Cahier

A collection of poetic stream-of-consciousness prose meditations by Friederike Mayrcker. Friederike Mayrcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesnt even have time for life itselfunless its 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, Mayrcker 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, Mayrcker presents in this cahier a life that follows only one maxim: Not just what is written, but existence, too, must be poetic.