Das Gedicht buchstabiert die Welt neu: Sampling und die Collagen Lydia Dahers

Each week, for one whole year, the young German poet Lydia Daher produced one poem using only the words and illustrations found in a single literary review of that week's newspaper. In this way, Daher composed poetry consisting of words and phrases sampled from literary reviews that themselves contained quotes sampled from the literary works being reviewed. In this essay, I show how Daher's collages represent not only a practical application of what she terms the recontextualizing function of poetry, but also how closely they conform to the theories of musical sampling outlined by Pelleter and Lepa.