The rebellion and apathy

I

Post-world and eventual accountability

A few months back I took a stroll through the neigborhood of Södermalm in Stockholm, and got the distinct feeling that I was passing through some sort of post-world – one of those sci-fi places you see in utopian movies, where war and poverty have been eradicated and everyone is free to engage in their own personal growth. I walked through the shopping centre on Medborgarplatsen square, and watched all the humidifiers rejuvenate shiny post-vegetables, and people walking around with post-sushi take-away and post-café lattes – everyone seemingly not rich, in globalist modern standards, but nevertheless so completely content that I could hardly imagine them ever lacking anything they truly wanted. Let alone what they needed. As if all the wealth had been equally distributed and now everyone could have all the sushi they could stomach. It’s a scary feeling, ‘cause you know it’s not true, and yet it would be so easy to believe it – it’s so enticing, so beautiful, to imagine a problem-free universe already here with nothing more  needing to be done, except leaning back and taking it all in.

I sometimes get the same feeling reading literature – especially modern prose work. Of course noone – or at least very few people – write novels without a dramatic angle. The basic formula of problem leads to problem-resolution is still the game to play in linear prose. But the dramatic angle is more and more, it seems to me, a personal story – protagonist A finds herself in an unfortunate circumstance, either because some other protagonist put her there, or because of a series of coincidences. This is all well and good – such things happen in the world, and they should be dealt with in literature – but the amount of this type of literature gives me this same post-world feeling I just mentioned. One could deduce from it that problems are not inherent in systems – that all the “big” political problems have been solved, the fundamentals, as if systematic, deliberate misery had been eradicated – and instead we focus on the particular within the social.

This feeling I get strikes a series of false chords in my soul, and I writhe – and I might even feel a certain anger towards my fellow writers (as a group, rather than as individuals). I may of course be mistaken, but I see our political world as being fundamentally wrong, repressive and cruel in a decidedly systematic way. It doesn’t allow for ethical decisions, the system being so overly complicated, all-encompassing and layered that noone can possibly be informed of the consequences of their actions – and the system has been built to use and abuse this fact in order to increase capital gains, the globalist wealth of the few, in particular, but also the contentment of any citizen lucky enough to have a western passport. Noone is eventually accountable for people dying in wars, or slave labour camps, refugee camps; or from easily preventable diseases – noone is eventually accountable for torture, political imprisonment, police brutality and other forms of state-run (and/or outsourced and privately run) violence.

But yes, of course, when caught we do arrest and imprison the low-level employee, the single soldier that steps out of line or the foreman who beats his worker to death, a politician may have to apologize or even step down – but we fail to make the system accountable, and we fail to notice that these things happen repeatedly and systematically and are not single coincidences of brutality, but rather intrinsic to competitional society and thereby just as systematic as in Soviet-socialism or other authoritarian systems, although masked with an idea of personal or individual responsibility. This responsibility is a façade, because those few that get “caught”, so to speak, are in most cases merely following the norms that society dictates, besides being only peripherally guilty – since responsibility is so decentralized that no one person is “wholly” guilty of anything.

The good thing about authoritarian systems is that you can see your abuser, you can point at him and cry for justice. One of the worst things about capitalist cruelty is that you can’t do this – responsibility has been decentralized. Nothing is the system’s fault, and yet the system breeds both sociopathy and apathy, feeds on war and massive (3rd world) poverty. Everybody’s simply doing their jobs. Capitalism having become a global crisis, makes this even harder.

In the Spanish movie Los Lunes al Sol (Mondays in the Sun), by Fernando Leon de Aranoa, the Russian character Sergei tells a joke that goes something like this: “When the Soviet Union crumbled, we properly realized what we already knew, that everything they had been telling us about socialism was a lie. A few years later we also realized that everything they had been telling us about capitalism was in fact true.”

II

Political writing in the post-world

In an interview with the Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, in 2002, Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jalloun was asked about the political dimensions in his work, and he answered thus:
“I come from a country that deals with many problems, not only in the economic sense, but also various types of injustice. In Morocco the demand is that writers cover these issues and take a clear stance. In all countries writers are citizens, but in Morocco a writer would never get away with thinking he was above the community and the issues that govern its debate. The public demands that he participates. The explanation for this important position that is held by writers and scholars in Morocco, is that only about 40% of the inhabitants are literate. This is changing rapidly but the people need someone to talk on their behalf and write about their hopes and suffering. A Moroccan writer really has no choice, he must take a stance. Such a stance is understandably not demanded of the nordic writers , because their communities have developed much further, here you have human rights, the rule of law and the foundations of your society are not up for immediate debate.” (1)

(Note: Italics are mine)

What I find interesting in this statement is the diagnosis of nordic writers, and noone demanding of them that they write political work – because not only is it obviously true, but there is also the tendency, in all of the western world (at least), to depoliticize art in general, and act as if one thing had nothing to do with the other, and even that they cast a dark shadow on each other. Indignant art-for-the-sake-of-beauty artists will point at Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens propogating national-socialism, or how Pound’s Pisan Cantos have had to suffer because of their political connection, as examples of the catastrophic effects of mixing politics with art. I would, in turn, point to the mountains upon mountains of unimportant, meaningless work – forgotten, of course – as examples of the catastrophic effects of not mixing art with politics – and George Orwell and Milan Kundera as examples of good political artwork (and I know I’m being particularly nasty in pinning those two together, since the latter has repeatedly critizised the former for not being any good as an artist).

Good work does not necessarily have good politics, and bad work can obviously be produced with the best of political intentions. But just as the maturity-plot of a Bildungsroman needs to make sense, needs to be done skillfully and artfully, so the politics of political artwork need to be thought out – there are no shortcuts. A banal work injected with current political trends, is nevertheless banal work. All of this should be self-evident – while a great portion of the literature debate ignores political work as gimmicks, and many political writers seem to think all it takes to make the work “important” is an injection of indignant moralism.

Because of literature’s tendency to imitate itself the world is ridden with so-called political authors, that show misery, violence, exploitation and injustice as individual cases, rather than the systematic rules that they are. The tendency in literature to represent through single examples – a part for a whole, a single worker for a working class – makes the literature fall through the cracks, in a world where the opposite is true. The single mother in the latest social realist drama is constantly portrayed as a victim of unfortunate circumstance, and I hate to be the one to say it but capitalism is not an unfortunate circumstance – it’s so-called side-effects are inherent to the system – while many writers wallow in political subject matter, reflecting little else than their own personal self-righteousness; at worst a nasty judgmental attitude of mostly ill intent towards the world (of which, I admit, I am not wholly innocent of) and at best a social commentary resembling the readers’ letters and editorials of newspapers. While certain writers may participate in the political debate, none try to reinvent it, none deal with the fundamentals that are nevertheless, in my mind, an inseperable part of the craft. We might write drama of individuals caught in the system – but it’s all revisionist in nature, as if all capitalism needs to make everyone happy is someone adjusting the buttons on the machine.

III

Antagonizing readers

The western world – at least – is inherently amoralist, and the most pressing political questions in that part of the world are not about our own suffering, or the suffering of our readers, but about the apathetic and sociopathetic conditions of our daily lives. I do not mean to say that there is nothing wrong in the western world itself, but we do find ourselves in need of dealing with juxtapositioning our own plights with those of the world in general – precisely because the world has become globalized. While Finnish students and Danish nurses may be facing bad conditions, we need to able to see that it’s hardly comparable to the disenfranchisement, exploitation and plain murder that the Finnish and Danish systems propogate abroad, without defusing the political struggles within our own welfare states, and thus allowing them to drift towards more libertarian fascist systems. We need to use the wealth amassed in the western world to ease suffering elsewhere – or that suffering will never end – without using that as an excuse to ignore local plights, such as the bad condition of Finnish students and Danish nurses.

