Looking back on the relaunch day – a summary

We had been eagerly awaiting the “relaunch day” for months. As of 1 September, the new lyrikline is up and running!

Many people helped to bring the new site into life and many people came to celebrate with us and followed the relaunch event at c-base in Berlin or online via live stream. For all who couldn’t be there or want to relive the event here’s a little summary.

Ready? Go!

What ingredients does an event need that celebrates the new lyrikline? Next to having a look into what is new, there should be the elements that make lyrikline the living project that it is – poets, users, national partners, voices, languages, poems and translations. We tried to add a bit of it all and stir well…

The event was opened by our two charming presenters, Joel Scott of Australian partner organisation The Red Room Company and Per Bergström who is the Swedish partner with Rámus förlag. Many other local lyrikline partners
sent their video greetings or organised relaunch happenings in their countries

Heiko Strunk speaking about the new website (© gezett)

Heiko Strunk, who managed the project right from its start in 1999 and masterminded the website relaunch, gave us a showcase tour of the site and introduced all the new features.

So, what’s new?

To mention all the new things in detail would extend poetry length by bar. Best go and have a look! But here are some of the essentials…

Navigation languages:

Next to the five existing languages to navigate the site which were Arabic, English, French, German, and Slovenian there are four new languages: Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Start page:

The new site opens new ways to access the content of lyrikline so the users don’t get lost amidst the 900 poets, 8,000 poems, 11,000 translations or 60 languages of poetry. Next to thematic teasers, the start page offers a radio like theme stream, recommends poems or poets to discover and informs about new content. From the main menu you can now select poets not only from A-Z or by languages but also by countries and you can browse the site by poems also, e.g. many poems can be found by categories like humorous poetry or issues like alcohol & drugs and many more everyday life topics.

Search & Community:

Have a look at the new design of the poem page, lean back on your couch after you selected „listen to all poems“ by your favourite poet or find the needle in the hay by using the new search and its dozen refinement options. Moreover, you can remember content, create your own lists or explore what other users like by becoming a member of the community.

Whatever access point you start from to explore poetry on lyrikline you’ll be able to find all the six poets who performed at the relaunch event on stage in Berlin, be it Finnish poet Helena Sinervo or Norwegian Simen Hagerup, who were both published on the site during the live event, Els Moors from Belgium, Pedro Sena-Lino from Portugal or the German poets Steffen Popp and Jan Wagner. Since the latter is the most translated poet on lyrikline his poem champignons was read on stage in the languages of all the present poets.

Can you hear me?

google hangouts session: Andrej Hocevar waiting in Ljubljana

To give the lyrikline users the chance to follow the event via online streaming was a main aim since lyrikline is a web project and its main audience is sitting at a computer and not in front of a stage. Another idea was to establish live video connections to our partners and to poets in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia during the event. In the end this did not go as well as we hoped and not nearly as well as it did when we ‘practised’ two weeks before, meeting in our first google hangouts session to check if we can all hear and see each other. At least we could hear Russian poet Linor Goralik read a poem in Moscow that night, but due to technical problems, the session sadly hardly worked and there was a lot of desperate asking „Can you hear me?“  This photo of a waiting Andrej Hocevar in Slovenia portraits the unlucky attempt. The more we’d like to thank the patient poets Linor Goralik in Russia and Benson Eluma in Nigeria and the partners Andrej Hocevar, Dmitry Kuzmin and Remi Raji who put a lot of time and effort in this. It’s a shame it did not really properly.

Messages from Space

Other connections to the outer world were more successful. It was fun to read what Julià Florit and Thomas Andersson, the partners from Catalonia and Sweden wrote while they took over our lyrikline facebook and twitter accounts to post some impressions of the event. The two of them and poet Els Moors also formed the jury that selected their favourite „space poems“ which were sent for the relaunch by users answering an open call. The space topic was inspired by the event venue, the c-base „space station“ in Berlin which is an association of IT activists and their headquarter was a great place for the lyrikline relaunch event.

Left: the two presenters Joel and Per, right: Julià and Thomas connecting to the outer world (© gezett)

We’re happy that with the relaunch, this new era of lyrikline has finally started. It’ll certainly take a good while before all the little bugs left on the new site will be found and fixed. Continuously, more and more poems will be sorted into the categories, more new poets will be published and ideas for new start page teasers will have to be found. It is, as it was, work in progress so stay tuned and visit the new site every now and then.

Thank you all for coming to the relaunch event, for watching it online or for following the whereabouts of lyrikline!

Space Poems

Last week, in the run up to our website relaunch and the live event, we started an open call and asked for your short ‘Space Poems’. The call is closed now and we would like to thank everyone who took part!! We received 15 poems, sent to us in English and German via twitter, facebook and as blog comments and enjoyed reading the poems a lot. We hope you all do!

 

… and here are the Space Poems …

 

daybreak

 

when we credulously

reached for the clouds

a clamour

from the mouth of

a careless fish

–

by Achim Wagner (via twitter)

 

 

words are vinds which blow roofs

–

Daiga Mežaka (via blog comment)

 

 

There’s no sound in a space poem, only the charged particles of solar wind.

–

by Dave Bonta (via twitter)

 

 

Folda Saumtar

Dark

Weil polygam in der

Weltraumzukunft

Vergessen

Dode jedan ratom

Kontakt

–

by Friedrich Stockmeier (via facebook)

 

 

At one gee

an event horizon forms

one light year

behind my ship:

no news from home

as long as my engine holds out.

