Yes! Money! Ultraweb! Interactivity! Javascript!

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 fiction – novels and novellas – since they demand more attention for longer and more numerous time periods than are comfortably provided on our laptops, smartphones and (most) other electronic data readers. But this also goes for shorter fiction, which has very little room on blogs or Facebook (let alone Twitter) compared to poetry. Prose of similar length – non-fiction articles, whether on blogs or news sites – is the most popular text online while comparably lengthed fiction is probably the least popular.

And it makes you ponder.

For one thing: almost everyone’s a poet. As I may have mentioned before, poetry’s the lazy man’s art form. So blogs and online poetry forums are easy to fill up with, excuse my French, emotional drivel in pretty little words. Any teenager with a laptop and an emotional problem; any middle-aged used-to-wannabe with a drawer full of anything from a lifetime’s worth of occasional quatrains to half a manuscript of semi-serious yet dated modernist verse; anyone who’s tired of solving Sudoku while the laundry dries – i.e. anyone without the time or the patience to write longer works (or more ambitious poetry) can self-publish online. And by jolly, let’s not forget that while this may make horrible poetry available to an unsuspecting (and sometimes unsavvy) general public, this is (in itself) nevertheless a good thing – überdemocratic and pretty like peaches.

Another thing: the writers most interested in the possibilities of text, and hence with the hardest hardons for the textual, social and lingual possibilities available online, usually call what they do poetry rather than prose – since prose is somehow supposed to be a story while poetry can (at least peripherally) be whatever the hell it feels like being. So the people who want to make movable or moving poems, who want to make self-generating or interactive texts, who want to write for a new venue – in short, the people who fall flat for the innovative are less likely to wanna constrict themselves to a one thousand year old Arabic invention. For prose, any medium is a vehicle. For poetry, any medium is a limitation on the path towards divinity.

Third: while length does not explain why people read the New York Times online and not the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges; while it does not explain why fiction can’t keep up online with non-fiction, length may explain why poetry beats fiction. You can get snippets of poems – but not stories. You can have a minute of poetry. Or half a minute. A second of poetry. Add to this the fact that a lot of poetry can be disjuncted, spastic and humorously dysfunctional like comedy – it can be very audience friendly. Anyone who’s attended poetry readings and prose readings can attest to the fact that poetry readings are usually much more enjoyable – poetry is (by nature) more performative than prose; by origin it is a spoken or chanted artform. And on the internet you can find anything, save for patience – hence the popularity of short fun.

Fourth: while there is no money in poetry and (for some reason) people have no compunctions about giving away non-fiction, or republishing it online a few weeks or months after it’s printed equivalent hit the streets, the world of prose fiction has been sufficiently conservative and self-protective to avoid both the blogosphere and the webzines – nor has it much of a presence within the (semi-legal) world of peer-to-peer networks.

Much of this may change with the advent of the e-book, which so far is mostly designed around linear prose fiction. For one thing the books of many popular and/or respected writers are now available (illegally, in most countries) in various e-reader formats through torrent-sites. They’re not available in the same enormous way as music or film, but the files are there and they’re much smaller than music or film and therefore more expediently downloadable. Although e-reader platforms are mostly geared towards longer works of prose fiction (including collections of short stories), non-fiction does have some presence, while poetry – with all it’s line-breaks and weirdo layouts – will have to adapt (and become more adaptable) if it wants to fit in.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

I'm pretty sure this is an apple. But I wouldn't know how to say "apple" in old norse. It's probably something like "gjôrknôttr".

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 pure and untouched. The language that stood still, century after century, like a bee in amber, so that Icelanders could drink their skulls off with Breezers in Ibiza and brag to the world.

All of this would be sufficiently intolerable if it were true – but as a collective national deception which fosters a rabidly conservative attitude towards language it’s causing infernal mayhem on a daily basis. Not only does every new generation feel less and less comfortable manouvering within this immovable 19th century construction we call 13th century Icelandic, but it actually generates a sort of slow, stale death where (mostly younger) people give up on adapting words to their (younger) language and pick up foreign words and sentences (primarily from English) untouched and unrecontextualized – i.e., they give up on their mother tongue.