Adressing the apathy/sociopathy of western people in general – from underpaid nurses to wealthy investment cowboys – is a potential career suicide, as instead of taking part in, and portraying, the “hopes and suffering” of the readers, it would inevitably be read as attacking them on political, ethical and moral grounds, and that reading would probably be justified, at least in part. It may very well sound like one was saying that Danish nurses shouldn’t fight for a better salary. This is a serious dilemma, not only because it requires more of the writers – perhaps more than they can do, or are willing to do – but also because, as anyone familiar with political debate can vouch for, antagonizing people doesn’t really get you anywhere. And a writer who is not read, or merely seen as an antagonistic moralist, can only hope to be discovered later as “having been right all along” – which might not be that important, however it may tickle the ego. It is proper to note though, that literature does not only occupy the present, but also the future, and “having been right all along” might have political meaning when that comes to pass. But it is naturally hard to say, if it will be so.

The demand that Ben Jelloun mentions, the demand that readers make of writers, that they portray and adress the readers’ problems, is non-existant in most western literature, and the political dimensions that need to be adressed in my opinion are probably not even welcome. The demand is only put forth in societies where suffering is great, and the suffering in western societies is mostly minor – if put into context with the harm these societies cause elsewhere. It is all too easy to ignore the more serious ethical problems of our societies – such as the near complete disassociation for human suffering in faraway countries – and turn to mirroring and remirroring our favorite 20th century novelists. Perhaps the obvious answer as to why this is so, is that, as Ben Jelloun mentions, writers are citizens and therefore suffering the same conditions as their readers – apathy and amoralism coming naturally – rather than them being populist, cowardly careerists pawning off their work as if it were any other consumer product.

IV

My excuses

This is a subject best broached in much longer texts than these – and yet a subject I feel should be broached, specifically by writers. I am not a monotheistic writer – I do not believe in absolutes, not even my own. I furthermore do not believe in any one direction of writing to be superior – neither morally, politically nor aesthetically – to another. To a great extent the maxim that literature simply is – that poetry should not should – rings true to me. My call for a new approach to political literature is neither fully thought out nor manifestic, and it is not meant to be. It is merely meant to propogate thought, through writing thoughts and subsequently speaking them aloud – for them to be digested with others. I do not say this to withdraw from my call for a new approach to political literature, but to emphasize that the nature of literature can not be easily defined – and it’s surely not mine to define alone. Literature can not be dogmatic, and must not be relegated to a space of political propaganda – despite it’s nature being, in my mind, political. It is within these borders – or rather, this borderlessness – that I would like to ponder, to throw these thoughts into the mix, these questions and calls, that I deem as greatly important, and see what comes of them.

I thank you for listening.

1: The Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun interviewed by Þröstur Helgason in the Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, april 13, 2002:

„Ég kem frá landi sem á við mörg vandamál að stríða, ekki bara efnahagsleg heldur og misrétti af ýmsu tagi. Í Marokkó er beinlínis gerð krafa um að rithöfundar fjalli um þessi mál og taki skýra afstöðu. Rithöfundar eru alls staðar borgarar en marokkóskur rithöfundur myndi aldrei komast upp með að telja sig hafinn yfir samfélagið og þau mál sem þar eru efst á baugi hverju sinni. Almenningur gerir kröfur um að hann taki þátt. Skýringin á þessari mikilvægu stöðu rithöfunda og menntamanna í Marokkó er sú að einungis um 40% þjóðarinnar eru læs og skrifandi. Þetta er að breytast mjög hratt en fólkið þarfnast þess að einhver tali máli þess og skrifi um vonir þess og þjáningar. Marokkóskur rithöfundur á því í raun og veru engan valkost, hann verður að taka afstöðu. Þessar skyldur hvíla skiljanlega ekki á norrænum höfundum þar sem samfélög þeirra eru mun lengra komin, hér eru mannréttindi, réttarfar og þjóðfélagsgerðin ekki knýjandi umfjöllunarefni.“

The importance of destroying a language (of one’s own) - full version

(The following text is an extended version of a previous text written as a mini-lecture for the seminar Alternativ publicering/litterær innovation in Biskops Arnö, Sweden, 10.-13. may, 2007 - but never read, since I was displeased with it, and decided these ideas needed much more than the 15 minutes given in Sweden. Instead I wrote another mini-lecture, about Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött

The myth about the Icelandic language among the population – the myth that is propogated in the school system, from kindergarteners to doctorates – is that in some ways it is a purer language than that spoken by our brethren in Scandinavia, which at best is considered to be some sort of pidgin Icelandic, “broken Icelandic”, languages not really fit for proper discussion – let alone poetry! – simplified and almost childish in their limited capacity for the use of cases, inflections or the melding of new words. This point of view, whatever merit it may have, has yielded a rabid conservatism within the Icelandic writers community that, despite what people might think, and despite the “official” view, is ever increasing: The idea is partly that we must not fall into the blackhole of becoming scandinavians.

Anyone that reads Icelandic books from the first fifty years of the last century – let alone older books - will notice the lack of uniformity in the use of Icelandic– the grammar is regional and personal, the idioms are regional and personal, the spelling is regional and personal, etc. In the years since there seems to have been a steady movement towards a uniformist coordination – linguistic scholars will often, although it is not fair to say always, mean that one usage is right and the other wrong – often this is a battle of cases and idioms – and believe-you-me, Icelandic professional proofreaders are among the most anal of the lot, scoffing at those who take liberty with language: “What silly mistakes!”

The general consensus seems to be: If you don’t do it the way the rulebooks say you should, then that’s because you don’t know how to – a peculiarity is written off as a mistake. I have even found the need to justify the use of the few colloquials that originate from my own home area – which are mostly about which prepositions to use – in my work as a journalist in my very own hometown, as well as having had battles with proofreaders from the south of the country. The conservative uniformism is so strict that there is quite literally no room for lingual diversity – be it experimental or traditional.

There are of course exceptions, the Icelandic literati – if indeed there is cause to call the half-illiterate a literati – will now and again ordain a poet or writer into a freedman, one that should no longer be revered as a mere servant of the language but as a genius (often rightly so) and granted permission to play – normally though, this permission is given afterwards, and it’s nearly a matter of coincidence who gets it and who doesn’t. To name two brilliant experimental writers, Megas has been ordained, while Steinar Sigurjónsson has not (outside a very small lit-clique).

The need in Iceland to overthrow the language regime is quite dire (“Tear this wall down!”). Viewing a language as such a rigid object does not only promote idiocy, it is literally a pathway to fascism (“No pasaran!”). A postmodern fascism, of course – where people are culled into action rather than forced (“Make love, not war”). A father saying to his child: „We really do have a great need for protecting our language, we are such a small nation. Now, you wouldn’t want to live in a world where noone spoke Icelandic, would you? You know, maybe then we would all speak Danish, and the pronunciation is not very easy.“

And the child whispers: „Yes, daddy, I promise to rid myself of dative-illness.“

Yes, it’s called „dative-illness“ – and it means that you have a preference for the dative instead of the accusative, or in some cases, the nominative. According to Icelandic parents and elementary school teachers, this is a life-threatening condition.

