Starting from the observation that a norm-setting, standard-forming poetics no longer exists, Grünbein outlines his poetic development as a "sketch for a personal psychopoetics." It revolves around the idea of the precise word, which only reaches its maximum charge as a result of the life situation, its position within the compositional whole of the poem, and within the overall system of all an author's works. Under the guiding phrase "Poetry is subject magic as a linguistic event," the poet presents ten theses at the end of his lecture on the current state of what is likely to be an unending search for meaning: not as poetics and not as a manifesto, not as theory or method, but as a stubborn mode of operation of poetry in a post-magical time.