Apparently (that is to say, according to the internet) this dog is one of the Führers cuter creations.

The philosophist Theodor Adorno famously stated, in 1949, that writing a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric. He proceded: “And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today”.

With some simplification poetry may be understood as an art of beauty, and indeed that is how poetry has been perceived in most times and most places. Anyone not in poetry’s “in-crowd” is sure to start thinking of flowers, waterfalls, nationalism, high-end emotion and heartbreak when presented with the word “poetry”. Poetry, in this sense, is a bit like water-colouring, somehow – standing between being purely decoratory and an expression of something private, almost lavatorial in the sense that even though your poetry springs from a natural (in some sense beautiful) need, maybe you should refrain from doing it in public.

Properly executed ‘tis the finest of arts, all oohs and ahs with exclamation marks making you shiver with its allusive and powerful imagery, its nearly divine rhetoric and its authoritarian voice. In short, it’s everything a nazi would want to read at night to secure himself a goodnight’s sleep, a haven from the horrors of his day-to-day activities. Reading it makes you feel cultured in the same way that systematically killing people makes you feel not so cultured at all. And maybe they’re not so much opposites as they are partners-in-crime.

When WWII came to an end the allies found more than concentration camps in the Reich – they found homes, tunnels, secluded castles, salt mines, caves, trains and other hideouts stuffed with the finest european artworks, paintings, sculptures and artifacts. Top nazi Hermann Göring filled his countryhome with some of the most beautiful and famous works of art in the history of man. Hitler was planning on building the greatest art collection ever, the Führermuseum, designed by Albert Speer. It was to be erected in Linz, Austria and filled with stolen and bought art from all over the world – the best money can buy and muscle procure. Included in the plan, of course, was a library with 250.000 books.

This poem is from John Toland's Hitler biography, and apparently translated by Toland himself (no translator is credited). Hitler wrote the poem while a soldier in WWI, shortly before being injured. The Wotan mentioned in the poem is the west-germanic Odin.

Nazi Germany thought of itself as the height of civilization – a refined world order, creating a structured, civilized beauty out of mayhem, chaos and degeneration, through the violent application of a stern idealogy. Although their methods were not always applied in a systematic and organized fashion – not everyone died in the machine-like gas-chambers; children were also beat against rocks to save bullets – their ideal was to be „efficient“, „civilized“ and not least „beautiful“.

I’m not sure what Adorno meant by his famous words – and apparently that goes for most people. To add insult to injury Adorno (reportedly after reading the works of Paul Celan) took most of it back, saying maybe it’s so and maybe not – God knows! (I’m paraphrasing). Perhaps he took offense to beauty in the face of horror. Perhaps trying to get to the heart of humanity was worthless if humanity was so tainted. And perhaps he felt that if fine arts could also be enjoyed by nazis, fine arts had themselves become reactionary.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

Portrait of the artist as a young man.

Most poetry’s pretty fucked up. It tries hard to be hard. Not only hard to understand, but also hard to touch – hard to feel. Sentiment isn’t really welcome in poetry anymore, it’s been outlawed. Sentiment is bad for poetry. It eats up the poetry and excretes it as pure whiny mush.

As is usually the case, sentiment wasn’t outlawed for just any old no-good-reason – it was kicked out ‘cause it’d started to misbehave so badly as to not be considered tolerable anymore. It had had too much to drink and was creeping everybody out with its nonsensical, overemotional whimpering. It was all in your face with its “The depths of my pain/ the drip of my drugs / today’s the day / I die” and it’s roughed-up, false bravado, driving everybody nuts. So it got kicked out. Boot in the ass and out the door.

It all started with the pleasant idea of representation. Poetry was to become the voice of the underprivileged, the huddled masses, the proletariat – it was to become the voice of the voiceless. This is North America in the sixties and the seventies – beatniks, hippies, black nationalists, anarcho-communists, neo-marxists, orgy-enthusiasts, feminists, shock-artists and the like. Anybody who wanted to be somebody was either underprivileged, or revolutionary enough to make up for their lack of underprivilege. It was, in many ways, a beautiful time.

