with each clouded peak

by Friederike Mayröcker

poetry, tr Rosmarie Waldrop

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Friederike Mayröcker (born 20 December 1924 in Vienna) is an Austrian poet. From 1946 to 1969 Mayröcker was an English teacher at several public schools in Vienna. In 1969 she took a release from working as a teacher and in 1977 she retired early.

She started writing as a 15-year-old. In 1946, she meet Otto Basil who published some of her first works in his avant-garde journal Plan. Mayröcker's poems were published a few years later by renowned literary critic Hans Weigel. She was eventually introduced to the Wiener Gruppe, a group of mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian authors.

Friederike Mayröcker is recognized as one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets. She also had success with her prose and radio plays. Four of them she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, with whom she lived together from 1954 until his death in 2000.

Her prose is often described as autofictional, since Mayröcker uses quotes of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries in her work.

Mayröcker describes her working process as follows: "I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language."

A German biographical movie documenting Mayröcker's life and work was released in 2008

Reviews

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve learned a lot from reading Wayne Koestenbaum. But his best advice by far was just : read Friederike Mayrocker. I started with ‘brutt, or The Sighing Gardens’. Revered in Austria, where she died a few years ago at the age of 97, Mayrocker is still not widely known in English-speaking countries.

Is it because few are ready to receive language in the way Mayrocker bestows it? We want our language cut up neatly for us. Suitable for fork, spoon, or straw. Whereas I read Mayrocker to BATHE in language, to dive and drown and burst back up through the shimmering surface.

The back cover says this is a work of collage. A combination of the everyday with bits of language Mayrocker collected throughout her life on countless slips of paper. I can’t think of anyone to compare her to but Gertrude Stein in her middle period : ‘A Long Gay Book’ or ‘Business in Baltimore’. The long lines, the repetitions, the sheer devotion to words, each one a little mystery, a little divinity.

Like Stein, Mayrocker makes use of everything. Daily things and events are used not in a diaristic or autobiographical way but as furniture, as object or music. Also like Stein, these short pieces reveal much more when read aloud.

I don’t want to make the book sound too imposing -- when really it’s beguiling. This isn’t a daunting bit of Language poetry, or an erudite postmodern exercise, or even like Stein, when she gets so abstract the air seems hard to breathe.

There are times I stop to ask, “But what IS it I am reading?” And I can’t ever quite decide. I continue because it is beautiful, hypnotic, and makes me feel more alive to the possibilities of language.

from “we in the shape of a feather”:

“from the springs, he said, set forth.
more or less consciously, but we all, he said, try to leave a bit of ourselves behind before we vanish.
a trace, he said,
a greenback we’ve scribbled on before using it, he said.
from the springs, he said, and the conjunction of total alienation with self-absorption.
with veiled voice, he said, from the flower room.
contradictions, canceling out, he said.
fishing, of a white wooden house by the gray sea.
brilliant poison-green the bugs, fish, butterflies, not that I wanted very much to catch them, pin them. they, the wobbling whites and swallow-tails were too much part of the sky i admired, the noon air. . . “

Note : Because few copies of this book are in circulation, it may appear costly. However (as of October 2023) the first edition is still IN PRINT and on sale from Green Integer, a later incarnation of its original publisher, Sun & Moon.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

a nightiemare, he said, he laughed.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every day goes by and Mayröcker's writing gets better. All of these poems are extremely consistent, which is remarkable in itself, in their exploration of what inserting "he said" and "she said" into the middle of poetic thoughts and conglomerations of words can do. It's A+ writing, for the garlic cube on every plate.

Flip through the book with my favorite quotes:

a nightiemare

do they really always expect a mirror when they reach for a book or other reading matter, he said, do they always want to find just themselves, be it in a miserable shard.

and all the other trees too, he said, talked of your mouth

and us with the eternal alpenglow behind the house

our mental separation from the environment had already begun

how every new day we wash, dress, have washed, have dressed, this torture till we've finished washing, dressing

reality based on values, she said, contemplation.
new contemplation perhaps, he said.
a hand, he said, with a baker's tong reaching from the shop into a chock-full confectionary window, removing a segment from an already cut pie

standing without neighborhood

our mental separation from the environment had begun long ago

hurrying toward the anchorage

it used to be hats, he said, but now.
he reached for his archaic dagger and looked at us.
this heroic impossibility, he said, of communication, the impossibility of being able to communicate, the impossibility of saying something, he said, it will wipe out your initiative.
and in the end, the animals will expect to become human beings, he said, the heroic animals

our mental separation from the environment was already quite advanced

first time the construction worker came to the house and told us he'd carried the basket, carried it the way all peasant women do, on his head, and demonstrated.

