Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) was an artist, poet, and influential editor of the Austrian avant-garde. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, includingtranscript (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He published major works by Austrian artists and experimental writers in his journal neue texte (1968-1991) and under the imprint of Edition Neue Texte (1976-1992), the publishing house that he ran along with his wife Margret Bäcker. Most of his literary works draw on the methods of concrete and visual poetry to present documentary material about the Shoah. These books were historical and literary, and they were also part of a critical autobiography, an examination of Bäcker’s enthusiastic participation in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Seascape was Bäcker’s first book; it was published in German in 1985, when he was 60.

Bäcker’s essay on documentary poetics appears in Jacket2.

An essay on Bäcker’s later work appears on crosspollenblog.

Patrick Greaney is Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-editor and translator of An Austrian Avant-Garde (Les Figues Press) and the author of Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin and Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (both from University of Minnesota Press).

Charles Bernstein is author of Recalculating (University of Chicago Press), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago),  and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.