But poetry was never a tool meant for representation – never an archaic form of Powerpoint, never a public diary. It was never a tool, per se (although many poets, I’ll admit, are in fact tools). And as often seems to be the case, things escalated fast. By the late seventies it was hardly enough to feel yourself an outsider anymore, to speak on behalf of your forgotten people or to project social problems. It quickly turned from the social to the personal – as poets realized that for pure muscle the personal always beats the social, hands down. Telling an audience that your people had been raped, had nothing on telling the audience that you yourself were the survivor of your own personal holocaust, and then proceeding on with the gritty details. The lump in the throat beat the fist in the air.

By the mid eighties, surprisingly enough, this turned into a competition. Literally. Poets got up on stages all over the world to espouse their clever, rhythmical rhymes for sexual abuse, rape and whatever else could keep the audience gasping. And the judges picked a winner. Usually the one who’d fit the most –ation rhymes into his or her poem. “Due to complications with my castration, and the depreciation of my flagellation, I fell victim to demonization without ejaculation.” The victor was the one who got the most applause. The one whose authenticity seemed most true. Whose pain ran deepest.

And so, embarrassed by all this sentimentality, most poetry worthy of the name turned it’s back, turned cold and turned hard. It intellectualized, codified and peculiarized – it kicked back with a vengeance. Sentiment, being an old tradition in poetry, gets all the proper lip-service, of course, but it’s not a card-carrying member anymore. On those rare occasions that it gets invited to poetry’s shindigs, it’s kept thoroughly in check, its punch is de-spiked and if it so much as hints at having had a rough time recently, poetry gets all like “so what, you gonna cry now?” and boots it without further ado.

Which is a shame, I guess. But until sentiment learns how to behave itself, that’s just how it’s gotta be.

Drunkard/poet Li Po. Not to be confused with Oulipo, an entirely different poetic project.

Poetry is a culture heavily impregnated with the idolisation of poets. Popular knowledge of poetry stops where the anecdotes about poets end and the poetry begins. We remember Rimbaud as the original rockstar, vomiting all over the Paris culture elite. We remember Ginsberg as the mad fairy who blew people in parties and undressed on stage. Li Po as the alcoholic who drowned while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the river. Sylvia Plath for being suicidal. Ted Hughes for being her husband. Gertrude Stein for her dinner parties. We remember poets for being crazy, for being loners, bitter or ecstatic, for their failures more than their victories, for their eccentricities more than their attempts at finding common human traits. Not counting a few soundbytes etched into the mental gravestones of our mutual consciousness (“I saw the best minds of my generation” … and “I am large, I contain multitudes” and the like) we hardly ever touch on their poetry.

Having soon spent a decade in Icelandic literary cliques I can confirm that this is not limited to the society of dead (famous) poets. Literary enthusiasts gossip about living poets and writers, big and small, like there’s no tomorrow. And culture-reportage in Iceland usually consists of asking a writer or artist what his or her “dream-weekend” might be, what they have in their pockets, or chit-chat about politics and social matters that may or may not have anything to do with the artist’s subject matter. What you soon realize when you first get interviewed for a book you’ve written, is that the reporter in question will, in 9 cases out of 10, not have read your book. Even the critique, the reviews in the newspapers or other media, is inherently focused on the writer’s person – he or she has grown, he or she has lost his or her touch, he or she is venturing where no he-or-she has ventured before, he or she is old-fashioned, he or she is revolutionary. He or she should’ve taken more time. The list of clichés is longer, but as it induces involuntary vomiting in the columnist, I will stop here.

The French literary-critic Roland Barthes wrote a famous essay in the late sixties entitled “The Death of the Author”. In the essay Barthes railed against the idea that we read the text in the context of it’s author. The text should be free from whatever the author is, says Barthes, and in fact there is no actual “author”, only a “scriptor” who produces the work but does not explain it, does not have the (sole) right to unentangle his or her symbolic efforts – or indeed any other part of the work.