Enter: Experimental poetry. The eternal fucking with language – in the sense of disturbing it and loving it at the same time. Fooling around with it. Cheating on it. Taking it apart and putting it back together again – inverted or otherwise malformed.

Iceland doesn’t not have a particularly rich tradition of experimentation. Not to say that people haven’t experimented, not to say the experiments haven’t at times been brilliant – but mostly they’ve been discarded as momentary flippancies, and the postmodern fascist’s answer to the artist’s weeping is: „Now now, you are very talented, we know. But you should focus on something more suitable, perhaps…“ – And the most talented of people turn to rewriting Knut Hamsun or Halldór Laxness.

A necessary statement to make at this point is that Icelandic literature (or poetry) isn’t in all senses bad. What is done is often well done – it is possible to thoroughly enjoy this conservatism, it may even border on the same profoundness that characterized the literature of old, you may feel yourself swept away on a pathos-tour-de-force. But somehow it’s often just more of the same. Their qualities need to be recognized, not doing so would be the same as saying the Da Vinci Code isn’t a page-turner – a statement intended to scorn it, I guess, but the truth is that while being one of the most awful pieces of literature published in years, it is nevertheless a page-turner. Icelandic literature is good at pathos. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that pathos is good at “literature”, or good in general.

Experimental writing isn’t thrown out with brute force, it’s thrown out with the tenderness of the understanding, yet ultimately intolerant. Like when the Icelandic police a few days ago „removed“ two dozen gypsies from Reykjavík – by showing up in police uniforms, giving them plane-tickets and driving them to the airport. Officially noone was deported, officially noone was forced to go anywhere – even though it seems the police hinted that they could deport the gypsies if needed – but still they went. Apparently there was a need to clear the streets of musicians for the Reykjavík Art Festival, that has just started.

The same social-democratic-postmodernist/diet-fascist – or whaddyawannacallit – approach is used on anything else that annoys the precious middle classes, the burgeoning structural enthusiasts that now populate Iceland to such an extent that rebellion doesn’t only seem hard, it seems futile. Like storming city hall is pointless for todays revolutionaries – the powers that be don’t need no city hall. And picking apart language as if it were a grandfather clock, is not really either a practice anyone hands out Nobel prizes for. But yet it seems that ever more poets find a calling within exactly those structures, or non-structures, of taking language apart and putting it back together, inverted or otherwise malformed. It is what defines most experimental poetry, and to a lesser extent probably almost all poetry worthy of the name. From TS Eliot to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to the Flarfists, from the silliest of slam-poets to the Four Horsemen.

The infinities of the world, every word and every meaning, all the meanings behind every word and all the words behind every meaning, have been divided into categories of right and wrong, and questioning those categories is nigh pointless – the machine will in all probability have it’s way. Yet, it’s probably the only possible course of action for anyone who actually cares for a language or for language itself.

Viewing language as any sort of finite object is the equivalent of giving up on thinking. Icelandic popstars who sing in english are often criticized with the argument: “You should be able to express it more precisely in your own (natural) tongue”. This is in many ways a misunderstanding of how language functions. To begin with, saying anything precisely, is as impossible as it is impossible for a road-sign-arrow to turn into the object it points at. It quite simply is not an option. If I were to deduce the “actual” meaning behind said criticism, it would be something along the lines of: “You should go the road more travelled, do not stray into unfamiliar territories for you might get lost.” A stay-at-home message to the boldly adventurous.

It is well and right to mention though, that when aforementioned popstars are asked to defend their choice of language, they do so with a logic that is of the same origin: “English is the language of rock’n’roll – the lingua franca of music.” That is to say: “We want to stay at home, we don’t dare to be adventurous.”

Both ideas are equally lingually conservative, and therefore (in my mind!) repulsive.

To begin with language needs neither to be known nor understood to be profound or beautiful. One could mention such strangeness as Christian Bök’s “Motorized Razors”, Caroline Bergvall’s “Hosts’s Tale”, Leevi Lehto’s ”Sanasade” or Kenny Goldsmith’s habit of reading in languages he doesn’t understand, with similar experiments being done at Nokturno’s In another’s voice series.

Another valid example is the nordic poetry community, and the discussions that take place within it. At a recent seminar in Biskops-Arnö in Sweden, the linguistic gymnastics were quite interesting, even to one who has a very basic understanding of the scandinavian languages, but as Biskops-Arnö conductor Ingmar Lemhagen noted the Nordic collaboration is mostly founded on misunderstandings. Having a decent understanding of written Scandinavian and spoken Swedish, about 70% of spoken Norwegian, 85% of spoken Faroese, all of the Icelandic and most of the English, while none of the spoken Danish, made discussions a very interesting terrain to cover. It was well nigh impossible to know what had been said, what had been covered and what had been discarded – and yet the discussion wielded ideas from somewhere, bits and pieces that form some sort of chaotic structure that is far from meaningless, one that is rather impregnating, in the same way as half-finished ideas can generate millions of finished (or half-finished) ideas, whereas a finished idea is just that.

Paal Bjelke Andersen noted in an article at the communal blog for the seminar

It is only proper to add to this Icelandic and Finnish – even though it wasn’t much. Zoning in and out of this debate was, although admittedly tiresome, an interesting experience. Paal also mentioned to me that he found it interesting to read Icelandic, seeing as there are mutual codes in the two languages, and the codes can be cracked more or less just by looking very hard and thinking very long (something which can’t really be done verbally – unless you’re all the more clever and the speaker talks all the more slowly). The finnish is a game of its own, although even the tiniest of understandings or misunderstandings can be very enjoyable – as I do remember listening for words and word-parts in discussions by Oscar Rossi and Leevi Lehto, even just trying to realize where one word ends and the next begins. It’s a bit like being an infant again, you get to poke at the world in near blindness, trying to figure out how things work and although it all sounds more or less like bababeebeegaga, you get the distinct feeling that there is actually something more there. Oscar and Leevi actually seemed to be communicating, with laughter, frowns and gestures indicating that the words being past between them was some sort of firm ground to stand on, even though for me the same terrain is pure quicksand.

Some weeks ago I was sitting at a café in Helsinki with two finnish poets discussing the whole “writing in english as a second language” thing, that has become more and more popular – there are several blogs in the world for this, books have been published – amongst those Leevi Lehto’s Lake Onega and other poems – and as Leevi has pointed out it may be a way for non-english speakers of gaining the upper hand on english-speaking constraintual super-poets like Christian Bök, which would otherwise be unavailable to those merely schooled in their native languages, spoken by few and hereto stretched by next to none (whereas english has the benefits of having been fucked over so often, and by so many people for so many different reasons, that experimenting with it often seems like the equivalent of surrogating wild and sweaty sex with standing naked in a field letting the warm breeze arouse you – it’s not that it’s not nice, it’s just not the same).

Of course although Christian could not learn to speak English as a second language, he could learn how to speak Finnish as a second language – but there really is no language in the world that can compete with English, it’s the only one with proper momentum, and perhaps especially English as a second language.