Let me just state this clearly for the record, and let noone tell you otherwise: Icelanders can NOT read 13th century Icelandic any better than they can speak Swedish or German (i.e. a few can, most can’t). The only people who can properly read the Eddas are those who have either learned to read Old Norse or have access to the texts in modern translation – that is to say (almost) everyone who speaks any other language than Icelandic (since the myth of us understanding them relies on us pretending to be able to, modernizing the texts would be tantamount to treason).

The fact is that Icelandic changed very much through the centuries and varied immensely between parts of the country (making it even harder for a modern man to read 17th century Hallgrímur Pétursson in the original than 13th century Snorri Sturluson) but all of Icelandic’s peculiarities – it’s dialects and accents, as well as common Latin and Danish phrases – were killed off and the language homogenized and rewound by 19th century nationalist poets and scholars who teamed up with a Danish (!) linguist with a fetish for a 12th century Icelandic grammatical treatise. And as for neologisms; yes, we have “sími” (telephone), “sjónvarp” (TV) and “tölva” (computer) – but internet in Icelandic is just “internet”, the hood (of a car) is “húdd”, and video is “vídeó”. Every other word is Nordic by origin, and yet conservationists forbid scandinavianisms like “ske” (happen) but not “bíll” (car) or “jörð” (ground). These people are perhaps shallow enough to think that their rules make sense – and arrogant enough to convince others.

Neologisms are fine – they are creative and fun, and we should have shitloads of them. But you can’t boss around a language like this. If Icelandic is to survive (let alone thrive) as a language it has to have an enjoyable presence, it has to be an enjoyable experience for the people talking, reading, writing and hearing it. The moment a language becomes an obligation it ceases to induce anyone with passion – except, of course, for the irritable pedagogue who feels he or she can constantly “teach” others how they should speak their own mother tongue. Icelandic, just as any language, is (mostly) comprised of foreign words and our grammar – like our sayings, idioms and proverbs – makes variably much sense. The new silly bits aren’t any worse than the old, traditional silly bits. Language is, when observed up close, a very illogical object – despite all it’s inherent logic and morbid obduracy (do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself …)

In short. A people’s language ruled by the fist of the eternally incensed and bitterly arrogant will become less and less wieldy with time until it no longer does the trick, until it is no longer capable of carrying the thoughts of the people, whereupon the people will move up and out, pick up and leave – adios, goodbye, nice to know ya…

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

Joyful poetry salesmen in the Beijing suburbs call "ljóð! ljóð!" at their prospective buyers.

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, translator from Chinese (and husband of Ingibjörg Sólrún, retired godess of Icelandic social-democrats), when they studied together at the University of Beijing in the seventies.

Besides being one of the richest businessmen in China (as if that was somehow insufficient), Huang Nubo is, according to the information website factsanddetails.com, a former Communist Party Propaganda department section chief as well as being a poet in his own right. Richer than most poets, he’s worth around 770 million dollars, says Forbes Magazine, making him the 114th richest guy in China – so, according to a 2010 CIA Factbook estimate, there should be around 1,338,612,854 people in China who are poorer than him. Give or take.

And Huang Nubo has guaranteed The China Iceland Cultural Fund one million dollars in the next ten years. Out of the good of his heart.

Now, Icelandic artists are no strangers to being bartered and bought by the infinitely rich. Until a few years ago, Landsbanki Íslands, or should I say the owners of that particular financial instititution, played Medici-like patrons to artists – and used their image to promote their loans, overdrafts, savings and pension-plans in national ad-campaigns. Everybody (more or less) played along. Hell, I even published a poetry book, whose printing was mostly financed by Landsbanki Íslands. And I defended it vigorously. The printing was not the same as the publishing, I argued, and even though I got money from them that didn’t mean I was their whore (‘cause I’d never copulate with them bastards) and whatever, whatever, it feels like aeons ago and I was wrong.

