Iceland, the IMF, Russia etc.

In a nutshell the Icelandic economic depression could be described thus: nouveau riche assholes trashed the currency playing stockmarket cowboys with immense amounts of borrowed money. The newly privatized banks enjoyed generous credit with foreign loan institutions and became mega-monsters that over-shadowed the government budgetwise. When the shit hit the fan (as tends to happen in capitalism) the banks investment policies turned out to be sour and the pouring in of borrowed money ceased, causing the banks to rupt.

Some people are trying to spin it so: These were bad capitalists, and that doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad. Which of course is a load of youknowwhat. Liberalist policies will inevitably lead to the “market correcting itself” - as it’s called - which causes mayhem for most people. The only way of resurrecting this dead flesh is through the sorcerism of more liberal capitalism - which begets fascism, the breaking down of the welfare system, the fundings for the arts etc.

Right now it seems Icelandic authorities are mostly interested in those types of short term solutions. I don’t know what it’s called in english, but in Iceland those methods are traditionally called “peeing in ones shoe to keep warm”.

The solutions - help.

Help from the IMF - which would turn Iceland into the first “first world country” to seek out the Friedmanist bribe, gotten only through serious social cutbacks. Iceland has long been on its way out of Scandinavia and towards a more liberal economy and this would be the fast-track to get there.

Help from the European Union - that is to say joining. I’m not totally against joining the EU - culturally it would be a strong move, and it would loosen up alot of Iceland’s conservationist & isolationist tendencies. But this is the worst time to do it. Joining the EU means incredible amounts of negotiating - there’s the fishing grounds to be taken care of, for one thing, and an unimaginable amount of stuff to be thought out. You don’t want to join the EU on a hysterical whim - you want to do it when you’re strong, when you don’t need to but want to.

Help from Russia - for some inexplicable reason Russia offered Iceland a loan to fix things. Now, first of all Russia has it’s own problems, so they must have plenty of political reasons for wanting to do this. The way Russia has been behaving towards the world and it self in the last years does not warrant trust and doing deals with the devil (and this goes for the IMF, with it’s history of backing fascists worldwide, in their struggle against working class people) is not the way to go. The conditions are probably never worth the risk.

Besides. I’m not sure what Iceland needs right now is more loans.

My own suggestion is to stay poor. Take care of the poor, the poorer and the poorest. Rebuild the economy slowly - think it through, tread carefully. I mean to say: Fixing the situation isn’t going to happen in three weeks and it shouldn’t. We need to unwind this boatload of nonsense.

Several friends abroad have written to ask how I am doing personally, if this is affecting the poetry scene, if everything is allright. As most of you’ll know I don’t live in Iceland at the moment, but in Finland. Which in effect means I get paid in Icelandic krónur (for translating and writing) and I spend all my money in euros. When I came to Helsinki in april 2007, my rent was 519 euros with a weekly sauna. That is to say, 44 thousand krónur. It’s still 519 euros, which currently bounces between being 75.000 ISK and 102.000 ISK. My wife just finished her studies, and is looking for a job. She spent the summer with me in Ísafjörður, Iceland, working to be able to spend the autumn seeking a good job. Her income was also in ISK. I had a stipendium that lasted through july. So now we’re getting by on my half-salary and eating into the pittance that her income has become.

Which doesn’t mean we’re not okay. It just means we can’t go out to eat, I drink less beer and we steal movies of the internet instead of paying for a cinema-ticket (can you say “steal” on the internet - will I get sued?). I won’t be buying any books in the next months (if anyone wants to support a poetry hungry poet with chapbooks and such - my finnish adress is in the right column) - sometimes I skip the ham on my karelian pirogs. Right now, the question of the Icelandic economic crisis strikes me more as a political one, than as a personally economical one. Most of my family didn’t have much loans, and luckily the only one that did, to my knowledge, also has a decent income.

Which doesn’t mean this isn’t hurting alot of people, that in no way deserved it (many people were persuaded by the banks to change their savings into “perfectly safe” alternatives, that went poof and vanished). One of the political problems right now is that it seems the authorities are more interested in resurrecting the system we had (with new faces on some of the billionaires) than they are in helping those that need it the most (for instance, lowering the credit-rates, giving out emergency funding for those that can’t eat or pay the rent, etc.).

But to my friends, I can luckily say, we’re OK and we’re gonna stay OK.

As for the poetry scene, the crisis poses a threat that has already started to affect us seriously. But poetry is resiliant, and Nýhil is resiliant, and eventually this won’t change much.

Ginsberg vs. Playboy

Playboy: What kind of life do you think these young people [the hippies] want to lead?

