I am in the Notting Hill Bookshop, when it existed, talking with the late Sheila Ramage, to whom in retrospect I owe so much. If my memory doesn’t fail me, she had told me that she had married an Austrian emigré, who had fled from the war. As humbly as anyone can, she told me about regular meetings with Elias Canetti and all the European literary brilliance London housed after the Second World War. I am a year into knowing literature, and poetry. I am starting to write. She gives me a book by Erich Fried. And she sends me to Kensal Green Cemetery.
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Viennese Actionism. A friend sees me smash a building with a spade in Latvia, on video, and suggests I look up the Actionists, knowing I don’t know them. I see why, and I see why they did what they did. I start attending Bob Cobbing’s writers’ forum after his death but before mine. I hear of his correspondences across the world, at the height of sound and concrete poetry’s first boom. He was close with Ernst Jandl. Oh, the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) too, then. I copy out H. C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm.
I am, again, being helped on by the Austrian Cultural Forum, and we make a film, Where is Everyone Austria?, during the lockdowns. The Austrian poets send me their footage, I roll around in the ACF bedrooms with a rainbow hippo. It is seen over 1,000 times online in the first few months. I am then performing at the Austrian Embassy, talking, making people laugh, hopefully, then uncomfortably, and the room stretches on like a glossy landlocked state. I am in Belgrade on the day of Brexit, having coffee with a surly Austrian poet, Stefanie Sargnagel. ‘Not a good day to be you,’ she says. I am receiving a hamper of Austrian goods at my home, a gift from a friend, and eat the cake with my hands. I am in Graz, at the Forum Stadtpark. A film of my words is projected in massive letters across a public park. It says, ‘two dates and a line between, that is all there is’.
Who has the chance to be led to such a tradition, that isn’t their own? Who then gets to work with it, now, as an outsider? What a privilege to have built a structure which allows me to invite Austrians to perform in London, and to go to festivals there, and to collaborate. To learn of them through them, and to see their tradition in a way they never will. Envy is inspirational.
I organise one of the Illuminations events in Kensal Green Cemetery itself, to celebrate Erich Fried, where he is buried. I end up being poet-in-residence of this place, the cemetery, for a whole summer. I get to know Fried’s son David, his niece Maeve, his friend, John Parham. They read for me, and us all, in the Dissenters’ Chapel. He was larger in that room, as he was in life. My younger British friends don’t know him. I’ll settle for them watching and reading the Austrian poets of their own age, for they are the ones who carry with them a century or more of something that no other country can, or will, commit to paper or the stage.