This week on the blog, Carcanet poet Jeremy Over celebrates the life's work of one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets, Friederike Mayröcker.
Towards the end of Richard Dove’s invaluable translations of a selection of Mayröcker’s poetry (published by Carcanet in 2007), there was a section of, then unpublished, poems entitled ‘Have Got a Flow of Poems Now’. The floodgates have opened wide throughout her ninth decade (she celebrates her 90th birthday tomorrow - 20th December) with nine new volumes of poetry and prose published by Suhrkamp Verlag. The flood of prizes also shows no signs of abating with Mayröcker picking up the 2009 Hermann Lenz prize, the 2010 Peter Huchel Prize, the 2011 Bremen Literature prize, and this year the Golden Badge of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria.
Kathleen Raine said that reading Peter Redgrove’s poetry was ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’ and, although her poetry is very different, the description applies equally well to the experience of reading Friederike Mayröcker’s unique combination of expressionism, Romanticism and surrealism. Try this, for example:
'have just invented language raving language'
by the second, itself, and have to
hurry GET MOVING before the sun rears up, REVOLTS etc.,
I stand by the window or crouch in a ball : a bundle in
the corner. Large butterfly geranium leaf
on the flagstones in the corridor : pressed flat / like
the past - (I’d like this sentence in the tiniest print!).
Here and there the innermost plantations, look, the orangerie!,
writes Marcel Beyer : smells of camel, or movable
baptismal angel. And thus Artaud’s face thought-body or -blood,
Artaud’s anemone hand.
THIS IS 1 LOVE LETTER!, the points of the mountains, the sharp
eyes like needles pinned to my nature, alas! Nature, pi-
nned to my own body-skin, alas, woe is me! I scream
writhe finish myself off, the flooded eye the feathered
eye, this nature or what!, this chiffre full moonlight -
you come into the room, I’m waiting for your voice
I’m writing deluded letters which you’ll never receive,
such thin and vulnerable skin-intercourse, this is 1 merciful
weather, the whitethroat’s kiss in the gardens . . this
word in the wire in communion I’m dreaming of you, and
ecstasy itself, this magpie,
have just invented language raving language
Mayröcker has described herself as an Augen-und Ohrenmensch; as someone who depends entirely on visual images and aural perceptions, and I think it’s the focus on this surreal rush of sensual images in her work that has often led to it being described as almost hallucinatory in effect. An analogy from perceptual psychology would perhaps be the motion after effect or waterfall illusionwhich is experienced by someone who stares at a waterfall for a minute or two and then looks at the stationary rocks to the side of the waterfall which appear to rise suddenly upwards. The rapid shifts amongst the flux of images that the reader gazes at, almost simultaneously, in Mayröcker’s collage of free association, fantasy and clear eyed descriptions of nature and everyday life can trigger such vertiginous and uplifting moments. This is not the poetry equivalent of sixties ‘op art’ though; the inundations in Mayröcker’s poetry are loaded with emotion. She is the most rhapsodic of modern poets, pouring out lyrical and ecstatic descriptions of memories from her idyllic childhood holidays in Deinzendorf, or joy at listening to her favourite music and then, often in the same poem, raging in a frenzy about the transience of life especially after the death of her life partner Ernst Jandl in 2000 which led to a prolonged expression of grief and an exploration of what she has termed the ‘heartrendingness of things’. Mayröcker has formally announced in interviews that she is ‘against death’. When she was eighty she felt that she was ‘only just starting’ and a life of 130, or even 200 years, would not be long enough to satisfy her desire to live, read and write or simply ‘to look at the world, to look at life without story’. The publisher’s information on her most most recent book, Cahier, states that she ‘has no time’ now, especially for narrative against which she has railed for years. If Mayröcker’s life and writing - the two are synonymous for her - do not, as she maintains, bear any trace of story, they do have a remarkably consistent and whole-hearted sense of what she described in an early poem as her ‘calling’, which was to fling herself ‘like a horribly burning wheel/ down a steep slope/ shorn of all the taboos and dreams of yesterday/ heading for an outlandish target : // without any choice/ but with an impatient heart’.
If you want something a little more full-bodied from Austria this Christmas than The Sound of Music, why not join the birthday celebrations and try out what Mayröcker’s work has to offer?
'liberation through reading, a Christmas letter'
‘there’s knot-writing in there old magic
text with complex themes - you can leave it
in the cardboard
box, hold it in your hands read it
with your eyes, or you can sever the twine
with the knife (the writing grows
lively), or you can do it the other way round, hold
in your eyes read with your hands, but in each case
it says LIBERATION THROUGH READING. .’
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He studied law at Leeds University and now lives near Cockermouth in Cumbria. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II (Carcanet, 1999). His first collection was A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet, 2001). His second collection, Deceiving Wild Creatures, was published in 2009.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946 - 2005 by Friederike Mayröcker.
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!