This may be a creative way to approach a poem, although perhaps a bit fundamentalist for most people’s taste. A poet’s life may be relevant to his or her work, either the methods of composition or his or her maternal relationship – whatever it is. Reading is a free world. And poets should maybe not be the ones deciding what readers see in their works or how they should be read. But I am confident that most of my fellow poets would be overjoyed if the media, when discussing the life, methods and opinions of the poet, would be so kind as to do so in the context of the poet’s work, rather than the context of the contents of the poet’s pockets.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

Dr. Hugo Heyrmans Alpha Bet - literally a walking poem: http://www.doctorhugo.org/e-poetry/walkingpoem.html

Poetry sings, prose talks. Poetry dances, prose walks. Poetry’s fewer words with more (“deeper”) meaning. Poetry’s about form while prose is about content. Poetry’s the memory and prose the remembrance. Poetry’s constructed in lines, whereas prose is constructed in paragraphs.

Don’t know, but I know it when I see it!

The amount of clichés about the difference between poetry and prose is quite sufficient. Abundant, even. In all honesty, there’s boatloads and shitloads of opinions on the matter. There’s so much of it that when you start acquainting yourself with the ideas you’d wish you’d never heard of either one.

The clichés are mostly as true as they’re untrue. Poetry sings, but it also talks – the Persian word for “poetic body of work” is “kalam”, which literally means “talk” in arabic. Poetry dances, but it also walks. There’s a million walking poems, from Wordsworth to T.S. Eliot to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Sarah Cullen’s Maps is a series of visual poems created by a pendulum device – a box with a swinging pen inside that wrote the poems while the poet took walks in Florence.
A lot of conceptual poetry is more words with less apparent meaning – some conceptual poems are computer engines that produce infinite amounts of texts with no apparent meaning. Most war poetry or love poetry is more about content than form and many socalled proseworks, such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Stein’s The Making of Americans have a lot more to do with form than content.

Hal Sirowitz’ poetry books Mother Said and Father Said are the remembrance, whereas Proust’s prose masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, is memory. The most instantly recognizable feature of poetry, for any layman at least, is the line-breaking. Poetry tends to be cut into short lines. The french poet Jacques Roubaud has called it le vers libre international – international free verse, a plague on all your houses, in effect nothing more than lineated prose and not poetry at all. Of course you don’t have to read a lot of poetry, or be acquainted with any radical avant-garde, to realize that much poetry is not divided into short lines. Take Ginsberg or Whitman, Rimbaud or Octavio Paz. Sometimes they get classified as “prose poems”, but a lot of the time such a definition proves seriously lacking.

The american poet James Sherry once pointed out that a piece of paper has a definite economic value. Paper is a commodity that can be sold for profit in the marketplace. The production cost is lower than the selling price. Sherry also noted that when you print a poem on it, this value is lost. Sherry’s colleague and friend, Charles Bernstein, calculated that a print-run of 2000 copies of a poetry book from Sun & Moon Press, that sells out in two years, actually loses money.

This does not go for prose. When you print prose on a piece of paper, it actually increases in economic value. Isn’t that amazing?

Which leads me to the only usable explanation of the difference between poetry and prose that I’ve come across so far (after about a decade of looking):

If the text that you’ve written sells for less than it cost you to produce it, chances are you’re not a novelist but a poet.

Originally published in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

A road sign.

I recently saw a norwegian sketch on Youtube about the invention of the book. A medieval man has just gotten his first book and can’t seem to get it to work, so he has to ask for help. A help desk employee shows up to guide him through this new state-of-the-art technology, showing him how to flip the pages back and forth, read from left to right etc. The dim-witted book-owner has trouble understanding the instructions and the irritated help desk employee asks if he never considered consulting the manual.

The manual, of course, is another book.

Instructional poetry is a modern day verse form in which the reader is told to do certain things in a certain order, often “ridiculous” things which cannot be done or don’t seem to serve a “purpose”. One of the most famous examples of such poetry is to be found in Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit.

