This poem from his best-known collection, written shortly before his death in 1975, depicts “a / freshly washed pair of / black tights” hanging on a wire “between two / bare trees.” The poem exemplifies many of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s convictions about the nature and process of poetry writing.

Brinkmann’s expressed goal of overcoming the artificial boundaries between “high poetry” and “poetic writing” is reflected in this poem on two levels. First, rather than focusing on what he regarded as “serious subject matter,” he makes an unremarkable, everyday event the theme of the poem: wet laundry hanging from a clothesline.

However, this poem also presents an attack on traditional hermetic poems—poetry that, through symbols, deliberately buries meaning that the implied reader is forced to decipher. Brinkmann’s poem resists all efforts of nonliteral interpretation. How does the author’s impulse, which he describes as “mourning,” relate to the hanging of the tangled, long-legged tights on a metal wire? The poem mentions the feeling in the title but does not refine or illustrate it.

By seducing the reader to imbue the stockings or the clothesline with symbolic value, Brinkmann forces the reader to realize that the author simply sticks to a spontaneous description of what is there. The black tights (whatever they may allude to) do not drip teardrops. Any interpretation of the poem along those lines would sound overblown compared with the austerity of Brinkmann’s language.

What the poem says is only this: “from the tangled / long legs water / drips in the bright / early light onto the stones.” The conventional tools of interpretation (often aimed at uncovering didactic messages) prove to be inadequate for dealing with such a spontaneous poem.

This poem illustrates Brinkmann’s search for an “authentic effect” in poetry. By stripping his poetic discourse of all artificiality and literary embellishment, he removes himself as the author from the text, allowing the implied reader unmediated access to the scene that inspired the poem.

Mourning on the Washing-Line in January is, nevertheless, a poignant example of Brinkmann’s attempt to subvert existing literary norms and notions of a “bourgeois high culture” through his writing, as well as his search for an aesthetic that makes poetry accessible to a wider spectrum of people by advocating vibrancy, topicality, and immediacy in literary writing.

Bibliography
Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter. “Trauer auf dem Wäschedraht im Januar.” In Westwärts 1 & 2. Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt, 1975.

Terrill, Mark, trans. and ed. “Mourning on the Washing-Line in January.” In Like a Pilot: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Selected Poems 1963–1970. Austin, Tex.: Sulphur River Literary Review Press, 2001.

Woolley, Jonathan. “Beyond the Beats: An Ethics of Spontaneity in the Poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann.” College Literature 30, no. 4 (2003): 1–31.

Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature, World Literature

Tags: anti-hermetic poetry, anti-symbolism in poetry, authentic effect in poetry, Brinkmann poetic technique, minimalist poetry, modern German poetry, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January analysis, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January character study, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January criticism, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January interpretation, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January plot, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January poem meaning, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January poetic devices, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January summary, Mourning on the Washing-Line in January themes, poetry and mourning, poetry without symbolism, postwar German literature, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann aesthetics, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann biography, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann literary style, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann mourning poetry, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann poem analysis, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann poetry criticism, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann themes, spontaneous poetry analysis, Westwärts 1 & 2 analysis