Otto Laske is a bilingual poet writing in English. Born in Oleśnica, Silesia, Poland, when it was still German, he has written poetry in German since 1955, and in English since 1966. Over his lifetime, he has (so far) produced six poetry collections, none of them presently known in English, except as translations of his German poetry (a few of them published in Osiris, 1992-2016). In 2022, a selection of poems from his first four collections was published under the title Schlesische Sprachschmiede / Silesian Language Smithy at Frieling-Verlag, Berlin, Germany (ISBN 9-783828037298). Otto combines in his work European and American traditions, naturally blending them in the spirit of contemporary American poetry. He strives for a poetry of enactment rather than declaration and self-staging, finding musicality to be a non-negotiable aspect of poetry.
In 2025, Otto fused his first five collections-- entitled (1) Toenungen, (2) Tremblings, (3) Untold Harmonies, (4) Karman Poems, (5) Prose Poems ("New Syntax") -- in a single collection called SONGS OF EXILE AND RETURN, PART ONE AND TWO. Part Two, consisting of his prose poems, functions as a critical interlocutor with Part One that implicitly critiques the claims of lyric poetry to emotional and aesthetic dominance, thus creating a dialogue between lyric poetry and prose lyrics. (This is a pendant to his digital paintings disputing the curatorial hegemony of manual painting, and of his work in dialectic disputing the hegemony of purely logical, formalistic thinking ...).
His most recent, sixth, collection, entitled Edge Work: Conversations with Absence (2024 f.), centers on Absence as a well of transformation and renewal (not simply as something to sorrow about and "overcome"); it can be read as SONGS PART THREE in that it adds another layer of the exile / return theme focused on losing one's homeland.
Otto is also the editor of Nadine Boughton's (his deceased wife's) poetry ("In the Lap of Night and Sixteen Sonnets", AMZN, 2026), and is presently working on bringing out her unpublished poems and other writings, among them her essay on "Finding Wholeness in Art Making: A Search for Authentic Living", a groundbreaking study of the creative process focused the archetype of the Feminine.
To listen to his English and/or German readings of his poetry, go to https://ottolaske.com/poetry/english-rea... or https://ottolaske.com/poetry/german-read..., respectively. To locate videos of his public readings, go to https://ottolaske.com/poetry/. To view and listen to animations that combine his poetry with his electronic music and images, go to https://ottolaske.com/gallery/visual-mus..., selecting specifically "Treelink" and "Farewell to Los Angeles". In these works, poetry read aloud by him is treated along a scale from autonomous poetic speech to being sound material not different from, and intermingled with, musical sound.
Audio of a 2019 poetry reading is found at https://archive.gloucesterwriters.org/wp...
ART WORK OUTSIDE OF POETRY Those interested in Otto Laske's visual art work are invited to go to https://www.saatchiart.com/olaske or https://www.saatchiart.com/olaske?srslti.... Those interested in his instrumental/vocal and electronic music are invited to go to https://ottolaske.com/music/
Presently, Otto is interested in a group of established writers who deal with issues of composition rather than just content (texts and single poems), meaning that they understand Gertrude Stein's statement that "it is composition that makes all the difference", -- who thereby recognize a meta-level of writing "above content" that has to do with how parts of a poetry collection (or collection of stories) communicate with each other, and thus determine (or influence) how individual pieces of a collection are to be read, understood, and how they dialogue with each other.
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