i can tell, he said, how my bed gradually grows warm with the warmth of my body.
with the person i was at ten

back then , hew said, when we all went out to eat fish together and

coming out of a raw world into a smooth one

i'm looking forward to your presence

i hope, he said, you will have a chance to meet your translator here

this dirty mutation, he said, that awaits us all when the green expanse of leaves is broken by white dots, spots and stripes

because you are living a life that is not your life

because over our skulls, he said, they are shaking sacks of bones

we had a hundred premonitions of what was to come

the things that haven't happened to us, he said, but almost could have, frighten us more deeply.
you're pinned down, he said

tinny old pianner wrapped in love

it upsets my search for a new magic of language, forest father of german art

it upsets me, he said, as it upsets me that i, because alive, try to spew forth everything inside me because i live by living. he felt with the thumb of his right hand the pulse of his left.

it upsets me, he said, as it upsets me that i won't be able to go to texas any more, it would have been nice for preserving the texts.
a trip, he said, a trip shredded into many small pieces.
it upsets me that i won't be able to experience it, it upsets me that i see it disintegrate even while i experience it.
disintegrate, he said, a situation getting out of hand, he said, in spite of stepping on the brake while preserving the texts.

to feel shy of gestures.
if any of you have had this experience, he said, fixing us.
a shyness that could gradually turn you to stone, he said.
a shyness of moving your foot, turning your head, a shyness, that is, he said, and in waves, in silent screams.
top level alarm until you go to seed outwardly and inwardly, until you finally break down with tattered focus, unanchored tongue.
ready for pain, he said, while his eyes drilled holes into ours, and we felt ourselves stepping close to him.
it upsets me, he said, that it upsets me.
he did not let go of us.
and the figure of thought? we cried in a desperate move and felt ourselves bumping into him. we had lunged at him. however, while we finished him off, he kept talking to us.
we finished him off, but he did not let go of us.
i was very attached to you, he said.
but equanimity on parting, he said. and this is it, by god, he said.
if i had not been knocked down to my bed by you, he said.
and very disagreeable and in general, he said.
i've rather had it, he said.
while we know we had long been put back in our place we felt this would not let go of us.

this giving somebody a spark of hope, he said, and then stomping it out.

tinny old pianner, he said, nice tinny pianner
but equanimity, he said, in a person.
the ruined words, lost words, he said, the words misplaced.

maybe i'm a chaotic pedant, he said
i think i've always acted under duress, he said.

as in my childhood, he said, when i desperately tried to ingest language.
dying, he said, for the splendor of words, cries, questions, tangled structures, coupling cupolas above all, business streets, markets, greenhouses, train stations.
my grounds of grace, he said.
radiant words, he said, cries, calls, questions, tangled structures.
dying for them, he said.

he looked at the swallows we could;t see

hands in a grave fallen from former form.

i wanted to grab the palm fronds, a palm tree agony, he said.

irretrievable time of life.

and their public behavior, he said, inversely proportional to their erotic desires for each other.

self abnegation.
each family, he said, thus has its own christmas tradition.

sand paintings and whatever else

pieces of language, like meat.
hurled against the forehead

self-consumption in time

ears of corn like ears of corn, what a waste.
reality, melted to the spot, he said, me body chill

wet feather

the conjunction of total alienation and self-absorption

contradictions, canceling out, he said.

or richard, out there in the garden, his back to the veranda we've just entered. we'll look at him for a long time before calling his name. as soon as we've called him he'll turn round, come to the veranda and welcome us. gives the impression, she said, he had first to be by himself to deal with his joy at our coming.

the presence of a loved one, she said, cannot be revoked, only assuaged.

i had often thought of it, had often thought i would soon have to write it down.

and the wasp's nest of her genitals in the niche of the basilica

rain, eye contact.
a supernatural bed wetter perhaps, he said.
murky piss perhaps, free paraphrase, wireless, indecent postage.

so-called sister cities
through an open iron door, he said, you could see straight into painted nature.

i felt something like a malaise in boston.

there stands there green

enter into a strange quarrelsome relation to the world

that time i cried with mountain-happiness

the sweep of the drapes immense, the miracle profane, he said.
like peacock splendor.
in a, pianos, temples, she said, she laughed.

noisily incorporated casually

nothing but falling out of line and alarming friends

i stared at the sparse leaves of the tree.
1 oboe, distant music.

seeing a poster, he said, which advertises bitters by showing a faithful old retainer with caring look and livery, a bodyguard, gives us a feeling of security.

as if i wanted to air bathe, as if i wanted to stick my head right into the sun grill.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

it begins with a deluge, he said, transreal, electrification called love, a sense of worry in belonging: the trees, the moon, the wind, the mountain. in a rundown neighborhood, we have to take things as they come, he said, the fact that time is so short, he said. the effort, he said, we spend in order to maintain the substance, he said. how futile, after all, only a remainder of our time remains, as we reach tapisserie 8 months' snow, we keep, he said, perhaps too carelessly to the beaten paths. on the one hand, he said, it seems necessary. on the other, we might discover all sorts of important things for ourselves, he said. from hand of one day to mouth of the next. and then, they settled in, a city of metz. they found their belonging.

[era · Rating 4 out of 5]

how it feels to revisit a memory

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the use of repetition, but the same device for 80+ pages was a bit too much.

[belisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

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