How do I feel about that now – post-meltdown? I feel ashamed. I feel I was oportunistic and naïve. I feel it gags me more than I expected, and in different ways. I don’t remember ever finding a reason to directly criticize Björgólfur Guðmundsson, the chair of Landsbanki Íslands and silverhaired chief of our modern Medici clan – at the time he was one of the most popular people in Iceland. A cute old man with class, a filthy-rich philanthropist who’d been victimized and put in white-collar jail and rerisen for a second helping. And I didn’t feel any reason to attack him personally – international capitalism, yes, but Björgólfur Guðmundsson, no. Maybe that was sensible – and maybe sensible is what it feels like to be somebody’s bitch. I’ll never know. I was robbed of that option when the banks collapsed.

But more than this, I feel that whatever I say today is tainted with a) the fact that I did partake in the financial adventure, however peripherally and b) I feel guilty about it and might therefore be willing to lash out at other participants who don’t seem the least bit guilty.

Perhaps I just don’t find it fair, that everyone else is so calm about it. I’m not asking for self-critique à la Mao Zedong, but a shrug of the shoulders – a collective “yes, shit happens and we’re sorry, we’ll try to be smarter and less egotistical” – that’d be nice. I don’t think the most important thing in dealing with the meltdown is that measly poets and artists engage in any kind of purgatory so that they can be re-allowed into the heaven of artistic bullshit – I don’t want to make the crisis about us. But it saddens me to see so many critical minds – superbly intelligent people – sitting around and behaving like politicians in denial: “Nothing happened, please, everybody just move along. There’s nothing to see here.” Yes. Politicians, bureaucrats, the media, businessmen – the list of culprits is long and poets are way-back. But let’s not do like everybody else and act as if we don’t recognize the scene of the crime.

Maybe this is just one of my useless manias. But I’d still like – in all humbleness – to advise those invited to participate in the projects of the newly founded China Iceland Cultural Fund to be careful in what they lend their names or faces to, their reputations and their artistry. Because, in my experience, it does matter – even though artistic autonomy may be only a far-fetched ideal, it might still be something worth striving towards.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Chinese state capitalism/market communism isn’t anything worth cheering on. Stuff may be relative, but fuck me, it’s not this relative.

Originally appeared  in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

William Tell: A Novel by Steve McCaffery

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 & Geof Huth)

eyeye (Aram Saroyan)

It’s the new new in poetry. The new black. Yet since poetry, like infants, needs an entire childhood and adolescence before reaching young adulthood – the mere concept is already 23 years old (whereas, per usual, the practice is as old as language itself – in fact, it’s probably how language was made). Coined in 1987 by entrepoeteur Geof Huth “pwoermd” is a combination (obviously!) of the two four-letter words “poem” and “word”.

One of the first instances of public notoriety for pwoermds – the “obscenity trial” that made ‘em famous (with no tabloid interest since the 1800’s, poetry wouldn’t have survived without its obscenity trials) – was when Aram Saroyan (son of William) typed the infamous “lighght”. Saroyan was a 22 year old fan of dada and concrete poetry and had started working on one-word poems that, instead of requiring a “reading process”, simply happened in an instant, a single moment. No subject-verb-object; no meenie, minie, moe; no ifs or buts or even abouts.

Lighght was first published in The Chicago Review in 1965 and in 1969 it was included in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology – whereupon the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded it the same sum as any other poem in the book: 750 dollars. Which makes about 5,200 dollars at current value (104,000 times what I make per word). For a single poem. Consisting of a single word.

Whoa!

Tax payers were incensed. The government could not afford to cut taxes but they could afford to pay beatnik weirdos exorbitant amounts of money for writing one word “and not even spelling it right”? The American right – congressmen, voters and bureaucrats – had a full-on hissy-fit, with mailbags upon mailbags of rage arriving in Washington. The NEA was made to answer on Capitol Hill, the Republican Party used the opportunity to squeeze the NEA and as late as 1981 Ronald Reagan was still citing Saroyan’s poem as a reason for the abolition of government funding for the arts.