Reenter: Experimental poetry. Sitting at said café, discussing the niceties of actually having a common culture with the international avant-garde, post-avant, experimental, radical writing, language whaddyawannacallit, it also dawned on me that the need to fuck over our own languages is imminent. Well, it’s either that or jumping ship completely, somehow. Let’s say I feel aroused by the idea of fucking over Icelandic. Let’s say I’m really, really aroused. It may hardly get through to anyone interested in it – seeing as the interest for such things is rather limited with only 300 thousand possible readers – and it may even be enough to induce interest in less then seven people, which again according to Leevi Lehto is the prerequisite for changing the conscience of the masses. The size alone makes Icelandic a damn fine upper hand.

Then again, this is also a certain disability: The groundwork for destruction, the methodical planting of bombs along the frontwalls of nouns and windows of adjectives – pardon my metaphorizing – has not been done, and the destruction of a language is no small feat that can be achieved by single individuals, no matter how hyper-active their lutheran work ethic is.

It needs to be said that when I say destruction I mean it in the most creative sense. As the crumbling of a house creates a field of interesting rubble, as taking down a tree lamppost leaves you with a nice log for bonfires and an electrical light lying on the ground next to it.

There is very little in Iceland that could be called an avant-garde tradition – if that is indeed not a contradiction in terms. Experimental writing has been limited to a few groups or individuals taking small detours that have ended in deadends only to be (more or less) forgotten about. A contemporary example would be the Medúsa group – one of the founding members of which was Sjón, who received the Nordic Literature Prize in 2005. An experimental group of late surrealist poets and artists (1979-1986) whose work is very hard to come by, outside the national library in Reykjavík. I have in fact, although being at least mildly interested, not seen much of it at all. The other members of Medúsa have, as writers, mostly been forgotten about – including the poet Jóhamar, who remains an experimental writer somewhere in the invisible outbacks of Icelandic literature.

As much as one might find it near-kitschy to canonize and anthologize avant-garde poetry, being interested in it in a society that doesn’t canonize or anthologize it isn’t particularly much fun. For one thing it makes continuation of experimental writing seem less plausible – the tradition is elsewhere, experimentation doesn’t have a tradition (which is probably a lie – most contemporary experimental poets I know get turned on by the experimental poets of the bygones, most of them read anthologies wet& wild, hot&bothered with flaming hard-ons).

It’s hard for me to say how much of this, to which extent and in which areas, these are international concerns, which ones have a home in several countries and which (if any) are Icelandic phenomena, simply because of the rift that divides Icelandic poetry from it’s foreign counterparts, the pervading lack of interest in foreign poetry in Iceland – although there are individuals interested, the poetry-culture as such, could more or less not care less – which means, for instance, that very little is written about foreign poetry and, outside of Whitman and such gargantuously canonized figures, foreign poetry isn’t found in Icelandic bookstores, and even then, I would dare to estimate that foreign poetry for sale in all of Iceland would not reach 3 shelf-metres.

The pitfalls of Kallio

They tell me most people who move to Finland, do so through Kallio. We immigrants may move further on later, to other neighbourhoods or townships, but this is where we take our first steps in a brand new civilization – this is where we form our new misconceptions and build complex new stereotypes in our over-exposed heads of what it actually constitutes to be Finnish. And for foreign eyes that have grown up leering at miniscule wooden houses in a small town of 3 thousand inhabitants in the north-west of Iceland – what a place! Situated 1.305 nautical miles southeast of Ísafjörður, Iceland, Kallio is, to the untrained eye, one of those places you read about in beatnik-novels and hear Tom Waits croon about – it’s the neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks, a fairytale land for anyone with a mild streak of bohemian romanticism. And a borderline paradise for those with a more solid, rampant streak.

Waking up in the morning I am free of the ceaseless chirp-and-chatter of birds, the belches of moo-cows, bleating of sheep and ripple-gurgling of the ocean that has swallowed so many – sounds that thus far have plagued my life with mundaneity and a sort of rustic backwardness. Instead I’m softly awoken by the sweet and melodious song of the drunkard, the smell of traffic driving through rain-soaked streets while teenagers on skateboards scuttle by. The world is born anew when the hierontas open for business, with their yuletide neon-illuminations flashing in rhythmical splendour, as if to welcome one-and-all. The last of the grill-shacks close as the bars reopen, and the incence stemming of newly implemented smoke-law victims trails across the street. Ah, ‘tis a new day in a new world, ours to seize! These truly are the bee’s knees.

My parents still live in the old country, the old world, and I’m obliged to understand that they may worry, as all people fear what they do not know. Nobody fears a drunkard as much as he who has never seen one, and the city-bred invariably avoid the sight of such country-side standards as udders, dung, fish entrails, straw hats and denim overalls. I’ve even heard of city-folk who live in fear of meat, which would suffice to get oneself institutionalized in the part of the world I originate from.

And sure enough there’s no shortage of dangerous situations in Kallio. To begin with it seems to me that highly infectious plagues of allergies are rampant in these parts. Since coming here I have not met a single person who doesn’t suffer from lactose-intolerance, hay fever, pollenosis, glutein-intolerance, dust-mite allergy, or one of the other species of city sickness. My own body has completely stopped understanding midge-bites and city-gnats, and chooses instead to puff up all over in pinkish inflammations. Apparently experience doesn’t come free.

Automobiles incessantly hustling and bustling up and down every asphalt-covered surface provide the ideal setting for a country-bumpkin to get himself roadkilled; cheap bars are traditional pitfalls for the bright-eyed surrounded by big city bright lights, and even Google Earth knows that beer doesn’t get much cheaper than round these parts; the the house of our benevolant Lord, The Kallio Church, doesn’t seem to bode anything remotely nice after dark, casting it’s pitch-dark gaze over Karhupuisto with such weight as no man can withstand; and I don’t think the naked guy standing outside my front door yesterday evening, flapping his hands like a monkey apeing a whooping crane, was particularly safe company. In fact I’d dare venture that he was downright dangerous, to both of us.

But I’ve survived so far, and hope in fact to survive a little longer, in this human forestry of civil (and uncivil) engineering, macheting my way through the thicket of passengers crowding the trams. For a while perhaps I may remain wary of the bright lights, but eventually I guess even the drunkard’s song will become as mundane as the ocean-ripples, and the midge-bites will stop itching, but until that day arrives I shall be the happy recipient of my own blue-eyed alienation – fully nelsoned by the bee’s knees.

Written for the finnish magazine MoveOn.

You are a pipe

I

One’s understanding of one’s own language is limited, one’s understanding of other languages is even more limited, and a perfect transferal of a text from one language to another is impossible simply because the languages are two different ones. “Boat” is not the same as “bátur,” which is not the same as “Boot” or “båt”, let alone “bateau”. So much is obvious.

To translate poetry is to write poetry by procedure, inasmuch as such an act is possible. One is made to choose which characteristics get to remain the same, inasmuch as they can remain the same – form, appearance, alliteration and other similar phonetic characteristics, rhyme, ideas and association of ideas, wordplay, continuity, story, allusions, semantics, semiotics, etc. – and then one is made to choose what gets to enter the work that wasn’t there previously. It is inevitable that many things will, since any kind of transferal of text adds layers to what was written, while peeling others off. If we take for example Borges’ famous story about Pierre Menard, who takes it upon himself to rewrite Don Quixote word for word in the 20th century, then that book, as Borges ironically points out, is another phenomenon than the one Cervantes wrote in the 17th century: Menard writes in a style which is unnatural to him, whereas Cervantes merely wrote in the colloquial of his time. The two works are different because they are written by different men in different times, even though the letters, words, sentences and paragraphs are the same and in the same order. The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith performs similar acts; he writes down previously existing language – including an entire issue of The New York Times (Day), everything he said for a week (Soliloquy), the weather report (The Weather). This has been called a N+0 translation, named after the Oulipo method N+7, where the words in a text (e.g. all nouns) are replaced with the seventh following noun in a certain dictionary. Translation as fair copy, the recreation of the same is an impossible feat, the translation is always new.

