Inger Christensen – 1935-2009

The danish poet Inger Christensen died last friday. She was a language-oriented poet with a humanist, lyricist streak – the same streak that continues to set most language-oriented poets in Scandinavia apart from their counterparts on the American continent, or even more south in Europe (think Mette Moestrup vs. Christian Bök – Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson vs. Oulipo). Her Alfabet was not only a play on the alphabet through the fibonacci sequence, but also a raging against nuclear armament and a passionate song for life, as well as containing lyrical beauty. It feels all encompassing. Maybe she was everybody’s poet.

Christian Bök wrote an essay some years back called A Few Notes on Beautiful Thinking, where he spoke of the failure of the Oulipo:

The basic fulfillment of the constraint often seems to take precedence over all other literary concerns (like euphony, meaning, etc.) so that often the results of such an experiment resemble the completion of a rote exercise (like writing 14 lines with metre and rhyme and calling it a sonnet, even though the poem lacks any literary pizzazz). The works often do not fulfill enough of their potential to make them any more interesting than a fumbled sleight. The coterie also seems uninterested in exploring the political potential of writing under such duress in order to expose the ideological foundations of discourse itself.

For some reason this reminds me of Ingers Alfabet, in the sense that although the formal constraints are nowhere as rigorous as in Christian’s Eunoia or many of the Oulipo works, it marries the lingually experimental and the lyrically beautiful, not to mention the politically engaged.

Probably the most known aesthetical idea of Inger Christensen is that poetry should not be truth, purity or even beauty, but a playful game. I can hardly think of an aestheticism I can agree with more wholeheartedly. It doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously, not to me at least.

I was surprised to realize that her death has not mortified the world. I’ve personally not been aware of her work for very long, but I’ve been aware of her person – last saturday she came up in a conversation in Malmö, and I stupidly asked: “who was that again” – she’s been the poet closest to the almighty Nobel Prize for some time now. Sometimes she’s just been that danish poet – I’ve not read alot, and the only thing translated into Icelandic did not appeal to me (although well translated). It wasn’t until I read Alfabet that I got it.

But I’ve seen very little of her death in the english speaking poetry world – not even Ron Silliman, who shared Ingers enthusiasm for alphabet and the fibonacci sequence, has put up a “she-died” picture on his blog – which always happens when a great poet dies. This makes me believe he hasn’t heard. [update: he has now] I’ve asked some people – and many seem to have never heard of her.

Which makes me think the poetry world really does function differently, not even poetry’s superstars are known – or maybe Horace Engdahl is simply right: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

In any case: A great poet has died, and I’m all hats-off.

A mural with the beginning of Alfabet in Copenhagen – and a translation of the first verses

Wikipedia on Inger Christensen

Tags: Christian Bök, Iceland, Poetry, Translation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 6:53 am and is filed under The New Illiterati. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.