SINCE HIS LITERARY START IN 1967 with the drama Fisch aus Holz, Johannes Schenk has published more than twenty volumes of prose and poetry and is counted among the most important of Germany's new generation of poets, and yet finding information about this man in literature handbooks remains a daunting task. The reader can discover that Schenk was born in Berlin in 1941, that he worked for six years as a merchant seaman, and that in 1969 he co-founded the “Kreuzberg Street Theater.” His work, however, reveals the entire Johannes Schenk in palpable immediacy. There is scarcely a page in which the lyrical “I” is not identical with that of the author. As often as not, the motifs and images of his poems correspond with logbook fidelity to the realities of his own past and present. But even in the most fanciful transformations and rearrangements of experience, Schenk does not withdraw beyond eyeshot from the actuality of his existence, as it was formed from an impoverished childhood, through arduous, often wretched years at sea, to insecure surroundings in Berlin.

In Jona, a book of thirty connected poems published in 1976, Schenk himself is Jonah, in lone flight from Germany by way of Portugal to Casablanca; but unlike the biblical figure, he is stranded on the trials and anxieties of life in a hostile world from which he cannot escape. In his book, Der Schiffskopf (1978), Schenk takes to the sea again. But any expectation of colorful adventure awakened by the genre of the sea story is abruptly disappointed. Rather, Schenk's tales confront the reader with a desolate existence in which moments of freedom, respite from brutality and exploitation are found only fleetingly in abandon to alcohol or in the hour's warmth of a port-town embrace. In the final story, “Hunger,” the narrator laments: “Now everything was aching, my knees and my head, and as always, my stomach. There was nothing that didn't ache. Outside and inside.” Also on shore, in Berlin, the soreness persists, outside and in. With compelling candor Schenk confesses to his personal vulnerability, from which he seeks to free himself, again and again, through poetry.

The political Schenk is not a dogmatist or the literary window dresser of social theories, but a compassionate, sometimes outraged ally of the abused and oppressed in the scattered ports of his seaman's odysseys.