Complex Temporalities, Poetic Niches, and Insular Moments: The Poetry of Sepp Mall

Abstract The South-Tyrolean author Sepp Mall, born in 1955, is renowned for his intricate artistic poems. For the writer, composing poetry is a practice of deceleration: an act of both reducing speed and slowing down. Similarly, he describes the process of reading poems as a practice of standing still, of reflecting, and as a highly attentive practice of perceiving and sensing (Mall, 2022). The following article brings Mall’s long poem “Unwirkliches Blau (Rondo)” (Unreal blue Rondo) from his most recent poetry collection Holz und Haut (Wood and skin) into focus, and discusses in which ways the poem opens up novel spaces of perception regarding time by seizing alternate temporalities – in other words, non-human-centred temporalities, as suggested by the poem itself. These spaces of perception manifest as utopian niches in the sense of deep, small, and secluded chronotopes of imagination and perception, which brim with transformative potential as they offer a means of widening one’s perception of temporalities.