Friederike Mayröcker - Biography

Friederike Mayröcker (1924- ) is an Austrian poet renowned for versatility and experimentation in verse. Friederike Mayröcker was also a successful writer of radio plays, performance texts and children’s books. In 1977, Friederike Mayröcker was awarded the Trakl Prize. She was also awarded Great Austrian State Prize, Anton Widgans Prize, Roswitha Prize, Erich Fried Prize, America Awards Prize and Georg Buchner prize.

Friederike Mayröcker was born on the twentieth of December 1924 in Vienna. The city of her birth remained her home for a significant portion of her life. Mayröcker’s first published poems found their home in Plan. Friederike Mayröcker’s early poems are considered to be imaginative and lyrical.

Mayröcker briefly studied business; however, her initial studies were cut short when she was drafted into the Lufwaffe in 1942. Her service lasted until 1945. In 1945, she took the state examination in English. Mayröcker was employed as an instructor of English in the Viennese public schools from 1946 until 1969. She took a leave of absence from her teaching position in 1969 and officially retired in 1977.

In 1966, Friederike Mayröcker published Tod durch Musen. This collection of poems is considered to be her first significant publication. Her work after this period experimented with linguistic form. Starting in 1969, Friederike Mayröcker began to work as a freelance writer. In the 1970s, she experimented with short prose that referenced dialects, foreign languages, jargon and pop culture. These works contained drawings or possessed a strong visual element.

In 1971, Tender Buttons fur Selbstmorder was published in Fantom Fan. In this work, Friederike Mayröcker honors the grand dame of modernist poetics, Gertrude Stein. She would similarly reveal the influence of e. e. cummings in her work. In 1972, Friederike Mayröcker created the Aria on Feet of Clay: Metaphysical Theater. This work assembled passages from a wide variety of genres including comic strips, detective stories, pornography, and science fiction.

In the 1950s, Friederike Mayröcker developed contact with the Wiener Gurppe. This organization’s interest in Baroque literature, Dadaism, Expressionsim and Surrealism framed its conversations about linguistic philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstien, Fritz Mauthner and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The group also explored the skepticism, and criticism of language. For members of the group language was seen as sonic and optic material for the creative endeavors. This type of interrogation resonated with Friederike Mayröcker’s own linguistic concerns.

Friederike Mayröcker had a close relationship with one member of the Wiener Gruppe in particular, the Austrian experimental poet and translator Ernst Jandl. Mayröcker and Jandl lived together from 1954 until Jandl’s death in 2000. Mayröcker and Jandl collaborated on many poems. In 1971, Friederike Mayröcker and Ernst Jandl collaborated on the radio play Funf Mann Menschen. This play disposed of the traditional narrative tools of dialogue and monologue. Speech and sound effects were scored in the manner of music.

In 1973, Friederike Mayröcker and Ernst Jandl joined Grazer Autorenversammlung. The group stood in opposition to the P.E.N. Club in Vienna, which was viewed as being too conservative. This was also the year that Each a Cloud-covered Summit was published. This work of prose by Friederike Mayröcker is episodic with a narrative constructed by structural relationships. However, this work is rooted Friederike Mayröcker’s actual experience of her travel through the United States.

Friederike Mayröcker’s poetry is characterized as being playful toward language and the world. Her work is at times uncanny and at times casual, but mostly unsentimental. Despite these qualities, Friederike Mayröcker does not lack concern for her personal life or real world concerns. The power of her poems to Ernst Jandl are some of her most powerful.

In Richard Dove’s translation of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem for Ernst Jandl, “Has 1 Invisible Bird Here," Mayröcker combines her abstract and non-linear poetics in order to capture the loss. She utilizes the fluidity of song to throat to asthma to impress upon the reader the nature of loss.

Experimental poets who have followed Mayröcker have touted her as a fine crafter of concrete poems. However, Friederike Mayröcker drew from a lot of other modernist techniques to give her poems a greater impact. The free association inherent in work has led some critics to link it to Freudian, Dadaist and Surrealist thought. However Friederike Mayröcker’s work resists easy classification. This type of associative plot analogue is also characteristic of her non-narrative texts. The texts that Friederike Mayröcker creates do not represent reality as much as they try to create reality a system on nonchronological dislocations. Sounds and syntax dominate the work.

In Magische Blatter, Friederike Mayröcker (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) tries to relate the nature of experimental work: “I am afraid we are like people who try, the morning after, to retrace the complex, branching body of dreams, but soon give up, disappointed and dissatisfied with trying to fixate what is vague." She explains that much thought and subtlety goes into to the crafting of a poem, but is difficult to suss out the relevant processes in order to satisfy the readers expectation.

Readers were slow to embrace the work of Friederike Mayröcker. This is due to the high cognitive demands that are required when reading her texts. However, eventually German and global audiences learned to appreciate Mayröcker’s work. The German readership made her book Die Abschiede a best seller in 1980. Friederike Mayröcker has had a lasting impact on contemporary German-language literature. Mayröcker unlike a lot of poets from the post-War period has tried to move beyond the social and political implications of the war. One of the projects of Friederike Mayröcker’s prose aligns itself with the contemporary impetus in prose to make the language and the writing process more central than character development and plot. However in more recent work, some critics have seen a trend towards more traditional realism in her work.

Some of Mayröcker’s work has been translated into English. Most recently include the following translated collections. In 1994, Rasmarie Waldrop and Harriett Watts published as with each clouded peak (Sun & Moon Press). Carcanet Press has scheduled the release of Richard Dove’s English translation of her work …raving language: Selected Poems 1946-2006.