The shortest poem I know is Steve McCaffery’s “William Tell: A Novel”. It is simply a lowercase “i” with an extra dot over the dot. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, however, the shortest poem is one by Charles Chigna entitled “I” (uppercase) – which goes “Why?”. But neither constitutes a pwoermd as they are both dependent on their titles – and are thereby a process and not an instant.

Like writing any poetry, writing pwoermds is basically easy while writing good pwoermds is somehow miraculous. To a reader of pwoermds they all seem very interesting at first, but the more you read the higher your standards become and the more it takes to surprise you, to create that prodigious instant which blows you away and leaves you “discombobulated”. Which incidentally is a “normal word” – a nwoorrmadl – and not a pwoermd.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

Everyone always has loads of fun at Roskilde.

Dear friends.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Roskilde festival to perform at ‘Ordets Område’ – the literature part of this famous rock festival. I’ll be performing as a part of a team on friday at 16.30 – playing around with the analogue text remixer RE ACT OR – and on thursday (my 32nd birthday!) I’ll be reading sound poetry. Info here and here and program here

Other things happening soonish is reading and lecturing at Kuopio Sound Poetry Seminar in September in Kuopio, Finland – probably some readings in Oulu this summer – and performing in London and Warsaw in November, as well as something in Berlin when my (second) novel, Poison for beginners, is released in Germany (by Kozempel & Timm ) in October/November sometime.

We moved to Oulu, Finland, a couple of weeks ago and are getting pretty comfortable. I hope you are all doing well.
All the best,

Eiríkur

William Shakespeare printed on Megan Fox.

The Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, the Cybook Opus, the Sony Reader, the iLiad – and now: Megan Fox’s right flank.

We’ve come to accept the fact that books are no longer just pages tied together. Just as we graduated from scrolls and tablets, we’re now in the process of graduating from paperbacks and hardcovers to more novel (pun intended) ways of presenting our texts. From storing entire libraries in a pocket-sized computer to encoding bacteria with poetry to programming machines that summarize, mash-up, read aloud and produce new texts, to print-on-demand and the immediate publishing that blogs offer – traditional books are no longer the only vehicles for poetry (or other texts), leaving traditional book publishers desperately clinging on to a past that’ll never come back. The “book” has been born again – but the world of literature (from authors to publishers to buyers) is still going through painful labour.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the old book is dead, although there’ll probably be less of it in ten years time. All the different vehicles for text, including the paperback and the hardcover, have their own value, their intrinsic qualities. Bacteria carrying poetry will probably outlive humanity. Storing text electronically takes a lot less space, doesn’t waste paper (although the reading gadgets are hardly “environmental”) and reduces the cost of distribution (fiscally and environmentally). Print-on-demand makes (almost) anything that can be printed publishable in book form, no matter the “marketability”. Blogs give us the chance to share text with lightning speed, making it easily accessible across the globe in a matter of seconds. And paperbacks and hardcovers feed our more fetishistic needs – reading as religion; personal libraries as shrines of knowledge, tributes to genius.

But until recently, we’ve not cracked the mystery of how to make sure that what we write will be read by millions, rather than just our devoted mothers. We’ve not had an obvious vehicle for this, the most desired quality of all: guaranteed success (short of printing our poetry in humongous letters on the moon, of course).

Enter: ultra vixen of oozifying sex appeal, smooth-skinned smorgasbord of poetry, mighty transformer of all our textual realities, Megan Fox.

The first poem to be published on the oh-so-popular body of Megan Fox was the somewhat traditional “chinese symbol” – in this case “strength”, on the back of her head. From Chinese minimalism, she moved on to publishing a bit of Shakespeare: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” on her right shoulderblade. She followed up Shakespeare’s success with a bit of her own poesying: “there once was a little girl who never knew love until a boy broke her HEART” on her right flank. Last but not least, quite recently she added a mysterious line to her left flank: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” – variously attributed to Friedrich Nietszche, Jelaluddin Rumi, the 18th century mystic Rabbi Nachman, Henri Bergson, George Carlin or an “unknown” poet by the name of Angela Monet. But no matter who wrote it, there is no doubt whatsoever no poem was read as widely last week.