“Make all the clocks in the world fast by two seconds without letting anyone know about it“ it says in one of the poems. “Decide not to use one particular syllable for the rest of your life. Record things that happened to you in result of that“, says another.

One of the most quoted sayings of conceptual poetry is from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” – I’m even pretty sure I’ve let it grace these fine pages of the Reykjavík Grapevine in some earlier column. Instructional poetry takes this idea to task and uses the language of information to give information (i.e. instructions) which deviates from the thinkable and thereby (literally) bends reality.

While Yoko Ono provides the reader with well nigh impossible tasks, Canadian poet Darren Wershler-Henry, in his book The Tapeworm Foundry, feeds the reader with ideas for art-works and poetry books, some possible and others impossible and many borderline: “find the threads in redhats andor litter keyboard with milletseed so that exotic songbirds might tap out their odes to a nightingale andor transcribe the letters pressed onto the platen when stalactites drip on the homerow keys andor reconstruct the ruins of a bombedout capital i”.

The imperative form of instructional poetry is a dizzying tool which can easily send the reader spinning. Instructions are made to make sense, they are there to guide us, and yet they can so easily be used to fuck with our heads – when they leave the realm of the expected. Do not finish this sentence. Before proceeding with the article, go back to the previous sentence (which you obviously finished, you fool!) and read it again, this time without finishing. Do not read the following sentence. If all goes well you should not be reading this. Then jump to this sentence and continue from there.

For an Icelandic example I’d recommend Sigurður Pálsson’s Nokkrar verklegar æfingar í atburðaskáldskap (tr. A few practical exercises in performance poetry) from Ljóð námu völd.

Italian-american poet and artist Vito Acconci once wrote a famous instructional poem, which contrary to most instructional poems could easily be followed. So easily, in fact, that not doing what it says proves to be impossible even for the most agile readers, the most cunning minds:

“READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW” etc. etc.

This is the pataphysical, the sphere beyond the merely metaphysical. Like in the book-manual-book problem of our medieval reader mentioned earlier, instructional poetry deliberately breaches the social code of messaging. It undermines the trust we naturally put in the imperative, and thereby manages to rid us (at least partially) of our ridiculous obsession with obeying everyone that sounds like an authority, while simultaneously entertaining us with the sweet, humorous sound of chains breaking.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s third novel, Gæska (Kindness), has just been published by Mál & menning.

Originally published in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

The cover of Eitur fyrir byrjendur was designed by Una Lorenzen.

My second novel, Eitur fyrir byrjendur (Poison for beginners), will be published in Germany next year by Kozempel & Timm publishing . The book was originally published by Nýhil in 2006, but Iceland’s biggest publisher, Mál & menning, bought the rights earlier this year.

The book was very well received by critics in Iceland when it was published (reviews in Icelandic can be read here). The book is about two young roommates, Halldór and Herdís, and their self-destructive and dysfunctional ways. When Herdís brings a potted plant into the household, as well as the gender student Högni, Halldór loses the ability to leave the house and becomes obsessed with the history of poisoning.

All good poetry festivals must have a good poster. Otherwise noone shows up.

Next saturday I will perform at the poetry Festival Verbale Pupiller in Aarhus, Denmark. It’s an international festival and amongst the guests this year are Cia Rinne, Charles Bernstein, Tua Forsström, Anne Cotten, Annelie Axen, Johan Jönson, Morten Søndergaard and Jan Erik Vold - and many others. It’s also a book fair for small publishers in Scandinavia, including OEI Editör, Arena, Den Bla Port and many more. You can see the program (in danish) here.

Now, what if there was a way of making a poem without actually having to resort to our supposedly original ideas? What if we could simply apropriate somebody else’s words and call them our own? Text-piracy, of sorts. Plagiarism. Theft. We’ve gotta fight for our copyright to “party”.