–

(from Microcosms, 5/2011)

by Geoffrey A. Landis (via blog comment)

This poem was read at the lyrikline relaunch event, selected by Catalan lyrikline partner Julià Florit.

 

 

Inmitten

–

im Tosen beginnen die Automaten zu sprechen,

die Menschen zittern und lauschen.

Gebete denkt sich einer.

 –

Alle atmen.

 –

by Julia Dathe (via facebook)

 

 

Killer lyrics

 

don’t let me guess what you want

give me or go play somewhere else

in the digital void it’s too dark to see

–

underground in me is a deep mine

laid by the Furies.

They got tired of people robbing

my precious ores.

–

If I keep on following

this vein of thought

(too late to replace the years

too bored for revenge)

I’ll end up like those aging rock ’n folk heroes

writing songs of disillusion

spiked with passive aggression

–

You know, the brittle lyrics that skate

coolly along the surface

endorsing the chosen path of the past

(Don’t look back.) Then crack

to reveal the anger in the last line

with a parting shot. Bang! Bang! —

I wrote you off. All of you.

–

© Karen Margolis

Berlin, August 2013 (via blog comment)

 

 

Blend in

 

What would I wear into space?

My black dress with the tiny silver beads.

Not the one with swirls of blue and green

soft lonely longing.

 

by Kirsty Elliot (via blog comment)

 

 

„Au“- schrie es in meinem Kopf. Eine reflexive Reaktion auf das zwickende Zwerchfell? Ein Zwitschern des Augenliedes und katarrhhh klingt es rumorvoll langsam aus.

–

Er hatte einen traumhaften Schaum. Auf der Etikette stand „selbstaussäend“, doch das las er nicht, sondern setzte sich und dekorierte den Rest mit Passionsflüchten.

–

2 poems by Lydia (via blog comment)

 

 

wir bewegen uns durch welten

kleingeworden

nehmen uns her

aus plätzen

geträumtes dunkel

und bringen uns ein

räumen die welt aus den räumen

 –

by Matthias Dietrich (via blog comment)

 

 

All-That-Is a boundless dot, through time and space itself forgot: Dichtung means densification of all-that-matters as vibration.

–

by Raffael Kéménczy (via twitter)

 

 

Message in a bottle of dreams

you should call it free

or else uncoil it

through thin air and in the misfit casts

of rident expansion.”

 –

“Botschaft in einer Flasche aus Träumen

frei nennen / oder abspulen

durch dünne Luft und in den Fehlschmelzen

lächelnder Expansion.”

–
by Schirin Nowrousian (via facebook)

This poem was read at the lyrikline relaunch event, selected by Belgian poet Els Moors.

 

 

SHIP

 

A ship at sail…

-does it ever think

the waters may abscond?

Or that the mast

is a woodworm’s nest?–

The bow divides the waves

trusting its strength

and is a god in motion.

–

by Therese Pace (via blog comment)

 

 

Wohin geht der Zugangscode wenn man ihn gedrückt hat?

–

by UKON (via twitter)

This poem was read at the lyrikline relaunch event, selected by Swedish publisher Thomas Andersson.

–

Relaunch messages – a video greeting from Québec

For our website relaunch, people affiliated to lyrikline like poets, local lyrikline partners and artists sent their personal videos. All the messages we received are uploaded here on our blog. Many thanks to all who sent us their greetings. Thanks also to everyone who gave us their feedback and congratulations on the new site and spread the word about it!

Here’s a video from our Québec partner, the UNEQ, that introduces all the lyrikline poets from Québec in a very special way.

Video message from Portugal

Video greetings from Portugal by Inês Pedrosa of Casa Fernando Pessoa, the lyrikline partner in Portugal.

By the way, Portuguese is a new navigation language on lyrikline. Have a look.

Video message from Macedonia

A message by Macedonian poet and lyrikline partner Nikola Madzirov.

Nikola Madzirov’s poetry on lyrikline

Video message from Israel

Avi Dabach is a filmmaker from Israel. He worked with the lyrikline website for the poetry film workshop “Poetic Encounters”. We like the idea that a poetry website inspires artists to create new works.

Video message from Finnish Poetry Flashmob

During Runokuu Poetry Festival in Helsinki, lyrikline partner Laura Serkosalo of Nuoren Voiman Liitto organised these greetings by poet Olli Heikkonen. We see many other Finnish poetry activists at their festival flashmob in the Helsinki railway station.

Poetic postcard from Croatia

Poet Tomica Bajsic of the Croatian PEN Centre, the local lyrikline partner, sent this ‘poetic postcard’ from Dubrovnik for our relaunch.

Video message from Costa Rica

Poet Luis Chaves from Costa Rica sent greetings for the website relaunch. Muchas gracias!

To all friends of poetry in the Spanish speaking world: check out the new Spanish navigation of lyrikline!

Video messages from China

The Chinese lyrikline partner Mindy Zhang was on tour through China and shot some little video greetings with Chinese and international poets on the occasion of the website relaunch. Thanks to Mindy, the new lyrikline website can now be navigated in Chinese too! Doesn’t this look great?

This video shows Mindy together with Chinese Poet HU Xudong who she will contribute to lyrikline in the future and German poet Steffen Popp.

In the second video we see Xiao Kaiyu, who was the first Chinese poet on lyrikline together with American poet Ilya Kaminsky who will soon be available on lyrikline too and Mindy in Shanghai.