The poet Martin Piekar – Connecting the inside to the outside

Martin Piekar was born in Germany in 1990 and grew up in Hesse. However, he has only held German citizenship since 2017. Until then he only had Polish citizenship, which he owes to his parents, who fled socialist Poland in the 1980s for political reasons. His father returned to his old homeland shortly after German reunification. Martin Piekar was still an infant at the time who could not yet know that he would later dedicate his life to poetry. He first lived with his mother in Bad Soden am Taunus, then in Frankfurt am Main. He would not come to Poland for a long time, as his mother was very resistant. Piekar calls it her private iron curtain. Piekar’s mother had experienced a lot of bad things in her old homeland: she was born in a gulag, then grew up in Białystok, became a teacher and finally decided to flee the detested political system. Her Polish teaching degree was not recognised in Germany, so she worked as a carer for the elderly – a typical problem for Polish immigrants.

Even as a child, Martin Piekar was a reflective, keen observer who got hung up on contradictions and injustices and daydreamed about other worlds. He began writing as a teenager to have an outlet, a “cleanser”, as he says. He began reading poetry. The young Piekar was particularly fond of the Romantics, and so his early attempts are characterised by fixed rhyme schemes and a yearning pathos. He loved the mysterious, dark side of Romanticism and found the right forms of expression for him in the Goth youth subculture. Soon he was dressing almost exclusively in black, dyeing his hair the same colour, listening to bands like “The Sisters of Mercy” or “Marilyn Manson” and giving his poems a gloomy touch. Looking back, he sees Romanticism as an escape movement. At first, he had more of a hunch than something he could clearly pinpoint: he would stagnate if he stuck to forms of expression that had been popular in the 19th century. And so he tried to explore contemporary poetry, even if he initially felt irritated by what at first glance appeared to be unwieldy forms of expression, and it took him some time to expand and change his aesthetic perception. He broke away from his Romantic role models and set out to be a contemporary poet. Piekar says of himself: “I wrote and wanted to write myself into the language and between people. I wanted to dedicate my language, my time, my thoughts to this: language, time, thinking – in the form of poetic texts.”