ABSTRACT
Brinkmann, whose early death in a road accident on a visit to London put an end to a career which may or may not have been in the doldrums, began in association with the Cologne realists (Wellershoff, Herburger, Elsner, etc.) and developed quickly during the 1960s to make him Germany’s principal advocate of American pop culture (especially in the poems of Die Piloten (1968), in the translation of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1969) and in the anthologies ACID (1969, with Ralf-Rainer Rygulla) and Silver Screen (1969)) and the poète maudit of the German alternative scene. Never political, he combined crude vitalism, linguistic virtuosity and an obsession with the surface detail of everyday life; only the last of these features, however, was taken up and developed by others (e.g. Born, Theobaldy, Jürgen Becker). While his poetry already seems dated and undisciplined, his final major prose work Rom. Blicke (1979) may prove to be a seminal work in its combination of verbal and photographic commentary, besides maintaining the strong German tradition of literature portraying the metropolis.
