First – a word of advice: never believe an Icelander speaking of his country or nationality. More or less every word we say about ourselves is a gross exaggeration in one way or another. Not many nations in the world are as fanatically interested in their self image as my own. We love to feel that we are fantastic, to make ourselves out to be the best. The government forms committees to find out what it should mean to be Icelandic, in commercial terms, rather than trying to find out what it actually means – the committees end up spouting the same nonsense as has been repeated for more than a thousand years – something about poetic, sensitive vikings shaped by rigorous nature, the strongest men in the world and the most beautiful women – and they´re all just a little strange, aren´t they?

This fanaticism about what others think of us (and how we can control it) has certainly got something to do with us getting our independence rather recently, in 1944 – we´re still in the throes of that particular nationalist struggle. And it has also got something to do with us being so few – so little in the world. 300 thousand people are hardly even noticable as data in a world of over 6 billion people, and this causes an inferiority complex of such a scale that breeds a kind of hysterical need for believing in our own accomplishments. A few months back Icelandic businessmen were the best in the world, this winter we’ve had the best revolutionaries – and we are, of course, going through the deepest crisis mankind has ever seen. Or so you might think, listening to us – myself included. In a few days we’ll vote and it’ll no doubt be the most amazing example of democracy in action ever seen.

But how can an Icelander such as myself divulge anything about Iceland to foreigners that is not somehow just another fairytale – that doesn’t in some way get apropriated by this incessant need to be acknowledged by foreigners – how is this story told without falling into all the numerous traps, the delusions of grandeur or banal clichés about elves, mountains and poetic vikings – these fairytales are already a thousand year old! Can I tell you that there´s a thriving arts scene, without succumbing to this insanity? Can I at all say something positive, without making myself an accomplice to this great unstoppable exaggeration? Ísafjordur

Anyone that wants to find out anything about Iceland will probably be exposed to a lot of exaggeration and nonsense – and that might very well happen here as well. You’re likely to get offered some euphimistic landscapes and language explaining how we are in fact special – because that´s what most Icelandic people, or the complicit foreign Iceland-fetishists, will lead you to believe. Sigur Rós will show you how we’re close to nature – a simple countryfolk with a tendency for mysticism, a people that sticks together. But they won’t mention that we also have a deep love affair with big cars, and that the simple countryfolk would like nothing more than to get an aluminium smelter or oil refinery in their backyard, whereas most of the city-dwelling nature lovers don´t want the fjords of their summer-huts destroyed – and you will probably not be told that we are among the most materialistic nations in the world, and almost assuredly noone will say we´re the most corrupt or collectively deceitful.

It’s hard to guess exactly what today’s speakers will tell you – I´m not even 100% sure about what I myself am saying – but it might be proper to bear in mind that the first speaker is an Icelandic bank manager – which, with due respect to mr. Andersen, is a job title which has lost a bit of it´s impartiality-shine in the last half a year or so, though of course the NIB does not, to my knowledge, have much to do with the current crisis. The second speaker is a regional director of an airline company, Icelandair, that incidentally, and probably through no fault of mr. Mäkinen, tried a few years ago to cash in on the idea that Icelandic women were promiscuous, selling so-called “dirty weekends” in Reykjavík to horny foreigners. Which of course is another very descriptive facet of our so-called self-image: a lot of what we masquerade as information or explanation is just plain old-fashioned capitalism, that has turned both the country and the people into merchandise that should be sold for a profit.

Naturally not much of what we´ll tell you about Iceland has anything to do with what you will actually find if you ever go to Iceland. What you’re most likely to find is lousy weather and a common-place western nation that’s more interested in American Idol than the Icelandic Sagas – with some dissenters of an independent nature, like everywhere else. You’ll find a nation that indeed has it’s peculiarities, but no more so than any other nation. It’s strange that I feel I need to say this, here in Helsinki, two hours flight from Reykjavík, but we´re mostly like everybody else. Yet it should be mentioned that the propaganda about Iceland and Icelanders does also affect Icelanders – we are very good at playing our parts in this incessant circus we’ve helped to create, and most of us believe our own mythology: that we read more than other nations, that we’re all poets and artists, that we have a daring pioneer spirit that’s helped us do great in business, that we’re carefree and liberal and promiscuous and we party hard and work even harder.

