Documentary Poetry

by Heimrad Bäcker

Austrian poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker's essays, collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his investigation into the memory of the Holocaust. A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria's largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory. Bäcker's writings constitute a singular source for considering the critical potential of contemporary literature.

"Heimrad Bäcker produced some of the most enigmatic texts of conceptual writing by amplifying the dynamics between the concrete and the abstract, the ephemeral and the remnant, the decontextualized and the historicizeable, what cannot be depicted and what cannot be avoided." —CRAIG DWORKIN

"Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker's appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice-which is all of us." —JOHANNA DRUCKER

"Backer painstakingly-and repeatedly-samples, fragments, slashes, echoes, and reconstellates short piercing details from Nazi metonymy as elegy and epitaph." —CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Translation. Holocaust Studies. Essay. Poetics.

Genres: Literature, Nonfiction, Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2024

Reviews

[Hetian bias]

yes

[Jack Alexander Lawrence]

Fascinating insight into Bäcker's process of composition, and the reasoning behind it. Now I'll have to get my hands on nachschrift.