Aus vielen Städten: Virtuelle und andere Reisen by Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr (review)

It is rare that we scholars of literature get the opportunity to appreciate our colleagues’ journeys into the creative realm. Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr is well known as a scholar to anyone in Austrian studies and Kafka studies in particular. Her years of service on the faculty at Temple University include founding the Kafka Society of America in 1975 and introducing the Society’s journal in 1977. With Julius M. Herz, she produced the three-volume annotated Kafka bibliography (1982, 1987, second expanded and revised edition 2000). For the Austrian Cultural Institute she founded and edited the Österreich in amerikanischer Sicht series. These are just a few of her many scholarly contributions. But now we can get to know her as poet as well.

After retiring, Professor Caputo-Mayr took the opportunity to publish the perceptive, sensitive, and frequently witty fruits of her poetic work in Fidibus, the literary journal of one of her homes, Carinthia. But she can lay claim to several other homes that figure in her poems, including Trieste, Vienna, Philadelphia, and especially Manhattan. The title Aus vielen Städten is therefore appropriate, reflecting poetic responses to the metropolises Chicago, Baltimore, and Munich as well, but also to Villach and the small market town of Wernberg in Carinthia. This variety of geographical settings is complemented by a variety of themes, which come together around the subtitles of the collection, Virtuelle und andere Reisen: Sprachübungen im elektronischen Zeitalter. The poems range (often in the poet’s imagination as well) across Europe, North America, Asia, and Egypt, but they also travel into the past, historical and personal, and into the world of human expression and communication subsumed by the term media. Caputo-Mayr’s poems engage not only the traditions of high art and literature but also television, film, journalism, music, the Internet, and advertising, often in the same poem. All of these themes and motifs are anchored in moments of personal experience, and the poems artfully reflect the random juxtapositions of individual perception. This lends them their persistent and sometimes surprising lyricism.

The formal qualities of Caputo-Mayr’s poems contribute to the sense that their organizing principle is the mind and senses of the poet. Lines tend to be short, sometimes only one, two, or three words long. Asyndeton is frequent. This example from the poem “New York im Mai 2006,” shows both the prosodic and the rhetorical structure:

200 Sprachen in BrooklynKlein IndienKlein PolenKlein MexikoKlein RusslandKlein ArgentinienKlein Vietnam China Thailand

(16)

As seen here too, Caputo-Mayr frequently uses anaphora to convey the accretion of information and impressions. This passage also stands, on a small scale, for what Caputo-Mayr accomplishes poetically on a broader scale. Like Brooklyn, in which cultures, languages, images, and people from all over the world are concentrated according to inscrutable patterns, Aus vielen Städten assembles poetic motifs in what can at first appear as a jumble. This is not a self-conscious, imperious cosmopolitanism that imposes its own order on the motifs but a modest, wondering (and wandering) cosmopolitanism that allows the motifs to speak for themselves. The voice of these poems seems amazed that one life could contain such different—yet often startlingly related—places, languages, and experiences. No perspective emerges as dominant: America is sometimes seen from a European standpoint, but then Europe is also seen from an American point of view.

In the poem “Mein ungeles’ner Zeitungsberg,” a pile of newspapers and magazines, explored as if on a geological expedition into the poet’s own past, produces a random scattering of cultural references (22–25). What is looked for disappears and what does appear is unexpected, with both somber and humorous results. In “Fernöstliche Fernseh-Impressionen,” another “Collage,” the juxtaposed broadcast images generate paradoxes, synthetic critiques of reality that analysis would probably not produce. India is...