A large portion of foreign experimental poetry today (avant-garde, post-avant, radical, language, digital, flarf, post-langpo, post-prairie, etc.) deals with a presentation, interpretation and a representation which to some extent strives for some sort of transformation, or even destruction, of language itself. Language is treated as any other raw material – its meaning is split and stretched, and its physical attributes (sound and picture) are split and stretched.

A text is a collection of meanings, phonemes and morphemes used to express something about “reality” through “reality”. Metaphorical “reality” is used to convey something which the reader can relate to in his own “reality”. Language is an independent reality within reality. The task of poetry is then to punch holes in the language of either, or both, of these realities – to seek a way out of the predominant social pact of text as reality and life as reality. Through the holes it might be possible to see something new, and language will heal in a different shape.

Many of the poems in this book are translated from English, a language which is diffferent from Icelandic mostly for not being a single language, but many. The poems in English are written by people of many nationalities who have English as a native language while others are written by people who have other native languages (Caroline Bergvall is French/Norwegian, Gherardo Bortolotti is Italian for example) As the Finnish poet Leevi Lehto has pointed out, this language – english-as-a-second-language – is the real lingua franca of the world, being spoken by considerable more people than english-as-a-first-language.

There is no way of translating Australian English into Australian Icelandic, or American English into American Icelandic. You can’t even localise by using homegrown dialects, since the little that remains of such things in this nation of the linguistic holocaust, quite simply won’t suffice (not that it would produce a more accurate “translation”). In this aspect Icelandic and English belong to different worlds.

Experimental poetry as represented in this book has been produced in the English speaking world for several decades by dozens of thousands of individuals, each of whom has done their bit to widen (or tighten, blast, transform, deform) the idea of English as a language – while Icelandic has enjoyed a rather limited amount of similar experiments in its literary history, and has, it seems, had to deal with a serious nutritional deficiency in the last years, there not being very much that escapes from under the petticoats of Icelandic proof-readers. Maybe the poets like it there.

II

Just as you can not translate anything between two languages, nothing is untranslatable once you realize that nothing is translatable. A translation of literary work is never the same work, but a new work related to the former – the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1763-1834) said that an artist could view a translation of his works by imagining what his child would look like, had his wife had it with another man (the gender roles of this example are from Schleiermacher – they can be reversed without getting sand in one’s vagina).

Since nothing (and yet everything) can be translated between two languages, it must be just as (im)possible to translate between more than two languages. That is to say to translate someone else’s translation of a poem from a third party. This used to be common practice in Iceland, but this transit has since been deemed shoddy according to the classical theory of translation, or so I’ve been told. But seeing as the final outcome – the translation – is only a relative of the original work, it should not really matter whether it’s a first or second cousin. It is only fair that the relations are mentioned – who begat whom with whom where and whatfor.

Most of the poems in this book are translated from the original language, although a few have been borrowed from other translators. Details can be found in the commentary section at the end of the book.

III

Even the greatest prudes in Finland would regularly say “voi vittu” without flinching, and this goes for everyone from winterwargrandmothers to pillowfightinghomosexuals to lollipopgirls. The words can be literally translated in at least two fashions – either as “oh, cunt!” or “butter cunt”. Most probably most Finns believe themselves to be saying “oh, cunt!”. But the weight and meaning of these words are not necessarily “the same” from one language to another – he or she who shouts “smörfitta” at the dinner table in Sweden, is not performing the same act as one saying “voi vittu” on the other side of the Baltic, and it is to be expected that Swedish housewives would shake their fists vigorously at such language.

In traditional translation the phrase would be “damn it”, or similar. But the words are of course not “damn it”, they are “butter cunt”. Or, I mean, in a matter of saying.

The Swedish profanity linguist Magnus Ljung divides profanities into several different categories, including theological (“damn”), expletives (“oh!”), fecal (“shit”), sex-related (“cunt”), and many others. The different categories are used differently in different languages. The most powerful of profanities seek to break taboos, go further than others have gone before, even though most of those used on an everyday basis stay far within those limits. But when we wish to go further, we employ the unusual, or original, and seek new ways to express our dissatisfaction. So it happens that something which is completely mundane in one language, like “voi vitto” in Finnish, becomes excruciatingly vulgar in another.

There is somewhat of a tradition for normalisation in the translation of literary work. An idiom in the language being translated is changed into another idiom in the target language, the names of places and characters are even changed, word-plays are twisted to be understood etc. Anything exotic is normalised.

Naturally people disagree on whether it is more important, in the consumption of art, to understand or to sense, but most (perhaps too many) seem to avoid that which they don’t understand, or even reject it completely.

Were I to paint a picture of Kallio (my neighborhood in Helsinki) for the Icelandic market in the same method as many translations are done, I would normalise it – I would change the supermarket chain Alepa into the supermarket chain Bónus, a tram would become a bus, brothels would be solariums, and the flowers grass. Because for an Icelandic person bus means the same as a tram does for a Finnish one (except the trams are on time and used by many – but then translations are merely approximations).

When you come to a new place one of the most enjoyable things to see are those that are different from those places one is used to. Here in Kallio I become amazed seeing three brothels side-by-side, with a sex-shop on one side and a strip-joint on the other. I look into the bottomless misery of the winos in my neighborhood like a well that no one knows where ends, or whether it does at all, and I learn something new about man, where he can get (out of sight).
In a recent book of poems from Linh Dinh (whose poetry can be found in this very collection), Jam Alerts, there is a poem in the form of a book review on the poetry translations of a man named Reggis Tongue – and Reggis deals in unnormalised translations. The poem quotes a prologue by Reggis to his selected translations:

Slovenly translators - bums, basically - think they have to choose between music and sense. To pin down meanings, many of them squash the tune. To ape the melody, they ditch or deface the semaphores. They don’t realize that syntax is melody. A translator must ignore the indigineous drumming echoing in his lumpy head and obey the alien word-order, rhythm of what he’s translating. Make it strange - never try to domesticate a foreign poem!

In most cases in this book no attempt was made to normalise text, and that which sounded strange was simply allowed to sound strange. In the light of the work being translated, i.e. work that deals with language and stretches it, it is very possible that in some places the poems are more strange, more incomprehensible, than were they to be read in the original language, although I still hope that they will allow access to some of the thought originally bestowed on them.

As well as being capable of producing weirdness, unnormalised translations can cause misunderstandings which can even be dangerous, particularly when the reader is not aware of the fact that other paradigms govern other languages. In this way I suspect that when the media proclaims that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that the American movie mogul Oliver Stone is “a part of the devil”, it is only proper to wonder what meaning that translation, which I expect is literal, has. Do they mean that Ahmadinejad literally believes that Stone is possessed – that the devil lives within him – or was his point quite simply one I suppose we can all agree on, that Oliver Stone is a part of the machinery of American capitalism?
It has also been claimed repeatedly that Ahmadinejad wanted to “wipe Israel of the map”. This has been chewed, back and forth, as the God’s honest truth. However, the British newspaper The Guardian printed the following correction on the 22nd of February, 2007:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has not “called for Israel to be wiped off the map”. The Farsi phrase he employed is correctly translated as “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. He was quoting a statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Then of course we might wonder where Ahmadinejad is going with this.