But just like the iPad or the Kindle, blogs or bacteria, Megan Fox, although a welcome addition to the plethora of poetic vehicles, is more of an addition to book culture than a replacement of it.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

From the book Sem sé by Ragnhildur Jóhanns. Click on the image to see more examples of Ragnhildur's work.

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, heavily established, living in isolation from foreign poetry (as well as younger poetry), over-emphasizing metaphor, homogenous, amazingly critical of variation (or fun) and having a snotty superiority complex that it justfied with its so-called “modesty”.

“The sheer power of my quietude will crush the world”, the poets seemed to say, while reciting their poetry to nearly noone in a suburban library somewhere off the map. “That’ll show’em!”.

But eventually I more or less gave up on commenting on Icelandic poetry. It didn’t seem to be doing anyone any good. They got mad (in their own quiet way) and I got madder (in my a little less quiet way) and we all would give each other the evil eye when passing on Laugavegur. I didn’t learn, they didn’t learn and almost everything remained the same. So I started focusing on things that did interest me rather than trying to play a draconian pedagogue to the Icelandic poetry community.

The fact is most Icelandic poetry doesn’t interest me. But then most Danish poetry doesn’t interest me either. What I’ve read of contemporary Arab poetry I find horribly sentimental. Most American poetry (that I’ve read) is emotional drivel. Come to think of it I like “scenes of poetries” much more than I like “nationalities of poetries”. I like language-inspired poetry – from Gertrude Stein and Kurt Schwitters to illuminated manuscripts, flarf, langpo, cut-ups, sound poetry, visual poetry, generative poetry. I like poetry that’s simultaneously intelligent, amusing and athletic. And I like poetry communities that feel like communities and not sectarian dogmas – be it the dogma of one ruling class (as in Iceland) or the multiple dogmas in a dog-eat-dog world of a thousand genres (as in the USA).

Of course there’s loads of interesting poetry happening in Iceland – though it doesn’t surface much or generate interest with the bigger publishing houses, who only publish poetry written by people who have already made a name for themselves, either as poets publishing with smaller publishing houses or as something else entirely.

Take Jón Örn Loðmfjörð, for instance, who’s been writing poetry machines on the internet for some years now. He’s publishing his first book in a few days – Gengismunur – a generated mash-up of the infamous nine volume Report (on the crisis/collapse). Or Ragnhildur Jóhanns, who recently published one of the most beautiful books of visual poetry to be published in Iceland, ever – called Semsé. This year the Nýhil International Poetry Festival will be held for the sixth consecutive year. Anton Helgi Jónsson has started publishing again, after a lengthy break. Ísak Harðarson’s last book was wonderful. And so on and so forth.

But none of this changes the fact that a good poem – let alone a good book of poems – is still an exception in Iceland. As it is in all the other countries of the world.

Now this is obviously a true yo-yo master.

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 the air, however, Kenny got found out: He had no yo-yo skills. And while madly swinging his yo-yos, beating himself over the head, bruising his genitalia and trying to “fake it”, Kenny claimed he had no muscle memory, and therefore perhaps the yo-yo was not anything he’d ever master. Sorry.

Now, lying to people is easy. Claiming talent is something (almost) everyone is capable of. But things tend to get a bit more complicated when we’re pressed to prove our talents – when we’re made to bring forth our yo-yos and perform a perfect “Buddha’s Revenge”, a “Reverse Double-or-Nothing” or – my God! – an “Elephant’s Trunk”. Then we either put our money where our mouths are or we fold. Which is why most people don’t go around faking mad skills they don’t possess. They don’t want to get called on.

