Ein Landschaftsding, kein Landschaftsgedicht. Eine Analyse des Landschaftsgedichts von Elisabeth Meylan

This essay analyses Elisabeth Meylan’s short poem, Landschaftsgedicht [‘landscape poetry’]. While the poem’s title might lead the reader to expect a poem about a (natural) landscape, Meylan’s writing rather explores her difficulties in writing about the (natural) landscape. The poet finds no inspiration in the landscapes she sees, rather visualising a polluted abandoned industrial area as a subject for her work. The essay explores the poet’s conceptualisation of landscape through Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘hyperobject’. Morton suggests that large-scale phenomena such as global warming constitute a new kind of ontological object, calling for new understandings of human-‘thing’ relationships and for a revisiting of the topos of the landscape (e.g. the ‘Zero Landscape). In this context, the paper also evokes Jane Bennet’s New Materialism, recognizing that Meylan’s description of the waste of the industrial landscape aligns closely to Bennett’s idea of “assemblage”: a powerful collective of human and non-human actants. Perhaps the natural landscape is in its final hours – on the brink of becoming a thing among things.