It should be duly noted that the author of this text is no specialist in Iranian politics, and does not take a stance on whether or not Ahmadinejad is “evil” or “good”, but is mostly skeptical of both the media and politicians.

IV

The poems in this book were chosen quite simply because they interested me. It really isn’t more complicated than that. It would have been enjoyable to add many other poets, as well as many other interesting (enjoyable and important) poems by the poets that are included in this book, but for reasons of time it was impossible. If all goes well another volume will be produced in the next one or two years.

Lastly, it is right to thank those who put their shoulder to the wheel. Firstly the poets, of course. A list of the poets can be found in the table of contents, but it is also right to mention Ellie Nichol who gave permission to include the texts of bpNichol.

The following people read either single poems, the whole manuscript and/or gave useful tips: Arngrímur Vídalín, Ingólfur Gíslason, Haukur Már Helgason, Haukur Ingvarsson, Derek Beaulieu, Nadja Widell and Hildur Lilliendahl. Many of the poets also helped with translations and answered quickly and surely the various questions that popped into the translator’s mind. Last but not least Finnish poetry-activist Leevi Lehto gets heaps of thanks; without him this book would never have become reality.

—-

This text is an english translation of my prologue to my new icelandic poetry translation anthology, 131.839 slög með bilum, which features poetry by the following poets:

Charles Bernstein , Jon Paul Fiorentino, Susana Gardner, Oscar Rossi, Kirby Olson, Leevi Lehto, Sharon Mesmer, Jan Hjort, Jesse Ball, Markku Paasonen, Jack Kerouac, Derek Beaulieu, Katie Degentesh, Paul Dutton, Nada Gordon, Paal Bjelke Andersen, , Gherardo Bortolotti, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Iain Bamforth, Michael Lentz, Anne Waldman, Teemu Manninen, Mike Topp, Ida Börjel, Amiri Baraka, S. Baldrick, bp Nichol, Charles Bukowski, Mairead Byrne, Mark Truscott, John Tranter, Sylvia Legris, Maya Angelou, Bruce Andrews, Haukur Már Helgason, Craig Dworkin, Shanna Compton, Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Vito Acconci, K. Silem Mohammad, , Frank Bidart, Rita Dahl, damian lopes, , Jelaluddin Rumi, Rachel Levitsky, Tom Leonard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, e. e. cummings, Saul Williams, a. rawlings, Stephen Cain, Jeff Derksen, Linh Dinh, , Nico Vassilakis, Martin Glaz Serup, Malte Persson, Anna Hallberg.

The book can be ordered by clicking here.

A brief history of nýhilism: Felix culpa

I

If a Lorentzian spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form dΣ ~ S², and if furthermore the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole.[1]

When one tries to speak of poetry one usually starts by making a really big circle, a really really big circle the engulfs the entire universe. When one actually starts mouthing the words that will – if god and effort allow - become one’s eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) one finds that the circle has shrunk. The circle is now no more than a dot. The dot, darkbrown like a mole or something of the sort, one realizes, is on the tip of one’s own nose. This, unlike the words that opened this my eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) is not merely a theory. This is the god’s honest truth.

Sitting on the edge of my bed a few weeks, days, minutes or seconds ago (depending on who you find it proper to believe in these matters) I noticed something on the tip of my nose and on the unfocused plateau in front of it I started marvelling at the accomplishments brought to life by my friends, my close acquaintances, my relatives and, oh yes indeed, by myself.

By some astonishing coincidence this was the same time as I started writing this piece. My eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) – cleverly subtitled: The unspoken facts.

(It shall be noted, and probably has already been noted by the more clever of readers, that this essay, rant, or what you want to call it, is not at all entitled eternal anything or the other, and it certainly is not subtitled).

I don’t remember what it was that I promised to write about, but it must’ve had something to do with literature. Very probably poetry, and I am almost positive Icelandic poetry is what I promised to write about. Oh, the late Sigfús Daðason! The marvels of the late Dagur Sigurðarson! The late Einar Ben, late Davíð Stefánsson, late Egill Skallagrímsson, late Tómas Guðmundsson! Ahhh… one’s heart throbs with joy at the infinite beauty and bleh bleh.

Please, I don’t mean no disrespect. As of late though, I’ve found an increasing desire to dismiss the late, as being a little less than timely. The circle is closing in. We’re not crossing the creek to get water, not this time. We don’t have time, I am in a hurry. Please.

II

So Nýhil.

A few years back I was standing on a streetcorner in Reykjavik. It was a great winter of much poverty in the circles I was circulating in, and me and a friend of mine, a poet with prematurely greying hair and a knack for walking holes into his shoes in a matter of days, were sharing our last cigarette in a quiet winter still. It might have been tuesday, and I think it was around 4 in the morning.
In the night.

We had just shared a beautiful late dinner of rice and soy sauce, a treat that we had grown bizzarely acustomed to.

And there it was. Suddenly, as if it had crashed on top of our heads: an idea as beautifully upheaving and destructive as if Orville and Wilbur had taken off in a Concorde supersonic transport (crashing or soaring, one or the other, take your pick).

After jumping up and down to display our joy and amazement for a few seconds, minutes, days or weeks (depending on who tells the story) we realized that the idea, like we’ve realized since goes for all ideas worth anything, was naught but a name.

The name was, it goes without saying: Nýhil.

III

As in nihil: nothing. As in vox et praetera nihil: voice and nothing more. As in aut Caeser aut nihil: Either a Caeser or nothing. As in nihil obstat: Nothing obstructs.

And as in nihilism: A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.[2] A wise man once said that nihilism was the black hole of philosophy. A wiser statement yet would be that nihilism is the black hole of poetry.

The nihilists of old went down the blackhole to stay there, with rotting teeth and pathetic revolutions that somehow never got farther than a shot in the foot. When the nihilist says: nothing matters so I might as well rape and pillage. The nýhilist asks: if nothing matters than why should I bother with raping and pillaging? They say buddhism is nihilism with a smile. Nýhilism is nihilism with a ‘ý’.

Ný. It’s the age-old prefix for new, as I guess most nordic readers have already guessed.

IV

This is where we start getting closer to the point. The circle keeps closing in and the spot on my nose is itching with glee. The black hole has a theoretical brother known as the worm hole. The name is derived from an analogy that a worm crawling over any surface will not circumvent an apple to get to the other side. The worm will dig through it, and therefore get to the other side much quicker than otherwise thought possible. Going down the black hole you might reappear somewhere else:

Different types of black holes have differently shaped singularities: in a stationary black hole it is a point, in a rotating black hole it is a ring. If you passed through the center of the ring without touching the ring singularity itself, the mathematics predicts you will come out somewhere else and you cannot return. This is the basis of the wormhole idea. However the mathematics gives no indication of where (or when) that somewhere else is, and no way to control or select it yourself.[3]

Apples and worms: Does anyone recall the symbolism?

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”.[4]

Yet, much like in the apple, there’s a hole in the story – there grew no apples in the Middle East. Which is hardly a great matter for anyone godlike, for anyone that has the wisdom to not circumvent the apple (malum in latin; evil is malus) but to go straight through. From one side to the other, laughing, in an action of non-action known as wu-wei within the Tao – in the old texts they compare it to moving through water. But enough of that.

