Donna Stonecipher is a unique star in Berlin’s literary firmament. An American who moved here in 2004, she has established herself as a highly respected poet, translator and poetry teacher – and as a master of the ‘prose poem’ genre.
She has published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City, and six books of poems, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia in 2023. This critically-acclaimed collection takes on the question of nostalgia – wisely, ironically, impassionedly, analytically – in a sequence of 64 page-long prose poems that excavate and animate a phenomenon that is “personal yet collective”.
Stonecipher also translates from the German, most notably the great Austrian postwar author Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy of prose-poetry books: following her 2020 translation of études, the second instalment Cahier has just been published by Seagull Books.
Let’s start with your fabulous collection, The Ruins of Nostalgia, which you’ve said took about five years to complete. What’s your writing practice like?
Bursts, and then long silences, and then, you know, little trickles (laughs). It’s completely irregular, and just depends on what the muse felt like allotting.
Is there anything that helps the muse on its way? Space, music, walking…
I’m nostalgic for the parties that I went to in very provisional and strange spaces
Yeah, well, caffeine it turns out! You’ll laugh, but it was tea – I don’t drink coffee. I’m very sensitive to caffeine. I was on a train with my husband to Munich, and I had the train restaurant’s tea, which was extremely strong, but I hadn’t realised. It was like I was on coke! I took out my notebook and three of the poems came out – and they pretty much stayed the same, although one didn’t end up in the manuscript. I’ve tried to recreate this again and again (laughs) and it hasn’t worked.
Well, you can’t go back! Speaking of which: what drew you to the topic of nostalgia in the first place?
I suppose I first started thinking more about nostalgia living here, and thinking of Ostalgie, and trying to understand what it really meant to be nostalgic for East Germany. And I was thinking about the ways in which nostalgia has kind of a bad rap – I mean, it has a really bad rap – and yet, in the case of East Germans, it also seemed to be empowering, like a kind of resistance – as in, you imposed this new system on us but we’re not just going to accept it. We’re also going to look back at what we missed: it’s not going to be erased!
That aspect of nostalgia hadn’t really occurred to me before. It seemed like a refusal, a healthy refusal. Then I started reading more about this idea, and I started getting nostalgic myself, particularly as my hometown of Seattle has changed very drastically over the last ten years through Amazon and so on. There’s a lot of erasure happening in Seattle. Literally, most of the places I hung out in during my youth are now just gone, knocked down, with little fanfare or grief outside of [on] Facebook, and very little sense of historical preservation. I got thinking of nostalgia as a strategy of resistance to capitalist erasure of the past.
This was all so compelling to me, as was the fact that the complexity of nostalgia really has not been given its due. So I decided to try to give it its due – in poetry.
Does nostalgia have a special role in times like ours, which are so obsessed with the present moment?
I think our relation with the past can become very distorted through social media and the internet. It probably always was distorted, but it feels more so now. But I will say that the internet is also a nostalgia machine! I can go on YouTube and see all the commercials I watched as a kid – they’re all there. So it has this insane capacity for the preservation of everything, and yet we’re forgetting more and more. It’s a paradox.
The poems are all titled “The Ruins of Nostalgia” plus a number, and they almost all end with those same words. Why?
With the prose poem, things can get really prose-y. And I like to have some sort of formal constraint in my prose poems. In my book Model City, every line starts with the phrase “It was like”, so it’s repeated like 200-something times. It is also to challenge myself. To end almost every poem with the phrase “the ruins of nostalgia”, and to make it feel kind of fresh every time, that was really hard to do!
And it has to be hard. What’s that line from Shakespeare – “lest too light winning / Make the prize light”? I also liked it because my book was critical of nostalgia, obviously, and something I love about poetry is that it can be both indulging in nostalgia and criticism of nostalgia. Having that title and that ending meant that the poems were bookended in a slightly claustrophobic way, and I liked that effect.
How would you define the prose poem to someone not already familiar?
I got thinking of nostalgia as a strategy of resistance to capitalist erasure of the past
The most basic definition is that it’s a poem without line breaks. You can’t get any more nitty-gritty than that. The prose poem came into being in France in the mid- to late-19th century with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who both tried it out. And the two main strains of it can be traced back to those two writers. Baudelaire wrote a more flash-fiction type of prose poem, telling a little story, whereas Rimbaud wrote more paratactic surreal prose poems.
It’s become more popular, certainly in US poetry over the last thirty years or so. Interestingly, it seems to be received very differently in different poetry cultures – the UK has been very slow to get on board, and Germany has a strange relationship, because they don’t even like to use the term ‘prose poem’. They call them prose miniatures or something. Of course, the very name – ‘prose poem’ – is a contradiction in terms.
Let’s talk about Berlin. It seems to show up quite a lot in The Ruins of Nostalgia.
Yes, Berlin plays a huge role in the book. I haven’t counted but maybe a third of the poems are about Berlin. I talked to a lot of people about nostalgia, so it’s almost never just talking about my own nostalgia – it’s from me taking in what others have been saying. And a third prong of the book, alongside Ostalgie and Seattle, is the particular nostalgia that Wahlberliner have for the Berlin that they moved to.
Because you chose to live in a place, then when it changes, you either get mad or you move away or you look back and say, you know, gee, I miss that squat or all those pop-up beer gardens or whatever. There is a lot of indulging in that among the Wahlberliner community. So some of the poems deal with that. And with being nostalgic for other people’s pasts. Like, you weren’t there in the 1990s when you could have lived in a squat so you’re nostalgic for your friends’ tales about it – but it is a real, vicarious feeling!
What are you nostalgic about in Berlin?
Low rents, definitely. And what comes with low rents – the sense of spatial possibilities. That you could start something, even if you didn’t actually do it, but that you or your friends could open up a gallery space or something. I’m nostalgic for the parties that I went to in very provisional and strange spaces, whereas now the doors are all closed and locked.
You just published a translation of Cahier by Friederike Mayröcker. How did you come to translate her?
I had read some of her poems, but not her prose poems. I never thought of translating her because she’s such a star. I assumed somebody was already working on it. Then I was looking around for a project and a Dutch poet friend of mine said, well, what about Mayröcker?
As it turns out, there was little of her in English. So I walked straight into Dussmann, went to the M section, and pulled out the most current Mayröcker book – which just happened to be étude, the first volume of the prose poetry trilogy. I opened it up, and within two minutes I knew that this was what I wanted to translate.
What about her won you over?
First of all, just the way she was using the prose poem, and the innovations that she made. I could see that she was doing things I wish I’d thought of – graphical modulations, writing things in all caps or underlined. I’m always trying to find a way to make up for the lack of line breaks in prose poetry, ways to get more modulation in, more highs and lows and, for want of a better word, more drama: Mayröcker had these charming, exciting ways of doing that.
And then it’s just her voice, and her incredible intelligence – she’s got a serious intellect, but she’s also funny, and totally whimsical. That combination of seriousness and whimsy, as well as melancholy – which speaks to me as a fellow melancholic. And her experimentalism with language, the way she writes in conversation with so many other art forms, too. It’s all there.
- Cahier is out now with Seagull Books; The Ruins of Nostalgia is available from Wesleyan University Press
