Friederike Mayröcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself-unless it’s writing. What counts, in her view, is only the poetry and “the echoic inventions” of a life that lasted for almost a century, which is preserved in her writings. Widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mayröcker passed away in 2021 at the age of ninety-six. On the outside, her life may be subject to the impertinence of the finitude of all human existence. But on the inside, and in its transformation into the eternal moment, life only becomes richer and richer in forms of experience. In radically concentrated language and compellingly beautiful images, Mayröcker presents in this cahier a life that follows only one maxim: “Not just what is written, but existence, too, must be poetic.”
