Abstract
Abstract This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza]. The article shows that BROTWOLKE belongs to a group of texts whose titles indicate an ekphrasis or an intermedial quality, but whose specific point of reference is absent. Rather than referencing to a specific painting, the poem thus showcases different aspects of the visual. Offering a close reading of the poem, the article explores Mayröcker’s special technique of image-writing and its dynamic effect on the reader. The article argues that the poem both “shows the word” and “writes the image.” It is shown that Mayröcker’s stream-of-consciousness is a process that refers to the act of writing in the first place and then to an inventory of texts and images that float the text as a stream of sense-data.
Highlights
This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza]
The generative dynamics between visual arts and poetic images unfolds as a two-way transformative process: Visual arts inform poetic images, and poetic language deploysvisual imagery
If we look closer at the nature of the relationship between text and images, it becomes evident that the poem BROTWOLKE displays different kinds of images and explores different “ways of seeing.”
Summary
The analysis of text–image relations has a longstanding tradition within the study of literature and art. Offering an exemplary close reading of one of Mayröcker’s many intermedial poems, BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza, I will shed light on more general poetic characteristics of Mayröcker’s poetry as well as on the dynamic relation between image and word in postmodern poetry. As a matter of fact, Mayröcker wrote her poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza at the end of August/beginning of September 1994. The naming of Karla Woisnitza in Mayröcker’s BROTWOLKE suggests an intermedial frame of reference for this poem. In Mayröcker’s poetry, everyday life and writing seem to be closely entangled, some texts appear to be written in a diary-like technique (Herrmann and Horstkotte 185) – like this scene of a spectator leaning by a window, looking at the clouds in the sky and watching the rain pour down. The generative dynamics between visual arts and poetic images unfolds as a two-way transformative process: Visual arts inform poetic images, and poetic language deploys (para)visual imagery
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