When it comes to the arts proving talent or skill isn’t so straight forward though. Sure, you don’t really fake the cello anymore than the yo-yo (although there’s more tolerance for avant-garde weirdo shit in the cello-world than the yo-yo world – and yes, breaking a cello while masturbating and drinking your own urine can be faked) – but the same does not go for the creative compositional arts. These days you can fake a painting. You can fake a song. You can fake a movie or a play. And you can fake a poem.

This is because creative art isn’t necessarily based on skill per se – or even talent. Creative art is mostly performed on instinct, it’s created in a hinter-dimension, a subconscious and brought forth into the conscious world where the artist either uses his or her cognitive skills to “finish” the piece or throws it away before diving back into the hinter-dimension for new more interesting stuff. And there’s no perfect, or even imperfect, way of judging it objectively. There’s no turing-test for creative arts.
Yet most creative art forms require other kinds of ambition – other ways of “proving” one’s dedication to (and love for) the art form, which are also hard to fake. If you want to write a novel you need boatloads of patience. Just writing a hundred pages that seem semi-coherent is an arduous task for a lazy person. If you want respect in the visual arts you go to school – often you have to stay there for years! A modern composer doesn’t get the time of day until he’s finished a doctorate. Even a lowly singer/songwriter has to invest in a guitar – or worse, a piano.

Nothing of the sort applies to poetry. A poet needs no qualification. There are no schools and the only required investment is paper and pen. And if you can’t afford paper and pen you can always borrow your mother’s laptop. There’s nothing obviously discernible about a poem that says it’s “good” or “bad” – not since we dropped metre and rhyme, in any case. It’s now all a matter of taste and taste is a superbly dubious and fleeting concept.

This results in two things.

On the one hand poetry attracts everyone who wants to be an artist without having to strain themselves too much. Every lazybone, wannabe, poseur and charlatan who wants part of the (perceived) “glamour” of being an artist, becomes a poet. Simply because it’s the easiest art to get away with faking.

On the other hand, for those willing to embrace it, it may provide greater possibilities for creation – casual or stringent, oblivious, spontaneous, uneducated, stupid, banal, kitschy, experimental, nutty – without any outer guidelines or official framework to tell us what constitutes a “true” poem and what doesn’t.

And still telling which is which will be well nigh impossible.

First published in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

"I wish I was a 21st century retrogardist and not a 19th century base prole with tuberculosis."

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 readers think of Patrick Bateman and his cronies – or Gordon Gekko. Lubricious slickers with a peculiar need to associate themselves with a bygone golden age while simultaneously proclaiming themselves as “the true new” of poetry (‘hey, look at me, I’m neo-Keats!’). This is poetry for a Roman master race; this is the right wing of poetry; this is literature for those who seek a moral center and a sense in poetry, and find both in nostalgic form and subject-matter.

Can you tell that I don’t care for it much?

Well, alright, I’ll admit I do get some pleasure out of it. My problem is more with the philosophy behind it than the parlour-game of pentameter per se. I’m no enemy of form or rigorous sportsmanship in poetry – both form and rigour are key traits of most experimental poetry, which is the part of the park I prefer to play in. But New Formalism’s spite towards modernism in particular, and modernity in general – not to mention its teeth-grinding spite towards experimental poetry – is so violently geriatric in its appeal that it verges on necrophilia.

Now, as in the real world, progressive left wing poetry’s problem tends to be dogmatism on the one hand and maddening factionalism on the other. Everyone has their own precisely constructed theory on what constitutes great post-avant poetry and the rest, however slightly they differ from the party line in question, are a bunch of revisionist nutters – interesting, perhaps, but eventually of no importance (“we must break you”). It’s poetry that praises community but (often) has little sense of community – and most of its communities are comprised of tiny revolutionary factions of mini-Lenins, each of whom can’t wait to drop the others so that they may lead the revolution on their own (“at best, you get to be a Verlaine to my Rimbaud, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go”).

(Can you tell I’m trying to be equally cruel towards my own, as I was towards the evil fascists of New Formalism above, in a perverted democratic tradition?)

