In Austria

In Austria, we don’t say: that’s a poem.
In Austria, we say: that’s a poetic act.

A basement. Monika Vasik reads her poems about everyday anti-Semitism. Images of old Jewish cemeteries. High spirits. Bone blossoms. Close-up on re-affirmation. For the first time, I understand what engaged poetry means. What it sounds like. This was 2014. Long ago. But the sound is still there.

Distance is but another word for movement. The final line of a poem I wrote in 2014. A colleague at Sprachkunst, Christiane Heidrich, tells me she likes it, but where am I going with it? Split ends, I appreciate.

You need sound. But you also need perspective. Anger does not want to be another word for fear. I walk past the stands at the first Krilit in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I bump into Stefan Schmitzer. You cannot negotiate with fascists, he says, after some people praise Alice Schwarzer for her peace initiative. That’s Stefan – he puts everything in perspective. If Don McLean were to write a song about the poetry scene in Austria, he would be the jester.

In Austria, we don’t say ‘okay’.
We say ‘fix.’

Stefan is the one who invites me to write for Fixpoetry in 2016. About poems. Sometimes about Austrian poetry. But what is Austrian poetry? The Wiener Gruppe? Mayröcker Mayröcker Mayröcker.

Poetry is just another word for discarding labels.

But it also opens doors. I start writing about Ann Cotten’s new book. Sandra Hubinger’s poems lay out acorns for me. And my saddest prompt: Ianina Ilitcheva, Blood and Coffee.

I write about poems. And sometimes reviewing rhymes with friends I’m making.

One of these friends is Cornelia Hülmbauer. Together, we translate surrealist poems from the SurVision project into German. One of them is called Monkeys made me do it. Cornelia translates: ‘Die Affen sind schuld’ (The monkeys are to blame). We laugh. I love it. I want to use her version. But she thinks: ‘Affen haben mich dazu gebracht’ (monkeys made me do it) is more appropriate. I should have said: ‘Poetry doesn’t have to be appropriate’. We laugh some more. That is the beauty of friendship, it never ages as long as you laugh together. Some poets become friends. Some poems too. Which ones did become friends to you? Or how?

Poems are lovers and sometimes, they even have children.

At the Literaturmeile, I sit in the audience and listen to Maximilian Scheffold read a collage. I hear lines that I know, that I wrote. They sound better in his poem. They sound. They overwhelm.

Hearing and seeing, the difference in it. It is always a problem when it comes to critiquing what has been read aloud. In 2018, as I sit with Gläserne Texte for the first time, I think to myself: please, no poems. Who can read between the lines like that?

Read it twice, says Laura Untner, says Julian Handl. Always a good idea.

In Austria, we don’t just make books for poems.
We make entire galleries.

When will you realise Vienna waits for you? Austria is not just Vienna. (Austria is not just poetry. But that’s not final). Two of the longest-established literary magazines are based in Graz.

Manuskripte are what you write. Where you have to fight your way through.

Until you stand in the open. In the Lichtungen (Stefan: Don’t forget the Perspektive!).

The first time I visit Graz, it is for a public reading, at Forum Stadtpark. I do not read myself. Actresses walk around and recite my texts, bits and pieces of them. Poems bite when they bark. It is always dark before it gets light. I wanna be the daylight in your ears. Corny. An important aspect of poetry is to corner yourself. That’s why it’s called a niche. Or: nice.

Helwig Brunner has been publishing a poetry series in Graz since 2011. From the little Cuban grammar to the taste of the cellar stairs, everything can be found here, all the colours of the rainbow. Of course, he published Sophie Reyer, too.

The second major series is published by Limbus, with six titles each year. In Innsbruck, where poetry rises like a mountain range. Of course, Sophie Reyer is published there too.

In 2019, I am in Innsbruck at the W:orte festival, co-organised by Siljarosa Schletterer. If poetry were a life in the mountains, then: ain’t no mountain high enough and no mountain lake deep enough for her. If Don McLean were to write a song about the poetry scene in Austria, she would be the queen.

In Austria, you don’t ask: Do you have mountains here?
In Austria, you ask: How far away is the nearest mountain?

Further west lies Feldkirch, home of the Feldkirch Poetry Prize. I have been invited there in 2025 to attend a conference on Rilke: What does Rilke still have to say to us today? Isn’t that the question of whether poems can grow old? Grow old with me, some poems say to us. And because we can say yes to several poems, we say: Yes. Yes. Yes.

And when the mundane
world has forgotten you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
Say to the water, swift: I am.

I am back in Vienna. In the heart of the city. Schönlaterngasse 9. That’s where it’s at.

