New book published

Clemens J. Setz: When Twitter was still a poem

Clemens J. Setz(Bild: Max Zerhan/Suhrkamp Verlag)

For many years, the Graz-based star writer Clemens J. Setz not only published his own poems on Twitter, but also discovered completely new forms of poetry there. But then came Elon Musk. In his new book, Setz looks back at the golden age of Twitter poetry.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022 and turned it into X, it also marked the end of an era in literary terms. The Graz-based author and Büchner Prize winner Clemens J. Setz had not only published poems there himself, but had also discovered some of the most exciting contemporary poets on Twitter, who found the 280-character limit per tweet a creative challenge. But Musk lifted the character limit and had old profiles that hadn't posted anything for a while blocked - including some of Setz's favorite Twitter poets.

"Has any single person ever had a more destructive effect on German-language poetry than Elon Musk? I don't think so," Setz now writes in his new book "Das All im eigenen Fall", in which he has not only written a history of Twitter poetry, but in which all of his own Twitter poems can also be found - all of them wonderfully bizarre gems.

With a certain degree of melancholy, the Styrian literary star looks back on a short but intense phase of reinterpreting poetry - a time when it didn't just seem to Setz that the internet could promote new literary experiments. Instead, it was replaced by #booktok, which shows the medium of the book a way into the future - but in the most commercial form imaginable.