Instrumentality and Referentiality in Poetry (Thomas Kling)

The essay deals with the interrelations between an instrumental technicity and the textual dynamics in the poetry of Thomas Kling (1957-2005). Visual effects and imaging technics are investigated, in addition to their relation to the textual spatialization and synchronization, identified as specific lyric features. The aims of the essay are primarily theoretical and methodological: to affiliate the paradigm of mediality with a literary reading, and to pursue a new possibility for reading images and their medial backgrounds and techniques in lyrical texts—the performative and referential effects of plurivocally medial staging of the poetry at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.