Pop poet and language player: Ernst Jandl would be 100

The poet died 25 years ago during his lifetime. On August 1st, his birthday marks its 100th anniversary.

With his sound painting and word -playing poems, Ernst Jandl often broke up with grotesques, the voice conventions broke up in order to expose hidden layers of meaning. Regardless of the assessment by the official institutions, Jandl always managed to address a wide, a young audience.

Breakthrough with “Loud and Luise” 1966

His first, even more conventional volume of poems “Other eyes” appeared in 1956. In a row, the language experiments of the “Wiener Group” and the Anglo -Saxon literature influenced the young poet, which developed into a main representative of “concrete poetry”. His best -known poetry volumes include “Laut und Luise” (1966), “The Processing of the Hat” (1978) or “Self -portrait of the chess player as a drinking clock” (1983). He himself has defined four different types of basic types of his poems: “The poem in almost everyday language; the voice -demanding speech poem; the loud wordless sound poem; the silent visual poem”.

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Success as a playwright gave him his speech opera “from the stranger”, written in the subjunctive. Musically, however, Jandl had primarily impressed jazz, which made him legendary appearances with the Vienna Art Orchestra or the NDR big band.

High school teacher despite growing success

Jandl was born on August 1, 1925 in a rather apolitical Viennese household, in which the father was a bank employee, the mother was a housewife. The mother died early, which fueled the son’s writing rage. In addition, the war of war floated as a Damocles sword at the beginning of the war, and in fact Jandl later caught captivity, from which he returned in 1946.

After completing his German studies and English, the upcoming Poet in Vienna worked as a high school teacher from 1949 – an activity that, despite great success in literary business, he did until 1979. Last but not least, the employment ensured a fixed income.

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