Right now, of course, you find us at a peculiar junction: for several years the prime example of our success, of our specialness, was the Icelandic business-life. Our president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, went around the world explaining to people how come we were so successful, how our spirit of innovation and hard work made a perfect blend for achieving greatness. This was the final and absolute proof – we live in a world of money, and the proof for the worth of anything is how much money you have at the end of the day. (Bill Gates isn’t just the richest person in the world, he’s the smartest person and the best person). And for awhile we thought that all the mumbo-jumbo we´d invented about our specialness was finally being proven true – probably to our own amazement. Icelanders bought up half of Copenhagen and London – diamonds and toys and banks – we even came to Finland, and settled for nothing less than the Sampo itself, the money-making tool of the Kalevala. Right now we don´t have any money – in fact we are deep in debt, and therefore, by the standards which we ourselves set, completely and utterly worthless.

But of course there’s no lie in the world as great as the lie of money and what happened is simply that all the lying caught up with us. The castles we built on air crumbled – loans. Icelanders were struck with a uniting disbelief, and have spent this last winter desperately trying to acquire new truths. Some have found them and others haven´t – mostly it seems that society will now settle back into it’s familiar rut, and having been perhaps a little spectacular for a few months – critical, thoughtful, daring, sceptical and even a little spiritual – we will once again become commonplace, boring, materialistic, commercial and cowardly.

But why am I saying all of this? Having never actually attended one of these conferences, I have a strange feeling it´s purpose is mostly commercial – not a big surprise in a world that much prefers commerciality to social critique or academic study. I have a feeling you´re gonna be listening to another round of Icelandic mythology meant to make you love us – stories of majestic nature, poetic vikings, daring instincts – while the truth is that Iceland is mostly just hot water, cold rock and normal people that neither believe in elves nor ghosts.

In short – what I´m trying to say here, in the best of spirits, is that we are mostly not trustworthy when speaking of ourselves, and especially not when the one speaking is a government institution or a commercial firm. The firms because in capitalism they are habitually dishonest: they may not lie directly, at least if the law can stop them, but they´ll always give you a skewered picture of the reality of their product. And the government because of a profound tradition of nationalism, which of course differs from country to country – and let me assure you, as far as I’ll allow you to trust even me, that Iceland does not suffer from it lightly, but greatly.

But maybe it´s hard to start a conversation by telling the critical truth, maybe I´m starting on the wrong foot, maybe we should all just start off by describing ourselves in mostly positive terms.

In which case I have done everyone a great disservice.

I don’t speak Finnish. I work at home and it’s a very difficult language that I’ve not even had (or given) time to learn. I can read a bit of French but I don’t understand it spoken. No Czech. A part of my work is translation, either poetry for the sake of poetry or something else for the sake of the money (mostly, though sometimes I get to translate something good). I translate from English, Swedish, Norwegian or Danish into Icelandic, and (grammatically) simpler things from German. Most recently I’ve been trying out translating from Icelandic to English.

And thus I sometimes feel strange in my own language, as I feel strange in all other languages around me. I’m an ocean in an archipelago of languages (excuse my metaphorizing). Sometimes I talk swedisms. Or even occasional finnisms (which is weird since I don’t speak Finnish and it’s very far from Icelandic). I say more weirds than words at times. And at times writing becomes interestingly difficult, and at other times it’s irritating – one is easily irritated when not in basic understanding of one’s lingual surroundings, when one starts losing the grip of one’s own tongue.

None of this is helped by reading language-orientated poetry. Bruce Andrews don’t heal this. Nor does Nada Gordon, Anna Hallberg or Jordan Scott. They just make me feel weirder.

I have opened a poetry portal. If you have suggestions for streams to be incorporated, please write. Thanks go out to Jón Örn Loðmfjörð for boundless help. It’s still a bit slow, but convenient despite the slowness.

I had some stuff over at Other Cl/utter the other day, recommend whole site for browsing.

Also recommend Marko Niemi’s Online Android Shop.

Höpöhöpö Böks was profiled on Metafilter. Which was fun.

All is good in Finland, and perhaps it will soon stop being so freaking cold.

Iceland on the other hand is in the midst of a poetic political scandal. For the fifth time running. 17th century poet Hallgrímur Helgason Pétursson wrote the Passion Hymns, the most published work in the history of Iceland, a 25 thousand word anti-semitic rant about the suffering of Jesus Christ. The Passion of the Christ of it’s time, and hardly less brutal or anti-semitic – but generally considered one hell of a poem. And it is, it’s a piece of mad crazy good art, like the Cantos or futurism, but without anyone having dealt with the political implications of the work – or at least, in a way that deems and redeems it like the Cantos.

