Articles
There’s a New Screen in Town
So far poetry has proved far more adaptable to a higher-and-higher high-tech world than prose fiction, which clings to the book as if the only thing justifying it’s existence were the bar-code and ISBN-number (not to mention the prize-tag). This would be relatively easy to explain away if we were only talking about longer... »
Reading the Eddas (With Google Translate)
Living abroad I regularly get asked about this miraculous language I speak – Icelandic – and if it’s true that we make new words for everything under the sun and can read the 13th century Eddas as easily as if we were drinking ice-cold mead in the midnight sun. Icelandic is supposed to be... »
Gung Ho
Hot-shot Chinese businessman, millionaire poet and patron-of-the-arts Huang Nubo, recently decided to start a fund to promote the cultural relations between Iceland and China, inventively named “The China Iceland Cultural Fund”. Reminiscent of pure Icelandic small-town nepotism, one of the main catalysts for Huang Nubo’s interest in Icelandic culture was rooming with Hjörleifur Sveinbjörnsson,... »
Cotery Poelumn: Pwoermds
It’s a poetic mouthful – a hard-to-perform sound poem in its own right – “pwoermd”. When you Google it the machine asks if you meant “powermad” and you’re half inclined to say “yes I am what are you gonna do about it?” beautyfault (Karri Kokko) fjshjng (Geof Huth) breathrough (Christopher Rizzo) llyllylly (mIEKAL aND... »
The Icelandic Poetry Community
A reader recently asked, by way of my editor, that I share a few words on the Icelandic poetry community. My first response was a long-winded, athletic “boooooooring” while I rolled my eyes and pretended to gag. For a while I was very outspoken in my criticism of Icelandic poetry. I found it self-centered,... »
Mad Skills
A few words about the surprising qualities of sucking really hard Recently I read on the news that a man, one Kenny Strasser, had successively duped the producers of numerous TV-programs into putting him on the air on the premise that he was a master in the art of the yo-yo. When put on... »
Left, Right and Center
– a self-righteous rant One of the greatest conservative projects in poetry is called New Formalism. In short it supports the return to rhymed metrical verse and classical themes. It’s a let’s-write-like-Keats kinda movement originally associated with the yuppie culture of the 1980’s, with that perverted type of pseudo-sophistication that makes most modern day... »
Canon Fodder
I regularly read poetry to Aram, my infant son. He doesn’t “get it”, of course – no matter how I try to explain that he’s really not supposed to understand it – but rather “sense it”. But he seems to like the rhythms of it anyways (and/or his father’s theatrical performance) so I keep... »
Segregating the poor
The Icelandic charity organization Fjölskylduhjálp (Family Aid) helps hundreds of families a month. Fjölskylduhjálp, like its sister organizations Hjálparstofnun Kirkjunnar (The Icelandic Church Aid) and Mæðrastyrksnefnd (Mother’s Support Committee) supplies the needy with food and at times other necessities, like clothing or diapers. For the poor of Iceland, these are the last line of... »
The barbaric arts
The philosophist Theodor Adorno famously stated, in 1949, that writing a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric. He proceded: “And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today”. With some simplification poetry may be understood as an art of beauty, and indeed that is how poetry has been... »