Guntram Vesper
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The Brothers Grimm Poetry Professorship at the Department of German Studies at the University of Kassel was awarded to the author Guntram Vesper, who lives in Göttingen, for the winter semester 1993/94. In lectures sponsored by the Stadtsparkasse Kassel, Guntram Vesper, like previous writers Dieter Kühn, Tankred Dorst, Hans-Joachim Schädlich, Klaus Harpprecht and Oskar Pastior, gave insights into the poetics of his work.
Image: SchoeCo (Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0)Vesper, born in Frohburg/Saxony in 1941, is the author of poetry, short stories and radio plays; of (according to G. von Wilpert) cleverly assembled short prose with descriptions of the rural milieu, "which he associatively links from banalities, prejudices, thought and language clichés to concise images of social constraints and human behavior." His radio plays continue this theme, often with the inclusion of more or less authentic criminal cases, while in his poetry he provides an "illusionless description of human unrelatedness" (Wilpert). Vesper has placed the following questions at the forefront of his work: "What world we live in. What we want. Who we are."
Some important publications are Am Horizont die Eiszeit (poem 1963), Fahrplan (poem 1964), Gedichte (poems 1985), Kriegerdenkmal ganz hinten (poem 1970), Nördlich der Liebe und südlich des Hasses (poem 1979), Die Illusion des Unglücks (poem 1980), Die Inseln im Landmeer (poem 1982), Frohburg (poem 1985), Latema magica (poem 1985), Ich hörte den Namen Jessenin (poem 1990), Lichtversuche Dunkelkammer (poem 1992).
Vesper is a member of the German PEN Center and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Darmstadt. He has already held lectureships in poetry in Mainz and Essen. He has been awarded numerous scholarships and prizes.