Andreas Weiland

Andreas Weiland (born 1944) is a bilingual poet. He writes in English, but also in German. His poetry has repeatedly caused positive echos by fellow poets. Jürgen Theobaldy was the first poet and editor who published him. Nicolas Born called him « a born lyrical poet. » Erich Fried considered his poems important. Many well-known and not so well-known artists and a few filmmakers (thus Jean Marie-Straub Dore O., and Werner Nekes) also cared for his poetry. Weiland is also an art and film critic.

The early years

Weiland was born on Oct. 14, 1944 into a pettybourgeois family in Northwest Germany. He studied American literature in Bochum (Germany). In 1967 he founded the poetry magazine Touch together with Steven R. Diamant.The journal is available in the Yale University Library OCLC 701816106 Touch. (Journal, magazine) ]); the Bodleian Library, Oxford University ([1]) and the DNB Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (see [2]).Massimo Bacigalupo called it "una rivista d'avanguardia" (a journal of the avant-garde). According to the critic Pavel Branko, the texts written by Weiland that were published in this "journal … showed him not only as a poet but also as a perceptive art critic of unconventional art scenes and as an analyst of independent, non-commercial film. Many times over his criticism stung me and let me feel that feeling of envy – that someone has something that one has not." Since 1966, Weiland has translated poetry from Italian, modern Greek and Portuguese into English and German. He also translated and published a number of "Angry Young Men" – thus Pete Brown, Libby Houston, Adrian Mitchell, Frances Horovitz. And he had a poetry reading together with the British "Beat" poet Michael Horovitz in Bochum in the late 1960s. Traveling to Rome in the summer of 1968 with Steven Diamant, he stayed there for a few weeks, saw films of Cinema Indipendente filmmakers, and met the poets and filmmakers Massimo Bacigalupo, Piero Heliczer, and Guido Lombardi.

In the 1970s, he wrote a poetic text inspired by the video film Herman Dances Alone that was shot by the filmmaker and painter Tony Morgan, who is also known for his artistic collaboration with Daniel Spoerri. He read at the Amsterdam-based avant-garde art gallery De Appel when both Tony Morgan and the poet were invited to come to Amsterdam for this purpose by the deceased director or manager of the gallery, Wies Smals. There exist mimeographed copies of this text, printed by De Appel.

In 1975, his poem inspired by Straub-Huillet's film "Moses und Aron" was published in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. This poem was translated from German to French by Jean-Marie Straub, and appeared in the Cahiers in both languages, accompanied by the commentary: "Il comble à peu tous mes espoirs quant au film.". Seven years later, Jean-Marie Straub reacted again very positively to Weiland's poetry, as an interview of the poet done by Linda Lombardi reveals. It is published in the journal Art in Society, and it includes the reproduction of a postcard that the poet got from Jean-Marie Straub in 1982. In this card, Straub thanks the poet for "the good poems" which he has received from him. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet had probably read the typescript of a projected volume of poetry that was also sent to others, such as Jürgen Theobaldy (who had already shown a number of poems by Weiland to Nicolas Born in the 1970s). This typescript can only have been identical with the big quantity of poems that Erich Fried had reacted to, in 1981. (The poems were later published as Gedichte aus einem dunklen Land – the "dark," terrible land referred to in the title being apparently Germany.)

Years in Taiwan

During the second half of the 1970s, the poet worked for several years as a lecturer at the dept. of German and dept. of English of a university in Taiwan. In Taiwan, he founded a journal called 街頭 / Street. In that period, there were many street protests against the KMT dictatorship. When he published two writers who had previously been imprisoned by the KMT, the journal was closed down by the regime. According to his "List of Publications," he published articles in such Chinese magazines as Yinxiang (magazine) and Artist Magazine. Two articles published in Artist Magazine were later on republished in a small book, Day for Night in Taipei, Notes of A Cinéaste. An article by him that was published in Yinxiang (magazine) about a film by the Indonesian film director Wim Umboh has been republished in Art in Society. The journal mentions that Weiland interviewed Wim Umboh in Taipei when Umboh's film "Plastic Flowers, scheduled to be screened during the Taipei International Film Festival of 1978, was outlawed by the KMT regime. The poet managed to attend a private screening of the forbidden film. In addition to articles about art and the cinema that the poet wrote and published in Taiwan, his "List of Publications" also mentions a number of articles that he wrote in those years about performances of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater.

