Cahier

If a collage and a poem are both produced through an arrangement of disparate images, the main difference between the two is that the latter relies on language. In Friederike Mayröcker’s cahier, translated from German by Donna Stonecipher, the poems read like collages—typographical symbols, punctuation, parts of speech, and so forth, are treated as images and arranged on the page based on a connection known only to the poet. The rules of syntax and language give way to a concurrence of images that jostle for attention:

            “since I stuff pieces of cake into myself these days, and bamboo branches, namely it was cropped, the day’s tail = the night’s tail (little dog with cropped tail galloping past the Roman sun &c.), I remembered a bouquet of white roses in a jar (le kitsch), 1 birdlet between the pages of a book : when I opened it the little bird fluttered up, a flowery scent when I opened the window in June,

In poetry, it’s hard to make time appear fluid; language imposes a sequence. Yet here, the cake, broken branches, a bouquet of roses remembered—all of these can be read (or seen) all at once, or in a sequence that doesn’t have to follow the order on the page. A collage is a space for simultaneities—the past is level with the present, so that the eye can flit from one to the other without being driven by chronology.

In cahier, Mayröcker is interested in composing memory—of both external and internal life—without ceding to a temporal scale. The page echoes the mind, as fragments of the past and present merge seamlessly:

felt myself taken back to a cold early morning at the sea in Trieste, talking is clearly a distraction from the essence = from writing, isn’t it. Ely just after the holiday (Descent from the Cross) I sit in the train station restaurant order a coffee and read in ROLAND BARTHES BY ROLAND BARTHES. It takes about 50, 60 years to come to know oneself : to come up with a self :