated much Nelly Sachs back in the late sixties, but in a quick dash after she had won the Nobel Prize).  And it was Sieburth who created such excitement around Friedrich Hölderlin with his translation of Hymns and Fragments (Princeton, 1984), and showed us how to hear the late fragmentary work of that essential German Romantic.  That the translator is still at work 40+ years later is a gift.

The gift is pleasure.  The pleasure of Lehnert’s form, however baroque in origin, lies in a shaping enterprise straddling time, as if an Enlightenment poet-of-idea and a Romantic poet-of-image had married to create a new kind of natural supernaturalism for our moment, but one grounded in an ancient apprehension. Lehnert has been called a miniaturist due to his favoring of these forms. They are as tightly predetermined as limericks; but as in any form, including jokes and folk dances, the opportunities for infinite variation and surprise arrive as a kind of delight, no more miniature for their metrical scale, interlineal partition, or attention to what they see than the visionary meters, often quite tight ones, of Silesius or Blake.

The doubled lens of Lehnert’s close attention to the natural world and his theistic view of reality, its epic frame, is present in the way his feeling for poetic form—his feeling, that is, for poetry—finds its shape in numbers, measurements (meters), and the correspondence of rhyme (for they went unto Noah, into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life).  Sieburth is especially sensitive to this very particular genus of numerology, and he parses it at length in his translator’s introduction, by turns generous, playful, and learned.  The formal nature of the work that he reveals in his evocative critical remarks is not incidental but rather baked into its meaning; extraction of content through translation, as if it were an ore separable from the mountain, is impossible, even were it desirable—it’s not.  Sieburth sees that the repeated experiments of these poems require repeated reenactment in kind if they are to make their meanings known to readers of English.

For the poet, every outing on the blank page is a new experiment; for the reader every experiment they find there is a new experience; only the translator inhabits both dimensions of the poem, as experiment and experience—that’s one way to describe the translator’s task: to feel the poem, and find the feeling again.

Second Advent 2016, Breitenau

The words hold still, there’s nowhere they want in.

Thus the name of fatigue: in silence it begins.

By holding ‘still’ (a false-friend noncognate there—the word means silence in German) the words of any poem stay where they are, in the original language. It’s out of their ‘silent beginning’ (der Schweigende Beginn) that the translator steps in, or into, as one steps into a passage, even as the poet sends us out again, into the world.

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Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry (all from Chicago) and a book of political/cultural reportage, Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees? (LARB, 2016). Everything I Do I Do Good: Trumpoems was published by Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2018).  His translation of Nelly Sachs’s Flight & Metamorphosis, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, was shortlisted for ALTA’s 2023 National Translation Award.  His translation (with Jay Hopler) of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Book of Pilgrimage’ was chosen by Arthur Sze for Best Literary Translations 2026 (Deep Vellum).  A recipient of Whiting, Guggenheim, and Rome Prize fellowships, he lives in Washington D.C. and teaches at University of Maryland. 

He is in the middle of reading Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt; Muscadine by A.H. Jerriod Avant; the biography of Clover Adams by Natalie Dykstra;  Selected Writings of Zen Master Hakuin, translated by Philp B. Yamplosky; Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, by Forough Farrokhzad, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray; Fugitive Tilts by Ishion Hutchinson; Katherin Phillips’ Oxford edition of Hopkins; Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver; How To Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil; Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment by W.S. Merwin; By and By, by Alan Shapiro; and Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916, translated by Marjorie Perloff.