Sophie Poppmeier’s poetry publications are
Book One (2002),
Book Two (2003),
Book Three (2013) and
Book Four (2015). Her theoretical ‘memoir’
of her years as a
burlesque artiste in Vienna,
Minnie Minerva’s Book of Marvels is
forthcoming.
Nearly all of her poems are in
her famous four line stanza, in which she plays off regularity against irregularity,
long against short, a poesis that she sometimes jokingly compares to the
balance and teasing poise of the burlesque artiste, and sometimes to the bodily
constraint and ironic performative freedom of corsetry. Masks, disguises and
partial disclosures abound in her work. But she has quoted Freiderike
Mayröcker: ‘flesh of the poem, the/
torments severe, I vanish in the/ line-break’; the world ‘snuggles gently up to
the/ line-knee’. Poppmeier’s habit of nearly always entitling her poems Book X
Poem Y is another trademark. Critics have called this a gimmick, but the
presentational austerity is an answer to the ‘problem’ of titles (a problem she
does not seem to have encountered as a performance artist, but it may well be
in reaction to the need to define, fix and advertise an ‘act’ for a ‘show’ to
dispense with such ‘labels’ as she calls them).
Book Two, published very soon (too soon, critics aver) after Book One, is the exception. Here she
(temporarily) abandoned her titling system and the four line stanza. The book
was largely an exploration of her work in burlesque (coming from the years of
her first period of work in 2001-2006) and was slated, particularly by feminist
critics, who dubbed her the ‘Whore of Babelfish’. A cooler look at the poems
will indeed judge them to be inferior to the rest of her work, but the
free-ranging and personal style (owing somewhat to the poems that Mayröcker was
writing at the time) does have its defenders.
As a burlesque dancer she
performed as Minnie Minerva (but occasionally as Polly or Poppy Polidori or –
in Berlin –
Angela Merkin). (See
here.) Tall, with long black hair, her long nose, her heavily made-up
eyes used to dramatic effect, she was an immediate and authoritative success
(particularly with women). Her best early work includes the ‘
Ute Lemper
Trilogy’, a 15 minute piece combining the swirling silk sea waves and
bejewelled seashell bodice of ‘Little Water Song’; ‘Streets of Berlin’, a mimed
drag-king boylesque; and ‘You Were Meant for Me’, in which she confronted the audience
with ‘unbridled displays of female desire’ to quote a programme of the time.
Her ‘Narcotango’ used the hypnotic grooves of
Carlos Libedinsky’s new tango
(‘Luz y Subi’, ‘Otra Luna’ and ‘Doble o nada’) for her neo-burlesque
exploration of intoxication and trance. In contrast, the energetic, almost
athletic, ‘Neveen’s Levee’, which featured the music of Salah Ragab and the
Cairo Jazz Band, involved a reverse dressing routine and Oriental dance (and
play on the letter ‘e’). ‘Madame Mallarmé’s Fan Dance’, featuring Debussy’s
‘Poisson d’or’ from
Images (Set Two),
was the most literary (and least appreciated) of her acts.
(See videos of these musics here.)
Perhaps in reaction to the criticism of the second book, she
gave up poetry and burlesque (on the brink of considerable success following
her performance at the
Berlin Burlesque Festival), but the truth may be less
dramatic, since these were the years she studied Art History in Vienna, gaining
a PhD in 2010 – she herself has talked of ‘collecting experiences’ in those
years – and it is not clear that she didn’t continue writing (while not
publishing) and teaching and theorising burlesque (but not performing, although
she is rumoured to have ventured out under cover of several of her alter-egos
when impecunious). Her book, despite its engaging title, is reputedly a
theoretical defence of the art of neo-burlesque, and has been compared, by
Jason Argleton, as analogous to, yet superior to, de Campos’ work on bossa
nova. In it, she reportedly argues that neo-burlesque is an enabling and safe but
public way of exploring and asserting various conflicting models of female
body-awareness (not just beauty) and female fantasy and sexuality (auto-,
homo-, hetero- and trans-), and draws on her experience of facilitating
workshops for differently-abled and neurologically atypical people and running the annual pan-European Ugly Bug’s
Burlesque in Bratislava. As she explained on the
Feathers and Glitter website: ‘This is what we have to do, those of
us with nineteenth century bodies in the twenty-first, to turn the ordinary
mousy split-end prose of life into the extraordinary shiny jet fringed poetry
of power!’
Book Three was judged a mature book when it appeared in 2013. The
earlier wide-eyed excitement (remember the febrile desire for ‘my chants to
change my life’ in her first poem) has given way to an aesthetic and political
sensibility reacting to a more disordered political reality, more desperate to
be sure, but more exciting perhaps for the reader. In some ways she turns to the political side of Bachman
rather than to Mayröcker, her first love in contemporary Austrian poetry. The
German poet Karla Schaffer, nine years her senior, has had some influence upon
her work and life.
Book Four (due later this year) is widely anticipated [not least of
all by me, because I’ll have to write it]. Minnie
Minerva’s Book of Marvels remains ‘forthcoming’ as it has for 5 years. So
does her much-anticipated return to the stage.
At the age of 34, in 2015, her
work began to be translated into English by the young British poet
Jason Argleton,
although
René Van Valckenborch seems to have presented her first, claiming even
to have invented her, at the end of 'his' book
A Translated Man, which is still available.
January 2015
