life without poetry

what I can learn from Peter Handke as a poet, being a writing person, which I consider myself to be, after all, is using everyday life as a material for work; a fabric for artistic processing. he's not the kind of guy who will go to the fields at night-time with a butterfly net, he won't wait for the rising tide or the southern wind. he just looks at things, observes them carefully, considering the structure of simple events, common constellations, and then highlights their nature with the help of cautiously selected words.
I was always interested rather in the Schulzean parallel narration, the elusive beyond any measurement. the elements of natural world as events, subtle emotions as determinants of human fate. but when I was reading Handke's poems, it occurred to me that if energy focused so efficiently around the core of a given phenomenon that it actually came to being in the real, literal world, it might deserve my attention juat as well. things I call mine; groups I identify myself with; how my identity is expressed in my language code – in the end this is the subject of my studies, of my B.A. thesis in particular. and Handke makes poetry out of it.
Leben ohne Poesie, that's the name of the collection. and at times I get frightened by the austerity, rigid analytical character of the poems. conveying a childhood memory with the use of a mathematical formula makes me want to cuddle in The Street of Crocodiles like in an old blanket, that is, to run away to my homeland.
but at the same time I get a sense of the poet's moral courage to accept life's rough surface and to face it. I'm not sayng that Schulzean gardens are easy. there is a quality to them, for which you have to turn aside from the main road, turn time and space upside down; this is the new, the other one. reality super plus. and Handke is like moving deeply, but always on one level only, the cognition level zero. I bet it takes a lot of effort to see the worn out everyday life anew and to describe it with such an awful attention and accuracy.
at the same time I have an overwhelming feeling that what I'm reading was written by a very, very sad man.