A found poem is a piece of language reframed. In some cases the pieces were already poems to begin with, collaged together in a new context, as in Eliot’s The Wasteland or Pound’s Cantos; but in other cases they are bits of overheard conversation, the text from a commercial or a news story, reframed as poetry. Charles Reznikoff’s famous book, Testimony, is just what it says: slightly altered texts from American court transcripts. Kenny Goldsmith’s Day is one issue of the New York Times – word for word, retyped. The Norwegian poet Paal Bjelke Andersen is working on a book of sentences found in the new year speeches of Nordic prime ministers, including the Icelandic ones. Icelandic artist Ragnhildur Jóhanns recently published a limited edition book, Konur 30 og brasilískt (Women 30 and Brazilian), consisting of sentences lifted from an online forum about women over thirty and brazilian wax treatments. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Delightful? The language around you actually runs amok, constantly, all on it’s own it seems and needs merely to be picked up and repeated to forthwith metamorphose into wonderful poetry.

Now, finding language in a world so full of it (pun intended) may not seem like a great challenge for the average creative mind. Quite the contrary most of us wouldn’t mind finding somewhere, anywhere, a quiet place devoid of language. Some calm resort, a haven, where we could be free from the incessant chatter, free from screaming billboards, blazing televisions and the latest Top 40 list.

But, as strangely as that may sound, found poems tend to provide a certain relief from their own inanity, stupidity, supposed depth or other imaginable attributes of the given source text. Like a good piece of adbusting, a decent-to-brilliant found poem both negates and amplifies the original text creating a flux of meaning and anti-meaning. An eye in the storm, if you will, where one is given the possibility to observe what actually happens within this given piece of language (or what didn’t happen, but, in some parallel universe, might have). Not to mention the irreverent joy that found poems tend to offer, as well as their quirky insight into the discourse and thought of a society.

Found poems document the movements of language, rather than imitating it – found poems leave language exposed, rather than exposing it. But trying to follow the way language moves is an arduous task. Words come and go, become fashionable and fade (particularly when enough people have realized that they indeed have become fashionable). But certain tendencies are obvious.

These days, the language that most Icelanders find themselves submerged in is legal and economic. Suffering a financial blitzkrieg does not only bring with it (rhyme-alert!) oceans of emotion (throes of woes!), but new additions to the everyday vocabulary. Concepts like “debt-equity ratio” are now household terms, as familiar as milk and honey. “Restructuring” is more common than the cold, and “shadow price” is getting so worn as to verge on being unusable.

We’ve contracted these words from reading the newspapers, blogs and listening to pundits who regurgitate eachother’s language as if they were ruminating cows. And you’d think, given how much they’re thrown about, that we understand them. Yet it seems, according to a survey conducted by the Icelandic Institute for Financial Literacy, that we don’t. Only a third of Iceland’s inhabitants, 18 years and older, have any understanding of the mere basic economic concepts. And yet we keep on yapping as if everyone understands. Restructuring opportunity costs according to the debt-equity ratio of offshore shadow prices.

And if reproducing language that you don’t understand, to people who understand it even less, isn’t poetry, then by golly, I don’t know what is.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

Glossolalia by Jason Liekhus.

They say human beings use language to make sense of their surroundings. We frame, categorize and systematize the objects around us with the help of nouns and verbs and adjectives. The sky is blue. The horse gallops swiftly. The sentence is a ridiculous rhetorical filler. We do this to understand eachother, to convey information, give orders, ask for favours. To some, thought is practically unthinkable (!) without language. If there is no word for mother, then there is no mother – or, at the very least, no mother to speak of.

And yet when we’ve finally managed to raise and strengthen these structures enough to have some sort of conversation, we start picking them apart. We join the boy-scouts to sing gibberish like Ging Gang Goolie; we giggle at Smurf-books with debates about whether an object should be called “a smurf-opener” or a “bottle-smurfer”; we can’t be bothered with films in (real) languages we don’t understand, but who can withstand the charm of a Klingon conversation?; we play computer games in simlish; listen to music in hopelandic and scat; devise made-up languages of our own – pig latin, rhyme-slang, arpy-darpy – to cloak our darkest secrets from our parents and/or the police.