What was the first thing the Lord asked, what was the first question to form on the lips (or not-lips) of God Almighty after his children betrayed him?

The Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”[5]

Man had dug through the apple and was long gone.

V

Nýhil is deliberately hard to define. For one thing noone really knows who belongs to it. It’s been claimed that anyone that has done anything in the name of Nýhil in the two weeks preceding anyone’s claim that anyone else is a nýhilist is in fact a nýhilist. If more than two weeks have passed, supposedly that individual (poet, artist, athlete, patron-of-the-arts, etc.) is something completely different.

Anyone that does belong to Nýhil (if anyone really does) can claim whatever they like about Nýhil. Manifestos have been written and forgotten, remembered and rewritten only to be deemed utter nonsense. The plan is perhaps not so much to make a symbolic gesture towards the ambiguity of truth, as much as it is to achieve contradiction, along with all the friction and movement that such an accomplishment brings. That’s how it happens that a society of not really anyone, with noone in charge, a worthless army of fools any way you look at it, has published around 20 poetry books, 4 essay collections, 2 DVD’s, a novel and a CD, produced four short films, a sportsbag, three instruments, while travelling the country for readings, holding a two-day international poetry festival in Reykjavik, and will soon open a bookstore in Reykjavik with an emphasis on underground art and poetry. During this entire time (about four years) people belonging (or not belonging) to Nýhil have continued publishing poetry books, novels, and translations with other more pristine publishing houses.

VI

Poetry is thought for those that deem it worthless. Good poetry comes from those that loathe poetry with a greater fervour than your average reader can possibly muster. There’s probably a point in explaining it, but I’ve lost sight of it. But my faith remains as firm as ever.

[1] Lorentzian Wormholes; Matt Visser.
[2] One of a few definitions in the Merriem-Websters dictionary.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes#Black_hole_FAQ
[4] Genesis 3:4.
[5] Genesis 3:8.

Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött (for Biskops Arnö)

(The following text, as well as the text following the following text, was written for a seminar in Biskops Arnö about alternative publishing and literary innovation. They were both (mostly) written to be read aloud - I only read the first one, which I wrote when displeased with the second one, and I kept to the text in most aspects, but deviated in a few places).

Mulling over what would be appropriate use of these given 15 minutes I wrote an entirely different segment called „the importance of destroying a language (of one’s own)“, which I intended to read here, now, as I am reading this, the segment I wrote when displeased with my first segment. The first segment was mostly about uniformism in language, in the name of lingual protection – the eternal struggle Icelanders are faced with: Let not the language slip away, or we will end up speaking like our brethren in Scandinavia – some sort of broken pidgin Icelandic that noone in his right mind would ever consider for poetry, let alone anything else.

After sleeping on this I decided to relay a different message, one of hope and possibility, instead of fascism and despair.

It was about 7 years ago that the artgroup Nýhil was founded by myself and poet, film-maker and philosopher Haukur Már Helgason, on a quiet street-corner in Reykjavík. To begin with it was nothing but a name that we decided to use as a common label. In the summer of 2002 the first book, my first book, Heimsendapestir, was published. It was a cheap affair, 160 copies that cost less than 300 Euros to produce, with the help and discount of some valiant artists and printers. And even though the following products would not all be this cheap, a path had been chosen: cheap but as beautiful as limited means could afford – a reasonable enough conclusion.
In the beginning all costs were paid by the poet himself or herself, but we would supply cheap print-deals, free layout, free cover design, and edit eachothers works.

But now I am getting ahead of myself: First we moved to Berlin, that is to say the only members of Nýhil at the time, Haukur and I.

In Berlin we were both supposed to be doing something else but life started to revolve around literature – we started holding monthly poetry-parties in a small place called Versuchstation in Prenzlauer Berg. The idea was quite simply to invite our friends to join us for live music, poetry and whatever came to mind – we took turns running the bar, which paid for the rent. We wanted to make poetry as exciting as we thought it was, as instantaneous, thought-out, chaotic and structured as we longed for it to be. In short, we wanted poetry to be all it could be. And it worked – those were some of the best parties and readings I’ve attended in my life.

When the winter came to an end, we had both finished manuscripts for new poetry books, and our lease for Versuchstation was broken – the parties were evidently not meant to become that wild, and the neighbours didn’t like it – this wasn’t their idea of poetry readings, nor was it, indeed, meant to be.

Meanwhile a new member of Nýhil, film-maker Grímur Hákonarson, was planning a venture of his own. Having visited Berlin in the winter and witnessed and participated in one of the poetry parties, he sought out grants to tour Iceland – a travelling circus of poets and other artists. When we came home in the spring of 2003, all had been arranged, except we needed to fill all the cars. So we wrote out a list of favorite young poets and invited them along. The people that went on this trip, that was wildly successful in some places and rather more mildly successful in others, are mostly the core members of Nýhil today, as well as some others that have joined in midway.

In the winter that followed we published our first essay collection, in a series called Afbækur (debooks), Af stríði (about war). Two more have been published, About us in 2004, and About poetry in 2005. The idea is to deal with topics through both critical essays and art. Several more debooks are in the making, including About theatre and About learning.

In the summer of 2005 we held our very first international poetry festival, and in november of last year, we held the second. Guests included Leevi Lehto, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anna Hallberg, Jörgen Gassilewski, Katie Degentesh, Catharina Gripenberg, Lone Hörslev, Matti Pentikainen, Derek Beaulieu, Jane Thompson, Billy Childish, Jesse Ball and Gunnar Wærness – with several dozens of Icelandic artists participating as well, mostly poets and musicians – we still have a rule of breaking up the poetry readings with music, so the poetry-parties, of which there are two at the festival, usually last about 6 to 7 hours. The third and fourth festivals are in the pipelines.

In 2005 we also launched the series Norrænar bókmenntir (Nordic Literature), 9 poetry books published in the span of about 7 months, by various authors, that was mostly sold through subscriptions.

Last year we held a poetry competition entitled „the icelandic championship in awful poetry“ – where poets struggled to write the worst poetry imaginable. We got support from the media – Iceland’s biggest newspaper Morgunblaðið, printed interesting poems with declarations from the panel of judges, for three consecutive days, and then the three winning poems. The award ceremony was held live on the biggest magazine-tv-show on the Icelandic state television. Now we are planning „the icelandic championship in other people’s poetry“ – which will feature poetic remixes of texts. This is inspired by the book Handsprengja í morgunsárið (A hand grenade in the morning) which features translations of poems from various foreign ill-doers, such as Radovan Karadzic, Ronald Reagan and Osama bin Laden, as well as text-remixes from articles of Icelandic politicians.

For about one year, Nýhil has run a small poetry bookstore, within the Bad Taste Records store in Reykjavík, which mostly features Nýhil products, and the few foreign titles that we’ve been able to afford.

Besides poetry, Nýhil has published four novels, 2 noise DVD’s, T-shirts, a sportsbag, a CD with readings of Allen Ginsberg translations, and a photocopied four page biography of an icelandic liberalist idealist and biographer, that incidentally, at about 10 swedish kroner, was the bestselling biography in Iceland last christmas – the proceeds were given to charity.

Most members of Nýhil also publish with other, more commercially viable publishing houses.