Anyways. The Passion Hymns are not only considered among Icelandic literary treasures, it’s also a cornerstone for the lutheran state-church, or it’s culture in Iceland. For over fifty years the poem has been read on the state-radio during the fast before easter (no we don’t fast, Icelandic christianity is mostly lip service) by various people, including nobel prize winner Halldór Kiljan Laxness. This years reader is actually my editor, Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir.

But this isn’t the scandal. The scandal happens in church and to the best of my knowledge it’s not broadcast. Thing is, for the fifth time running, Grafarvogskirkja church has gotten the parliamentarians (all of them, I think) to read a portion every day ’till easter. And even though we have a state-church, my feeling is most people aren’t pleased about this.

And I’m sort of neither. I’d like the state to be secular (I almost wrote vernacular). Yet I find it very humorous, that this undealt with bloody, vengeful anti-semitic rant is being read by parliamentarians who are probably all christian in the same way as other Icelanders (lip service) – there’s something dada about it, something inadvertently iconoclastic. Like a two-headed dragon biting itself on the neck. Or in the penis. But I’ve yet to diagnose it fully.

This is Dall Wilson’s rendition of the hymns in English, performed by the Moravian Choir of Elizabethtown, South Africa.

When I got into town the crowd had surrendered – after having made a deal with the cops that they would stand down first, which they surprisingly did.

At a bar the first night everyone spoke of tear gas and pepper spray, their experience with such during the siege of the police headquarters in Reykjavík a week earlier. The siege was made to protest the arrest of a protester who’d pulled a Bónus-flag (Bónus is a chain of cheap food-stores, owned by corporate assholes who used the libertarian principles enacted by politicians to get filthy rich) up on the parliament building. (Although, apparently, according to the powers that sort of be, he was being arrested for an earlier protest, not the flag-protest which made him famous).

Surprise, surprise – the succeeded. The young man was set free, two hours after the siege started, and a mysterious donor paid his fine (said by the young man’s mother, to have been a high ranking official).

Radical ideas are commonplace these days, it seems – suggestions of anything from looting to beating are heard from the most unexpected people.

Although it seems to be dying down a little. Christmas is coming, we’re still in the bumper zone (meaning that unemployment is still not critical (less than in Finland, for instance) and people are still in the houses they can’t afford). I don’t know why or how – but people are saying that come february, the shit will properly hit the fan.

So last saturday, fewer people showed up at the weekly demo (1.500 instead of up to 10.000), and for once the parliament house was not covered in eggs and melons afterwards.

Also, I’m pretty sure that when people start realizing how much Iceland is being governed by the libertarian think-tank, the IMF – and how little the government is willing to turn back from it’s own libertarian ideals (both parties – the independence and the social-democrats – are rampant) – people will get angry. They’re being told that we’re no longer libertarians, while nothing has been done to regulate or socialize the system.

Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning.

It’s mad.

I don’t know how gullable people are in this country. Right now. They’ve been very gullable in the past. But I’m not sure their innocence still persists.

People are hoping a board of foreign experts will investigate, while not understanding that laws haven’t been broken – laws were made to accommodate this nonsense – and just because experts are foreign, doesn’t mean they’re not the same kind of assholes as our domestic assholes. I mean to say – the IMF is a group of foreign experts. Which doesn’t mean they’re good news.

We need to redefine crime, if we want to investigate – otherwise it’s just talk that’ll lead to vindication of said assholes. And to redefine crime, we might need to redefine punishment.

We need to investigate the causes – we need to do it publicly – the results and the inquiry should be made public while it is happening (as much as is possible) – and it needs to be done by independent parties, and I’d personally go for a mix of foreign and domestic independies – but the keyword is independent, not foreign. Purely foreign experts tend to overlook some of Iceland’s functionalities, which due to size has strings of cliques running in all directions – and let us not forget, that a panel of foreign experts has repeatedly given Iceland a stamp of being nearly corruption free (while political parties don’t need to give up any of their financial afiliations, the head of the central bank was PM for 13 years, the current PM just had his wife hired as the organizer of the largest arts festival in the country etc. etc. etc. etc.)

IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF!
OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF!

IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF!
OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF! IMF!

FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME!
FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT!
LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL!

FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME! FME!
FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT! FIT!
LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL!

Read at the Poetry Week in Turku, Finland. Video and production: J.P. Sipilä.

I’m uploading the poems I read in Turku last week, most of which can be found on the CD with my new book of visual poems – which everyone is intending to buy, at a bookstore in Iceland or online here.

