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Today is the birth day of Günter Grass (16.10.27) and although knowing of him as a ‘politically engaged’ German novelist I had not considered him also as poet so today is as good as any to come to know his poetry a little better. He died in 2015 so we begin with an act of remembrance as in this poem “My Epitaph, Written in Sprigs of Dill”

...”Remember me, over plates of boiled codfish, 
write my epitaph in sprigs of fresh dill
 when you finish the dish to serve up to your dinner guests. 
Remember me, 
when you cut the gherkins to accent the meal: 
the salt of my sorrow, the bitter vinegar of my lot. 
When you visit the fishmonger, remember me. 
The common-law wife you never made into an honest woman. 
Remember my un-common recipes, cooked for you, 
back in the days when fish fresh from the Baltic 
wasn’t priced beyond the means of a poet,...”

In the poem “What I write about” Grass tell us quite plainly:

“...Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything, after yesterday’s leftovers have turned into today’s fossils, forgotten in the fridge. 

Whatever I write: it’s about the egg. 
About gobbling up the sorrow with your bacon, swallowing down the love with a nail and a rope, 
bickering over too many words, like hair, in the soup. 
About the deep freeze, another ice age, and what happens when the river stops flowing and is no more. 
About all of us at a table we’ve eaten empty, 
and also about you and I, and the spiny fishbones caught up in our throats.”

And for today’s MTB prompt we are continuing with the 16th theme and writing a Quatern

“The Quatern (Latin= 4 each) is a French verse form, possibly from the Middle Ages since it is so close to the Retourne and Kyrielle. It also employs a refrain…. from stanza to stanza. [source]

Poetry style:

  • 16 lines in total
  • divided into 4 quatrains (4 line stanzas)
  • 8 syllables per line (iambic tetrameter an optional metre)
  • 1st line is the refrain which moves consecutively downward through the 4 stanzas as Line I L2, L3, L4
  • usually unrhymed but this is at your discretion

Poetry Theme

An optional suggestion is to engage with one of Gunter Grass’s poems:

  • taking a quote as an epigram
  • write an answer to/ response to one of his poems (for, against or along the same lines/style)

Useful Links:

  • all Günter Grass poems quoted above are from the selections: HERE
  • a further selection of Günter Grass poems are HERE and HERE
  • example of iambic tetrameter
  • Grace visited the Quatern in 2023 – explanation and examples HERE

Once you have written and posted your poem, according to the guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.
Please also TAG dVerse in your post, or include a link at the end of your poem that leads readers back to this dVerse prompt

[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3 p.m. EST]