The 1980s and 90s

Starting in the early 1980s, Weiland worked as a planning historian at the Department of Planning Theory of Aachen Technical University. As a planning historian, Weiland published a number of articles. An interdiscipliary article that crossed the boundary between urbanistics and "discourse theory" appeared in Jürgen Link's journal kultuRRevolution. This journal also published a number of his poems. He continued to write poetry and it seems that he also continued to corresponded with poets, among them Jürgen Theobaldy, Erich Fried and perhaps also John Wieners, with whom he was already in touch in 1973 (see John Wiener's letter to Weiland, in Street Voice, #2) and certainly Cid Corman (until Corman died, it seems). When he read his poetry, it was very often in the context of art exhibitions. Thus he read his poems in the Villa Ichon (a cultural center) in Bremen in 1986 in conjunction with Wilfried ("Willi") Seeba's exhibition. In Aachen, he read his poems in the Karmán Auditory during an event organized for him by the late Peter Klein of the renowned Buchhandlung Backhaus that also invited such poets as Volker Braun. And he read his poems in this university town when he was invited to so during the exhibitions of artists like Lui Rummler (http://www.art-in-society.de/AS1/images/LUI-RUMMLER.pdf) and Peter Lacroix. It is also necessay to mention his poetic participation in the art projects and exhibition of such artists as the Canadian painter and printmaker Angelo Evelyn, during the 1980s. In addition to reading his poems during single exhibitions of Evelyn, he wrote the text for A. Evelyn's catalogue "Burning Cloud and Other Themes" when the artist had a big single exhibition in the RhoK (Flemish art academy) in Brussels in 1987. In 1987, the poet participated in the feminist art project "Unter einem Himmel" ("Under one and the same sky", gallery of Schloss Borbeck, Essen, that was organized and curated by Doris Schöttler-Boll in 1986-1988. Here, he introduced the female Korean artist Eu-nim Ro to the public and read his poetry. And two years later, he participated in the project "Wo bleibst Du, Revolution? (Where are you waiting, Revolution?)" (Museum of Modern Art, Bochum, Germany). With Fang Weigui, he translated one hundred and fifty-five poems written by the ancient Chinese poet Bai Juyi. The book, published in Göttingen in 1999, was positively reviewed by Karl-Heinz Pohl (sinologue, Trier university) and by Wolfgang Kubin (poet and sinologue, Bonn and Beijing).

The new millenium (2000 – )

Weiland read his poems frequently during diverse events organized by Doris Schöttler-Boll in the Atelierhaus (art house) in Essen Steele. Thus he presented poems of his new poetry book "Die Tage, das Zeitalter" (The Days, the Age...) during the "Long Night of Poets" (Sept. 21, 2001) – an event that also featured the poets Angelika Janz, Christina Schlegel, D.E. Sattler, Ina Kurz, Matthias Schamp y Urs Jaeggi. When the late Hans van der Grinten, a friend of Joseph Beuys and an early collector of his works, invited Angelo Evelyn to do a big single exhibition in the museum of his hometown, Kranenburg (a retrospective, in celebration of the 60th birthday of the artist), Weiland was invited to read his poetry. Because Hans van der Grinten died, the exhibition was curated by Marcela van der Grinten. Prof. Wolfgang Schmitz gave the introductory talk; Weiland and the musician Gunter Pasler (London/Leipzig) did a poetry & jazz performance. The new poems read during the vernissage were inspired by works of the Canadian artist. They appeared in print in 2003. Weiland also read recently written poetry in the context of a series of events curated by the artist Li Portenlänger. In one case, the result was a small poetry book with an original lithographic art work by Li Portenlänger. And he participated in collective art and literature projects – such as the project "Erfahren/Erinnern" (Figurenfeld Project, Eichstätt, Germany), together with Li Portenlänger, Luc Piron, and Angelo Evelyn, and in the big "Demer" project of Luc Piron (that was exhibited in Diest, Belgium, in 2014). His cooperation with the Belgian artist Luc Piron (a recipient of the State Prize for Art) resulted in a number of artist books with Piron's art works and Weiland's poems. Weiland wrote also poetic commentaries on the paintings of modern Arab artists like Maurice Haddad from Iraq and, while apparently using a pseudonym, about the expatriate Egyptian painter Saad el Girgawi, as Saad el Girgawi has mentioned. In 2009, he participated in a conference about the Contemporary Arab Contribution to World Culture at the UNESCO in Paris that was organized by the president of the IAIS. He gave talks on two Arab architects, Rasem Badran and Hassan Fathy. In recent years, Weiland has started two multi-lingual online magazines. One of these is called Street Voice in English. For the sixth issue of this poetry journal, he has translated poetry from the Mongolian language (together with the poet Hadaa Sendoo).

He has been published since 1966 in a number of literary journals and his poems have also been translated into diverse languages.

His poetry books can be found in the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) and the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag).

• Gedichte aus einem dunklen Land,

Rotterdam (Symposium Verlag) 1998

• Die Tage, das Zeitalter,

Rotterdam [etc.] (Jietou Press) 1999, 2da edición 2001

• At Mad Mick's Place,

Rotterdam (Symposium Press) 2000

• Das verwandte Land,

Rotterdam (Symposium Press) 2000

• Midwestern vistas & other poems,

Rotterdam (Symposium Press) 2001

• The Kranenburg Poems,

Rotterdam (Symposium Press) 2003, 2da edición 2004

• Strange meeting you / Seltsame Begegnung,

Rotterdam (Symposium Press) 2003

• Die Rosenberg-Barradini-Torres-Gedichte,

Paris (Jietou) 2005