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Poem by Anne Korff

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the young German poet Anne Korff (pictured) this Friday - perhaps apt since her love of film dovetails with the fact that this week is the 60th anniversary of the editing of The Third Man. For those who are into auspicious numerology, this is Eyewear's 1,313th post.

Korff was born in a town next to Hannover, Germany, in 1985. In 2004 she graduated from the local secondary school and left to work and travel in England. In 2008 she graduated from Kingston University London with a First Class Bachelor Degree in Creative Writing and Film Studies. It was here that I met her, and where she impressed me greatly with the creation of a brilliant TV Bible on the golden age of Hollywood - and, of course, her poems.

They strike me as being very powerful and clever in their fusing of film and feminist theory with disturbing, sometimes erotic, and highly expressionistic verbal construction, often presented with disrupted syntax and hybridity of language - these are postmodern European lyrics that echo Benn as much as Plath. The one I have chosen here is actually in some ways less sinister, and more playful, than much of Korff's work.

Some of her poems have been published in Ripple Magazine. Several more are forthcoming in Nthposition, in May. Korff is currently interrupting her further studies in order to work on her creative projects including scriptwriting and poetry. She lives in London.


My favourite movie

Blood red nails cut
short flaking and hair
curls around my neck into
a touch of evil my lashes
black my lips painted
in dark, dark red
I wink at the dark passage
my boots deadly knee high
my thighs in black jeans tight
in a lonely place I sigh a
farewell my lovely

On my bicycle I lean onto
the handlebar and shoot the
pianist with the road
rising ever so slightly
me gradually breathless
wind strokes my cheeks
bare and tears at my hair
une femme est une femme
my lips parted red painted I
taste exhaust fumes
at the back of my
throat the sunshine
tickles my chin like Jules
et Jim and glistens
in the drops above my lips

poem by Anne Korff
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