Also performed at the Helsinki Book Fair and the Turku Poetry Week. I’m waiting to receive recordings from the latter event and will post them when they arrive.

Some people are trying to spin it so: These were bad capitalists, and that doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad. Which of course is a load of youknowwhat. Liberalist policies will inevitably lead to the “market correcting itself” – as it’s called – which causes mayhem for most people. The only way of resurrecting this dead flesh is through the sorcerism of more liberal capitalism – which begets fascism, the breaking down of the welfare system, the fundings for the arts etc.

Right now it seems Icelandic authorities are mostly interested in those types of short term solutions. I don’t know what it’s called in english, but in Iceland those methods are traditionally called “peeing in ones shoe to keep warm”.

The solutions – help.

Help from the IMF – which would turn Iceland into the first “first world country” to seek out the Friedmanist bribe, gotten only through serious social cutbacks. Iceland has long been on its way out of Scandinavia and towards a more liberal economy and this would be the fast-track to get there.

Help from the European Union – that is to say joining. I’m not totally against joining the EU – culturally it would be a strong move, and it would loosen up alot of Iceland’s conservationist & isolationist tendencies. But this is the worst time to do it. Joining the EU means incredible amounts of negotiating – there’s the fishing grounds to be taken care of, for one thing, and an unimaginable amount of stuff to be thought out. You don’t want to join the EU on a hysterical whim – you want to do it when you’re strong, when you don’t need to but want to.

Help from Russia – for some inexplicable reason Russia offered Iceland a loan to fix things. Now, first of all Russia has it’s own problems, so they must have plenty of political reasons for wanting to do this. The way Russia has been behaving towards the world and it self in the last years does not warrant trust and doing deals with the devil (and this goes for the IMF, with it’s history of backing fascists worldwide, in their struggle against working class people) is not the way to go. The conditions are probably never worth the risk.

Besides. I’m not sure what Iceland needs right now is more loans.

My own suggestion is to stay poor. Take care of the poor, the poorer and the poorest. Rebuild the economy slowly – think it through, tread carefully. I mean to say: Fixing the situation isn’t going to happen in three weeks and it shouldn’t. We need to unwind this boatload of nonsense.

Several friends abroad have written to ask how I am doing personally, if this is affecting the poetry scene, if everything is allright. As most of you’ll know I don’t live in Iceland at the moment, but in Finland. Which in effect means I get paid in Icelandic krónur (for translating and writing) and I spend all my money in euros. When I came to Helsinki in april 2007, my rent was 519 euros with a weekly sauna. That is to say, 44 thousand krónur. It’s still 519 euros, which currently bounces between being 75.000 ISK and 102.000 ISK. My wife just finished her studies, and is looking for a job. She spent the summer with me in Ísafjörður, Iceland, working to be able to spend the autumn seeking a good job. Her income was also in ISK. I had a stipendium that lasted through july. So now we’re getting by on my half-salary and eating into the pittance that her income has become.

Which doesn’t mean we’re not okay. It just means we can’t go out to eat, I drink less beer and we steal movies of the internet instead of paying for a cinema-ticket (can you say “steal” on the internet – will I get sued?). I won’t be buying any books in the next months (if anyone wants to support a poetry hungry poet with chapbooks and such – my finnish adress is in the right column) – sometimes I skip the ham on my karelian pirogs. Right now, the question of the Icelandic economic crisis strikes me more as a political one, than as a personally economical one. Most of my family didn’t have much loans, and luckily the only one that did, to my knowledge, also has a decent income.

Which doesn’t mean this isn’t hurting alot of people, that in no way deserved it (many people were persuaded by the banks to change their savings into “perfectly safe” alternatives, that went poof and vanished). One of the political problems right now is that it seems the authorities are more interested in resurrecting the system we had (with new faces on some of the billionaires) than they are in helping those that need it the most (for instance, lowering the credit-rates, giving out emergency funding for those that can’t eat or pay the rent, etc.).

But to my friends, I can luckily say, we’re OK and we’re gonna stay OK.

As for the poetry scene, the crisis poses a threat that has already started to affect us seriously. But poetry is resiliant, and Nýhil is resiliant, and eventually this won’t change much.

Being away from Finland means I don’t always notice things when I should – Mikael Brygger’s excellent book, Emily, is not only out but FREE as a PDF on Nokturno. Check it: http://npc.nokturno.org/mikael-brygger/

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.

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.