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Poetic Justice: Heike Fiedler fragments her words and uses sound and visuals to communicate her poetry

It's not about metre, rhyme and verse for Swiss multilingual performance poet Heike Fiedler, who fragments her words and uses sound and visuals to communicate her poetry. A performance set in Delhi made for a most unusual evening, finds Amrita Madhukalya

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For those assembled on the attic of a hip Hauz Khas Village outlet on a muggy September evening, Swiss poet Heike Fiedler's poetry performance was something that you don't encounter every day: As she read her poems, bathed in a selection of visual imagery projected on to the performance space, Fiedler used a kaoss pad and a looper to dissect and present words for an unusual experience.

"I am a language nomad. I have my roots, of course," says the 51-year-old multilinguist performance poet, who can rustle up a verse any moment in German, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Her poetry performances are usually an audio-visual experience where she uses text, sound, visuals and installations. In her first performance in Geneva in 2000, Fiedler used a candle to reflect the text of her poetry on the wall, after which the organiser compared her poetry to that of surrealist theorist and poet Gherasim Luca.

Fiedler started experimenting with poetry while in college, and would use her guitar skills to improvise on her performance. "I was interested in deconstructing the semantics and then rebuilding them," says Fiedler. She considers the works of avant garde poet-musician Henri Chopin, the Beat Generation poets, American novelist William S. Burroughs, American writer Anne Tardos, and the philosophy of American gender theorist Judith Butler as her prime influences.

Fiedler has collaborated with various artists, musicians and writers in her performance sets around the world. For her, the words, the mixer, the kaoss pad and the looper are simple tools of expression. "These tools permit me to make layers in my pronunciation, and to establish a connection with my audience," says Fiedler. And every venue comes with a different approach. In Pune University, where she performed a few days ago, she had to simply read out her poetry without the use of any electronic tools.

Fiedler has also written books, short stories, and plays. Her Language de Meehr, fifth in the edition spoken script series, is an extension of her visual poetry. Most of the text is used only for visual representation, and there is no meaning attached to many of these words. It is the arrangement of the words that matter. Words, as she says, are merely tools of expression, and here, these tools are dissected and fragmented. "I fragment the words, and this fragmentation permits me to swim inside the languages I know," she says. "Sometimes, I need to curb the urge to not jumble up the various languages that I know; try and not think of a French connotation for a German word."

Her poetry takes up various political outtakes– like gender issues and linguistic politics. "I try and question dominant systems – especially in the case of languages. In Europe, there were times where one was forbidden from speaking a certain language at times. My book is a political statement against these dominant systems. Each language borrows from the other, and hence there should be no language supremacy," she says. Some of her work is also influenced by the Berlin Wall and the mass exodus that took place.

Fiedler, who has been organising a poetry festival in Geneva for the last 13 years, feels that poetry performances have come a long way from the time it started in the early 1920s. "In the early days, performance poetry was a marginalised way, and there were barely any acceptance in literature or among poets. When I started, I would introduce myself as a performer," says Fiedler.

In India, apart from Pune and Delhi, Fiedler also had performance sets in Goa and Jaipur. She is now headed to the Schamrock Festival in Münich, a women's literature festival, where she will perform poetry on gender issues late October.

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