Arts alumnus Martin Krafft went to Berlin for an artist-in-residency at the ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Center for Art and Urbanistics.) His project for those three months? Krafft decided to approach people in public and offer to read them a poem.
Reading one poem 1,000 times to strangers in Berlin. An artistic, social experiment.
Krafft (MFA ’20, Photography) selected the German poem, “Surely Gravity’s Law” by Rainer Maria Rilke from “Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,” translated by Joanna Macy.
Since Germans are pretty well known for speaking and understanding German, Krafft, a non-German speaking American, learned enough German to recite the poem 1,000 times strangers in Berlin.
MARTIN’S JOURNAL / March 4
I am doing a three-month artist residency in Berlin at ZK/U, an organization that focuses on the nature of cities. At a time when divisiveness and fear of the other threatens to tear apart our democratic societies at the seams, I will be reading a Rilke poem to 1000 strangers. I have done 22 readings so far and am on my way to memorizing the poem in German. I look forward to sharing more as the project progresses.
How did you get to residency in Berlin and what drew you to it?
“I was drawn to ZK/U because of their emphasis on thinking about the nature of city life. I think there’s this anonymity in cities that really was helpful for doing a first version of this project where it’s really looking at interactions between strangers. Berlin is a metropolitan city that has a lot of strangers.”
How did you choose a poetry project? How did you choose the poem?
“I have a lot of experience working on political campaigns; I’ve trained people on how to knock doors and talk to strangers. I’m very interested in how a lot of interactions between strangers end up being with some goal in mind. It often times has a financial goal, sometimes a political goal. And I wanted to offer an open-ended experience that was just inviting people to participate in experiencing this poem that I had fallen in love with.
“I wanted to pick a German author and I was familiar with Rilke. There was something about his writing that blended the physical and metaphysical that I appreciated. There was a fluidity with which he blended those two together.”
How many interactions were there, 5000?
“I don’t have an exact number for how many people I interacted with. I know that one day I had 72 rejections and 19 readings, so that was about a four-to-one ratio.”
Did your approach more for evolve over time?
“When I started, I was very interested in this question of why people engage with the arts or not. And I wanted to see if random people were offered a poetic encounter, if they would be open to that, if maybe their reason for not being more interested in the first place is that they’d never been asked. Then in doing it, I found out that even when asked, a lot of people were not interested. Some of that might have been the messenger. Maybe they didn’t want to hear a poorly read German poem by an American.
MARTIN’S JOURNAL / March 17
I have done over 200 readings so far; the notebook is already falling apart. There have been many magical moments validating the project – conversations in parks, on trains, in stores, exploring the meaning of the poem, asking my reasoning for why they poem, why read it to strangers, what does it mean to me. This is poetry that anyone can fall in love with, poetry that is an invitation to feel and sit with the feelings of wonder and contemplation.
“I would try to challenge myself at least once a day to offer to read to somebody who I assumed would say no. There was this tension in the project that never really got resolved, even though I did find myself gravitating more towards people who I expected to say yes, because I just got tired of being rejected so often.
“I started to find my strategy. I would ask people on the train to look around and pick somebody for me to go read to next. I’d say, “My new friend Sabrina here just picked you for me to offer to recite a poem to, would you like to hear this poem?” So, it became not just me interacting with strangers, but strangers interacting with each other. And so that was a way of deepening the project even more.”
Has the meaning changed over reading it so many times?
“Yeah. I think that this poem is an invitation to experience a sense of connection with the more of human environment with the natural environment. There was a moment after I’d read the poem several hundred times, I was like, ‘okay, maybe this poem is being too simplistic.’ But there’re much more nuance to it. Even if parts of it are simplifying, there is this ongoing invitation for us as humans to be contemplating our relationship to the natural environment in ways that we still have so much learning to do and growing to do. I think this question deserves more attention from us as a species. We’ve really been pushing it to the side at our own detriment.”
MARTIN’S JOURNAL / April 1
A woman who had just lost her mother and was making calls to inform family and friends. She had read poems to her mother in the hospital and was touched to hear one from a stranger. A woman walking a very rowdy puppy – she had just lost her job and boyfriend. The poem spoke to her sense of loneliness.
Another woman who was at first annoyed at my approach, ‘Here is another man feeling entitled to my space,’ then felt grateful for my challenging that expectation. And a man who I offered to read to … ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said, before pushing me.
What was the best interaction when you think back?
“There was a woman who said, ‘I’m from a working-class background and sometimes I think that poetry is only for intellectuals, and you’re act of coming up and offering to read it to me was a reminder that that’s not the case. That poetry can be for anybody who wants it to be for them.’”
Have you drawn a conclusion from the project?
“I think we’re at a critical moment as a species. There is this tension arising from otherness, and there are different strategies of how to respond to that otherness. And some of the strategies involve fear. And this project is about playing with that expectation of fear and trying to offer creativity as a path beyond that fear.”
MARTIN’S JOURNAL / May 15
855 readings done, with 9 days to go. I read to a man with long hair who also happens to be named Martin. He is a teacher and tells me the German translation for the name of the Rilke book I am carrying. Given his enthusiasm, I ask him to line up my next recitation. We walk for a couple minutes. He stops in front of a young woman sitting on a bench with strawberries. He explains the project in German. She at first refuses, saying she is not feeling up to approaching a stranger afterwards. I tell her she will not have to, and she agrees.
She is a lover of poetry, of Rilke too. She talks about how the poem makes her think of the importance of trusting the act of falling. She offers me a strawberry. It is delicious.
What’s next for Martin?
“I’m working on a state senate campaign in Pennsylvania. So, I’m assembling an army of interns and volunteers to the knock doors. I also live at a farmhouse. Volunteers come here for an artist residency. They make art and help out in garden and rebuilding the structures.”
What’s the name of your farmhouse?
“Grampy’s Red Rock Rabbit Ranch.”
MARTIN’S JOURNAL / May 26
Selfies still aren’t my thing, but I needed to document the 1000th reading of a Rilke poem. This has been an incredible journey, full of moments of beautiful, surprised rapture, and harsh rejections.
(Martin is to the far left.)