Last but not least, oh woe to ye of putrid intentions, is the center: International Free Verse. Like its political representative in real life, the poetic center is mostly without vision and has no discernible wish for poetry to be one thing or the other. It is a despicable mish-mash of nothing whose primary goal is to have a nice desk-job in the Poetic Institution – preferably a well-paid official position with a respectable title.

Its philosophy is that no news is good news. While nothing happens, you don’t have to be afraid that perhaps it’s the wrong thing happening. The poetic center came out of the twentieth century – through the indescriminate bombings of Marinetti, the degenerate hippie logic of Allen Ginsberg and the rabid intellectualism of Language Poetry – feeling like it needed a break, at the very least. It deplores ideology, method, form, discernible content and conversation while idolizing all that which is vague: inspiration, harmless abstractions, cliché-ridden symbolism, simple juxtaposition – and simultaneously deals in the perception that not asserting anything is in itself a form of supreme modesty.

Sometimes all of this seems too much for a poor soul –we still haven’t even begun discussing the rampant paranoia and petty hatreds which permeate poetic circles left, right and center – and I feel this prompts serious questions about my career choice. Questions to which I’ve sadly still not found a satisfactory answer. But it’s totally fucked up, right?

Cannon balls. The canon doesn't have any balls.

Some things are probably too sacrosanct. It’d be hard, for instance, to rouse support for changing the national anthem to something more up-to-date (I’d vote for Haukur Már Helgason’s Matarsiðir Sýslumannsins í Kópavogi (The Dining Habits of the District Magistrate in Kópavogur) or Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s Klof vega menn (Crotches Kill Men)). So we might have to keep Matthías Jochumsson’s Song of Praise – “Oh, God of our Country, Country of our God” – despite the fact that I wouldn’t read the horrendous thing to my son if it’d spawn peace on earth (well, okay, maybe then, but I’d want it in writing!).

But how about Bjarni Thorarensen? Hannes Hafstein? Do we really need this? How about just cutting the nationalism and the godliness in its entirety? I, for one, believe in the power of poetry, the power of words, of language – and I don’t think this drivel is doing us any good, nor has it ever. It rots your mind.

If one were to actually reduce Skólaljóð in this manner, what you’d be left with is nature and a few verses of Steinarr’s “The Time and the Water”. Now, nature is fine and all (and knocking Steinarr is a veritable crime), but nature and more nature might eventually get a little monotonous, believe it or not. So how about instead of us just picking out what isn’t popular anymore and inserting a few innocent examples from newer poets (which seems to have been the method of composition for anthologies thus far), we enter the archives and start picking out new interesting examples from the history of Icelandic poetry? Why, for instance, is there so little of Æri-Tobbi to be found? He’s hardly even mentioned in the five volume Bókmenntasaga Íslands (Iceland’s Literary History). This is a serious canonical mistake – “agara gagara” etcetera! (internet addition: more on Æri-Tobbi here).

In this process we might also see about finding some more female poets. Reading anthologies one might think that women hardly ever wrote poetry back in the days – but to the contrary poetry was very much a feminine sport and indeed most poets were women. Granted, not all of it got written down, and collecting the poetry of Icelandic women throughout the centuries is hardly unproblematic – but it is, truly and utterly, a cultural heritage (mostly) ignored (while we spend years debating whether or not sacrosanct male poet Jónas Hallgrímsson had syphilis, and whether saying so aloud is decent or not). And if there’s anything that gives Icelandic authorities a hardon, it’s the words “cultural heritage” (attention, scholars: free grant money!)

A cultural heritage is not an impermeable fact and it has never been. What we consider important to our “national image” (a dubious and difficult concept in and of itself), or to ourselves privately – what we make available so that I can read it to Aram – isn’t etched in stone. It’s written on paper and it can and should be reevaluted every other year or so. A cultural heritage is a construction like any other, we define it – it is not an otherwordly, uncontrollable entity which controls us – we control it. And so we should, if – at all – we give a damn.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.