AG: Here I can talk only about the life I’d like: more contact with nature; more and more occupation with exploration of subjective consciousness and enlargement of areas of inner and outer sensibility; more participation in rhythmic theater; and liberation of sexual energy from population reproduction. Since the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply” isn’t sacramentally appropriate anymore, it seems to me that the time has come for the orgy to become a communal form of “adhesive” democratic festival. Ideally, what should have happened in Chicago, for example, was that the Festival of Life should have eclipsed the convention with the glow of thousands of naked bodies intertwined, making love, spurting semen all over the newsmen and TV cameras and one another on the grass, all to the accompaniment of yab-yum mantras and naked rock-’n'-roll artists swinging through trees.

Playboy: You’ve got to be kidding.

Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind - selected interviews 1958-1996. Page: 189.

Do you have an issue?

Issue 1 is funny. It’s also pretty smart. Most people seem to agree that the book was written by an algorithm, which seems likely, particularly in light of it’s massiveness. The algorithm is smart, the people that made the algorithm are smart, but it’s also smart conceptual poetry. Perhaps you might call it juvenile, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that, but in that case it’s juvenility to be praised, much like certain artists would praise their inner child. It’s juvenile like Duchamp is juvenile, like Dada is juvenile, like Flarf, like alot of conceptual poetry, like most literary hoaxes (and quite simply, most hoaxes). It doesn’t seem to aim at pissing off - the poetry is not intentionally unflattering, there is nothing about the book that is directly derogatory - but it doesn’t care either if you get pissed off, and it’s deliberately treading through violent territory (poets aren’t just overly emotional in caricatures, they’re the same in real life, although it’s not as romantic - usually it’s either funny or pathetic, and sometimes it’s just). The researchers behind the book must’ve had a notion that people’d get pissed off, irked or upset in some way, but they couldn’t be sure without doing the research.

The hypothesis might be: Poets get upset if they suspect someone might be making fun of them. Noone knows how the poems were generated, how the names were collected, and the anthology does not have a proposed agenda - the researchers have not said anything about the aim of the book. It’s certainly not “all poets are alike”, since one would hardly propose that Gunnar Ekelöf and Kenny Goldsmith, Gary Barwin and Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Darren Wershler-Henry, William Shakespeare, Jack Kerouac and Ron Silliman were all alike. Or, it wouldn’t make any sense, and I’m sort of guessing there’s some sense in it. As is, we know it’s a hoax. We don’t know whom they’re making fun of, and we don’t like it.

All sorts of statements have been made about the authors - they’re juvenile, stupid, young (I’ve never seen anyone report actually how old these people are, and I’m not sure I’d trust them if they did, not even if the hoaxters themselves would do it), students of Kenny G (both literally and figuratively, as if either were a crime), they’re flarfists or flarf-inspired - many people seem to literally think it’s Kenny himself under a pseudonym (which somehow sounds ridiculous) - they’re bored and can’t find anything better to do (name me a poet who isn’t?), they’re scoundrels, thieves (and yes, they are identity-thieves, but hey, it’s not as if you’re not still you, is it?), trying to profit of other people’s reputations (in a non-profit business, and I don’t think anybody’s ever going to be fooled and think this is a proper anthology, and if that ever happens it’ll probably be someone who hasn’t a clue and isn’t interested in having one), trying to ruin other people’s reputations (”My, my, I saw an awful poem by Ron Silliman the other day in a 4 thousand page anthology, I’ve lost all respect for the man and his poetry, I’m burning my Alphabet and never buying a book by him again”) etc. etc. etc.

It’s seems banal to say it, cliche-ic, because there’s something fundamentally true and repeated about it, but a great majority of the poetry community (more or less worldwide, as far as I can tell) could do with not always taking themselves so seriously. There’s a lot of spite, and there’s a lot of paranoia - which came first I don’t know. Reading is important, people should learn to, and they should learn to enjoy it - learn to enjoy encountering weird new things, or weird old things, or just new things or old things. (If I could, I might be tempted to get pissed of at every poet who ever wrote a book of boring old international vers libre, but I won’t ’cause it’s not gonna get any of us anywhere).

As most literary hoaxes Issue 1’s poetry is not least in it’s social reverberation - how do the hoaxees react to the hoaxers. Suffice to say it’s stirred the emotional pots of many poets, both people that were included and people not included, although it should be mentioned that quite many seem to like the game - included and not-included people - and why wouldn’t they? Anyway, most people, if not all, seem to have a reaction, which is more than you can say about a great many poetry books, and the reaction is almost always strong - laughter, anger or posed and poised nonchalance.