There are many theories about divine languages – spoken by God, angels, Adam and Eve, languages of pure universal harmony. Some pentacostal Christians speak in tongues – “glossolalia”, as it’s called – which is believed to be a holy language, perhaps from Eden and perhaps from Heaven itself. These people fall into some sort of trance and start speaking something which resembles a language, and indeed has linguistic structures, although the sounds usually originate from the speaker’s native tongue. These divine languages sound mostly like gibberish – like complicated pig-latin or simplified Klingon, like very basic sound-poetry – at least to the uninitiated. Religious zealots from the glossolalian’s particular sect would, of course, be more likely to sense “the presence of God” than the presence of, let’s say, hopelandic.

In the 13th century the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, had his servant experiment on newborns to see if, undisturbed by human languages, the infants would eventually start speaking in the language of God (presumed to be Hebrew, Latin, Arabic or Greek). The infants were completely isolated from hearing any language. They never spoke – they died for they could not live without “the gladness of countenance”.

Jacob Grimm, of the famous Brothers Grimm, theorized that if God speaks any language involving dental consonants, He must have teeth, and since teeth are made for eating and not for speaking, He must not only be a talker but also an eater – which, as the dutch philosopher Frits Staal put it (according to wikipedia): “leads to so many other undesirable assumptions that we better abandon the idea altogether”. We can only assume that Staal means He might speak with His mouth full.

Poetry, as everyone knows, is full of gibberish. Not only are poets often deliberately labyrinthine as well as voracious neologists and portmanteurs – making up new words with varying degrees of sanity – but some of them actually attempt to write pure nonsense, utterly bereft of any sense. The Russian Futurists wrote poems in a language they called Zaum, a transrational language to awaken the creative imagination from it’s drowsy everyday existence. The Dada-poets had Hugo Ball’s Karawane and Dada-Mertz had Kurt Schwitters’ opus magnum, the Ur Sonata. Since the beginning of the twentieth-century sound-poetry has a non-stop history. But even before the birth of the so-called avant-garde, there was nonsensical poetry – in Iceland, Æri-Tobbi wrote his tercets and quatrains in the 17th century; in 13th century Catalonia the troubadour Cerverí de Girona had his own songs of gibberish, and 16th century Italy had Teofilo Folengo. The history of poetry is blotted high and low with work of such inspired delirium.

Perhaps, deep down inside, we are not as impressed by “actual” language as we sometimes let on. Perhaps we feel there are other ways of using and abusing our tongue, our language centres and vocal cords – a thinking beyond mere meaning. Like screaming. Like laughing. Grunting. Like giggling. And then, if I’m allowed to quote “meaningful” poetry to drive my point home, perhaps Emily Dickinson had something like gibberish in mind when she wrote “Much madness is divinest sense / To the discerning eye; / Much sense the starkest madness.” And maybe Kurt Schwitters said it all, when he said: “Ziiuu ennze ziiuu nnskrrmüüü, / ziuu ennze ziuu rinnzkrrmüüüü; / rakete bee bee, rakete bee zee”.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

Lo, his oceanaut stereo-grip on the world, udderly unparalleled!
Lo, his unfathomable floods – Earth never saw floating like this!
Lo, his beautiful cutity, his cutiful beautity and all the King’s men bowing!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

Lo, all the frazzled futures, eating legal tender and excreting wisdom!
Lo, all the curly horizons and lock up your plutocrats, deadbolt the deadbeats!
Lo, all the puppyfied fates, don’t be sucky, and dodge thus his kitty-whiskers!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

Lo, his fuzzy snout, groggy inspectors and bitty digits of itty-bits!
Lo, his babbling baby fish mouth suckling – RE-LO, his fantastic suckling!
Lo, his turtly feet, feetly turtles, turftly ottles, inkly puddles!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

At 9.56 AM Wednesday, 02.09.2009, the columnist/poet had a baby and went bonkers.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.