Jan Volker Röhnert is a German poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar whose work moves through travel, cities, landscape, translation, walking, and close observation of place. Born in Gera in 1976, he studied literature, German as a foreign language, Romance languages, and education in Jena and later became a professor of modern German literature at TU Braunschweig. His books include Metropolen, Notes from Sofia, Wolkenformeln, Breughels Affen, and Erdtagzeit, alongside prose and essay work such as Vom Gehen im Karst, Karstwärts, and Wildnisarbeit.
Metropolen
The title Metropolen places the city at the center of poetic attention. A metropolis supplies density, movement, signage, transport, crowds, architecture, overheard language, and constantly changing visual frames.
Writing through such spaces turns walking into a compositional method. The poet receives fragments in sequence, and the poem can preserve that moving perception through image, rhythm, and shifts of scale.
Notes from Sofia
Notes from Sofia gives travel a notebook form. “Notes” suggests immediacy, incompleteness, observation, and the preservation of details before they disappear.
Sofia becomes a site encountered through routes, weather, architecture, voices, and the practical experience of being elsewhere. The form leaves room for the visitor’s partial knowledge and for the city’s resistance to any single account.
Travel as method
Travel alters attention because familiar habits lose some of their automatic force. Street signs require reading, transit systems require learning, and ordinary routines become visible through comparison.
Röhnert uses this heightened awareness as literary material. Place is experienced through the body moving across distances and through language adjusting to unfamiliar contexts.
Route and composition
A route gives travel writing a temporal spine. The writer encounters one place after another, and sequence becomes part of meaning. A station, road, square, path, or trail can determine which images arrive and which memories become active.
Röhnert’s place-based writing benefits from this relation between geography and order. Movement through space becomes movement through the text, giving composition a structure discovered through travel.
Landscape and walking
His prose works Vom Gehen im Karst and Karstwärts make walking and karst landscape central subjects. Karst terrain is shaped by water moving through soluble rock, producing caves, sinkholes, exposed stone, and irregular surfaces.
Such terrain encourages a poetics attentive to geological time and bodily movement. Walking becomes a way of reading land through slope, texture, route, weather, and the resistance of the ground.
Wildnisarbeit
Wildnisarbeit places wilderness beside work. The combination gives landscape an active relation to human attention. Wilderness becomes something encountered through movement, interpretation, memory, and the cultural histories attached to ideas of nature.
The title also suggests sustained effort. Seeing landscape closely requires time, and writing makes that attention durable through form.
Translation
Röhnert has translated poetry from French and American English, including work by Ron Padgett. Translation creates another form of travel because language crosses between literary systems.
Every translated poem requires choices about syntax, rhythm, image, tone, idiom, and cultural reference. The translator has to preserve relations while allowing the new poem to live inside another language.
Ron Padgett and American poetry
Working with Padgett’s poetry brings Röhnert into contact with a distinctly American tradition of conversational speed, surreal turns, ordinary objects, humor, and New York School inheritance.
Translation makes that tradition available inside German literary culture and changes the translator’s own relation to rhythm and sentence. Reading becomes compositional apprenticeship.
Breughels Affen
The title Breughels Affen invokes visual art and the long afterlife of Pieter Bruegel’s imagery. Ekphrastic attention asks poetry to move from image into language while preserving visual complexity.
A painting holds many details simultaneously. A poem unfolds them through sequence. This difference gives ekphrasis a productive formal problem: language has to decide where the eye moves first.
Cloud formulas
Wolkenformeln, “cloud formulas,” brings atmospheric change into contact with systems of description. Clouds are visible structures whose forms continually alter through weather.
The phrase suggests a desire to name something unstable. That tension fits Röhnert’s larger poetics of place, where observation becomes exact through language while the observed world keeps moving.
Place as literary form
Across cities, karst landscapes, travel notebooks, translation, and visual art, Röhnert treats place as an active formal problem. Geography determines routes, scale, weather, architecture, and the language available to the observer.
His writing gains coherence from this sustained attention to movement through environments. The city produces one rhythm, karst another, translation another. Each form asks how a writer can remain precise while responding to conditions that keep changing.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers engaging travel, translation, landscape, walking, and the poetics of place.