Today is dichterloh or Dicht-Fest. Michael Hammerschmid or Semier Insayif are hosting the evening. Behind them: the tools of another craft. Happiness can be forged, but poetry must be understood? I wish I could. And I hope you can. But maybe let’s just listen. The sound is more important than the sense. Trust your senses!

It is 2021, I overhear a conversation next to me: ‘Forge the old until it is new.’ I think I must have misheard. But I don’t want to question everything.

In Austria … but let’s stop doing that.
In Austria: Austria is not important to most Austrian poets.

A few more publishers should be mentioned. Chivalry is not dead, for example! Of course, Sophie Reyer is published there, too. Also: Poetry on the podium, so that some of it fits in your pocket.

It is 2014, my first reading in Vienna at Café Anno. It is common in Austria for readings to take place in cafés. Guess some clichés are true. The Anno is home not only to Literatursonntag (Literature Sunday), but also to the magazine &Radieschen, often visited by its sister magazine Dum. There are readings every Thursday and Sunday, except during the summer break.

But there are also plenty of readings to enjoy during the summer break, thanks in particular to the Kultursommer cultural festival. Temporary stages are set up in many of Vienna’s parks and the deckchairs are arranged in long rows. In 2023, I attend a reading at the water tower in the tenth district. Among those present were several icons of young Austrian poetry: Sandro Huber, Frieda Paris and Seda Tunç, as well as Verena Dürr and Jakob Kraner, who, together with David Hoffmann, are members of the poetry punk band Smashed to Pieces, named after a quote by conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. The band take a political and poetic stance with their lo-fi arrangements. Their website quotes Ingeborg Bachmann: The carnage takes place within the bounds of what is permitted and customary. If Don McLean were to write a song about the poetry scene in Austria, they would be the mother, the daughter and the holy robot.

In Austria we say: Ingeborg Bachmann.
Say: Christine Lavant.
Say: Mayröcker, Mayröcker, Mayröcker.
And so on.

Once we were young.
That was nic(h)e.

Do any of you still listen to the radio? If so, you could tune in to Ö1 and listen to Nachtbilder (Night Pictures) where contemporary poetry is accompanied by music. Or Radio Orange, where you can listen to the literary programme presented by Ilse Kilic, Andreas Pavlic, Eva Schörkhuber and Fritz Widhalm.

The GAV (Graz Authors’ Association) is also worth mentioning, without whom little progress would be made in the field of poetry. In Austria, they are more popular than PEN. Thanks to people like Jopa Jotakin. If an AI (prompted perhaps by Jörg Piringer) were to write a song about the poetry scene in Austria in the style of Don McLean, Jopa would be the cat content you can’t live without.

Jopa is also part of the Blumenmontag team, a literary reading series at Café Stadtbahn (another café!) together with Apollonia T. Bitzan, Lydia Haider and Mercedes Kornberger. Every March, Blumenmontag hosts a poetry special with usually more than fifteen readers. As does the Graz Authors’ Association. Also in March. Sometimes it’s hard to be the first good month of the year. Fortunately, the Poesiegalerie always takes place in the less popular month of November. Three evenings filled with poetry from 6 p.m. to midnight.

What else is there to say? Names could be dropped of poets who call Vienna or Austria their domicile: Yevgeniy Breyger and Sirka Elspaß, Judith Nika Pfeiffer and Hannah K. Bründl, Franz Josef Czernin and Christoph Szalay, and those I have forgotten and who will haunt me in the twilight world.

Limbo! I almost forgot the magazine Zwischenwelt and the Theodor Kramer Society, an important institution; Astrid Nischkauer is a member of the team, an important translator and editor (and a poet herself, of course).

In Austria … but what do I know about Austria. I’m from Germany. I came here eleven years ago to study writing. Putting poems together. Since then, I learned about Jandl (he has his own poetic days) and Jaschke, Tawada and the art of leiwand, but can I say: my poems are from Austria?

It doesn’t matter where poems come from, of course. But they do originate somewhere. And they come to us from far away, until they are very close. I learnt this yet again when I wrote poems this summer that referred to Christoph W. Bauer’s project Dichterin im Fokus (Poet in Focus), more specifically: poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun and poet from the 17th century. All that anger and beauty. They are here with me. And yet still there.

So, when you are here with me, on these pages, you are in Austria. But you are also not; you are out there, in your poems, the languages and verses on which they travel.

You see: that last sentence is a joke. The words Ferse (heel) and Verse (verses) are very close to each other in German. Words bring us together and sometimes separate us. But, a hypothesis: in some poem in some language, any two words come close to each other once.

(PS: This text is a mosaic!)