The poetry webzine Tíu þúsund tregawött (www.tregawott.net) was founded a little over a year ago, and half the editorship is in the hands of members of Nýhil. Since then it has published 59 icelandic poems, 17 articles, 14 reviews, 39 found poems, 21 foreign poems in the original language (mostly readings, visual poems or videos) and 47 translations. It was founded for the same reason as the poetry festival – that is to say, mostly to be a gateway to some sort of foreign experimental writing, seeing as those connections have been scarce in Iceland in the past. There are five people on the board of editors, and like bloggers we put up individual posts instead of entire issues. Indeed, seeing as the board of editors is HTML-blind, the zine started as a blogspot blog – but later we got a web-designer to do a proper page for us, for free.

Most of what has been done by Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött has indeed been possible because of people’s willingness to work for free, since our income from selling books is minimal, and most of the cost comes from either our own pockets or government and private grants. The idea that drives us on is the same sort of determinist idea that plagues small-town people – like myself, coming from a town of 3000 people in the northwest of Iceland – that if you don’t do it yourself, noone will. It is pointless to wait until somebody spoon-feeds you culture, anything worth witnessing is worth seeking out, and in most cases it needs to be sought out. It lies on the internet, hiding behind bookshelfs in libraries, in the heads of those seeking out similar things as yourself – and precisely for this reason the poetry festival has been very influential within the icelandic poetry scene, as younger poets have become more prone to experiment, to break out from the structures of language that is seemingly called „good“ or „proper“ for literature in Iceland – Icelandic poetry has been, in many ways since the middle of the last century, with a few exceptions, increasingly homogenic, increasingly incestuously imitative and, sad to say, increasingly bad. Many poetry books published in Iceland today are like photocopies of photocopied 1950’s poetry, bound as if they were new books – which would somehow be a nice project, if it was intentional and admitted.

What ties the members of Nýhil together as a group is not necessarily a shared aesthetic, as much as it is an opposition to the ruling aesthetic of our small country – which governs the big publishing houses who ordain poets, governs the ideas about poetry (which is snobbish in Iceland), governs the education system and therefore governs the ideas of most young poets. Instead of writing poetry, tackling language, metaphor and madness, they tend to „make like a poet“ – putting together sentences that sound like something they once heard in a poem.

The importance of destroying a language (of your own)

The myth about the Icelandic language among the population – the myth that is propogated in the school system, from kindergarteners to doctorates – is that in some ways it is a purer language than that spoken by our brethren in Scandinavia, which at best is considered to be some sort of pidgin Icelandic, “broken Icelandic”, languages not really fit for proper discussion – let alone poetry! – simplified and almost childish in their limited capacity for the use of cases, inflections or the melding of new words. This point of view, whatever merit it may have, has yielded a rabid conservatism within the Icelandic writers community that, despite what people might think, and despite the “official” view, is ever increasing: The idea is partly that we must not fall into the blackhole of becoming scandinavians.

Anyone that reads Icelandic books from the first fifty years of the last century – let alone older books - will notice the lack of uniformity in the use of Icelandic– the grammar is regional and personal, the idioms are regional and personal, the spelling is regional and personal, etc. In the years since there seems to have been a steady movement towards a uniformist coordination – linguistic scholars will often, although it is not fair to say always, mean that one usage is right and the other wrong – often this is a battle of cases and idioms – and believe-you-me, Icelandic professional proofreaders are among the most anal of the lot, scoffing at those who take liberty with language: “What silly mistakes!”

The general consensus seems to be: If you don’t do it the way the rulebooks say you should, than that’s because you don’t know how to – a peculiarity is written off as a mistake. I have even found the need to justify the use of the few colloquials that originate from my own home area – which are mostly about which prepositions to use – in my work as a journalist in my very own hometown, as well as having had battles with proofreaders from the south of the country. The conservative uniformism is so strict that there is quite literally no room for lingual diversity – be it experimental or traditional.

There are of course exceptions, the Icelandic literati – if indeed there is cause to call the half-illiterate a literati – will now and again ordain a poet or writer into a freedman, one that should no longer be revered as a mere servant of the language but as a genius (often rightly so) and granted permission to play – normally though, this permission is given afterwards, and it’s nearly a matter of coincidence who gets it and who doesn’t. To name two brilliant experimental writers, Megas has been ordained, while Steinar Sigurjónsson has not (outside a very small lit-clique).

The need in Iceland to overthrow the language regime is quite dire (“Tear this wall down!”). Viewing a language as such a rigid object does not only promote idiocy, it is literally a pathway to fascism (“No pasaran!”). A postmodern fascism, of course – where people are culled into action rather than forced (“Make love, not war”). A father saying to his child: „We really do have a great need for protecting our language, we are such a small nation. Now, you wouldn’t want to live in a world where noone spoke Icelandic, would you? You know, maybe then we would all speak Danish, and the pronunciation is not very easy.“

And the child whispers: „Yes, daddy, I promise to rid myself of dative-illness.“

Yes, it’s called „dative-illness“ – and it means that you have a preference for the dative instead of the accusative, or in some cases, the nominative. According to Icelandic parents and elementary school teachers, this is a life-threatening condition.

Enter: Avant-garde poetry. The eternal fucking with language – in the sense of disturbing it and loving it at the same time. Fooling around with it. Cheating on it. Taking it apart and putting it back together again – inverted or otherwise malformed.

Iceland doesn’t not have a particularly rich tradition of experimentation. Not to say that people haven’t experimented, not to say the experiments haven’t at times been brilliant – but mostly they’ve been discarded as momentary flippancies, and the postmodern fascist’s answer to the artist’s weeping is: „Now now, you are very talented, we know. But you should focus on something more suitable, perhaps…“ – And the most talented of people turn to rewriting Knut Hamsun or Halldór Laxness.

Experimental writing isn’t thrown out with brute force, it’s thrown out with the pathos of the understanding, yet ultimately intolerant. Like when the Icelandic police a few days ago „removed“ two dozen gypsies from Reykjavík – by showing up in police uniforms, giving them plane-tickets and driving them to the airport. Officially noone was deported, officially noone was forced to go anywhere – even though it seems the police hinted that they could deport the gypsies if needed – but still they went. Apparently there was a need to clear the streets of musicians for the Reykjavík Art Festival, that has just started.

The same social-democratic-postmodernist/diet-fascist – or whaddyawannacallit – approach is used on anything else that annoys the precious middle classes, the burgeoning structural enthusiasts that now populate Iceland to such an extent that rebellion doesn’t only seem hard, it seems futile. Like storming city hall is pointless for todays revolutionaries – the powers that be don’t need no city hall. And picking apart language as if it were a grandfather clock, is not really either a practice anyone hands out Nobel prizes for. But yet it seems that ever more poets find a calling within exactly those structures, or non-structures, of taking language apart and putting it back together, inverted or otherwise malformed. It is what defines most experimental poetry, and to a lesser extent probably almost all poetry worthy of the name. From TS Eliot to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to the Flarfists, from the silliest of slam-poets to the Four Horsemen.

The infinities of the world, every word and every meaning, all the meanings behind every word and all the words behind every meaning, have been divided into categories of right and wrong, and questioning those categories is nigh pointless – the machine will in all probability have it’s way. Yet, it’s probably the only possible course of action for anyone who actually cares for a language or for language itself.

(This text was written as a mini-lecture for the seminar Alternativ publicering/litterær innovation in Biskops Arnö, Sweden, 10.-13. may, 2007 - but never read, since I was displeased with it, and decided these ideas needed much more than the 15 minutes given in Sweden. This will probably be expanded upon at some later date — Instead I wrote another mini-lecture, about Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött).