First: Mind the Sound, writings about the 17th century Icelandic nonsense/sound-poet Æri-Tobbi and my own work from his writing. Published in aslongasittakes and (in finnish translation) in Nuori Voima magazine.

Second: Hay-grinder of the greenpeace-kitten earth-channels of the desert-asphalt sugar-free beach-found transparent salt-Coke – a column about ‘kenning’ metaphors in skaldic poetry. Published in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

Third: Focus on Iceland: The fanatic self-image. A short lecture on the self-image of Iceland and Icelanders, given at the Haga-Helia College, Helsinki.

Fourth: Icelandic Art Makes Me Feel Nothing At All. A column for the Reykjavík Grapevine, about art criticism and its ambivalence.

Also: Hnefi eða vitstola orð. Video-poem (in Icelandic).

Those that understand Icelandic can see the same pictures with more text here.

A few videos are at the bottom, of three very different but wonderful musical acts.

Kari Peitsamo

A small working class choir, sings Hurrah for Mayday.

Tuomas Toivonen makes wonderful word-techno / nerd-hop.

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.

This coming thursday I will be reading in Malmö, Sweden, along with finn-swedish poet Cia Rinne and the nestor of swedish concrete poetry, Bengt Emil Johnson, as well as the poetrygroup 3 Advokater. Malmö Litteraturbar Stanza – Inkonst.com 26.03.2009 – at 8 pm

In spirit and likeness I will be in Akureyri, Iceland, on the third of april, performing poetry off a screen. Sharing the stage but not in disembodied presence will be Ingunn Snædal, Jón Laxdal and Þórarinn Eldjárn.

Next up is Poikki-taiteellinen kirjallisuustapahtuma or the cross artistic literary event at Korjaamo , Helsinki 04.04.2009, at 7 pm. Amongst others performing are Kati Neuvonen and Jani Sipila.

Onwards Helsinki – avant-garde apreciation night at the english bookstore Arkadia-bookshop – 07.05.2009, with Mathias Rosenlund, Pauliina Haasjoki, Mikael Brygger and Hannele Mikaela Tavaissalo et. al.

Still more Helsinki, two days later – the literary clique Uusälyttömyysl fawns performances at Ravintolalaiva Wäiskin keskibaari, Hakaniemenranta 11, 09.05.2009 7 pm

May – middlish – I will be at The Nordic Poetry Festival in Tallinn, Estonia – 12-16.05.2009.

In all probability there will be one more may-reading, at Vanha Ylioppilastalo (the old student house) on the 20th, but it’s yet to be confirmed.

The poetry translation part of my homepage has grown considerably, containing over one hundred poems I have translated.

A few poets have then been added to the series 25 Icelandic Poets – my translations of Icelandic poets into English.

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.

Allen Ginsberg was born 1926 in Paterson, New Jersey. The son of Naomi and Louis Ginsberg, both of whom were a great influence and presence in his writing – Naomi principally because of her psychic illness, catalogued in length in the poem Kaddish, and in bits elsewhere in his writing, while Louis, who was also a poet, at times serves as the conservative standpoint from which Allen pushes himself. In places his poetry reads as a deliberate attempt at not being the poet his father was – to be neither timid nor conventional.

After moving to New York in the forties to pursue studies, first in law and later literature, Ginsberg meets the writers with whom he would share an aesthetic of writing and living, to a degree: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and others. These young men – and practically there were only men in the movement, with a high concentration of homosexual men – tried to shed themselves of societal norms, experimenting with drugs, insanity, sexuality, excessivity, relegating themselves to literal outcasts (while some of them, including Ginsberg, still maintained a nicer ‘university front’ on the side). For Ginsberg, this resulted in eventually getting arrested and condemned to a lunatic asylum, where he met another great influence, Carl Solomon – to whom Ginsberg dedicated his most famous poem, Howl. While Solomon’s own work may not have had any greater impact on Ginsberg, he introduced him to the surrealist poets and painters, whose ideas of a socially redeeming, yet spiritually free and bondage-breaking, esthetic had a profound impact on Ginsberg.

Eventually the New York Beats split up and went their own ways, some of them coming back together in San Francisco in the fifties. That’s where and when things started looking up, and they started getting published. Howl & other poems came out in 1956, and became a major bestseller after a famous obscenity trial, when the book’s first printing, which was done in England, was stopped in customs. Seeing as the authorities couldn’t stop the book from being reprinted within the US, the book kept selling during the whole trial (although Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of his employees at City Lights Bookstore, got arrested for selling it). The case was eventually lost, and Ginsberg had become somewhat of a household name. A media-frenzy started about the Beat generation and their call for freedom, which later resulted in the hippie generation (hippie is originally a beat-term – the beats apropriated a lot of the Jazz-lingo into their vocabulary, including hip, as in hipster, someone who, according to my dictionary, “rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle”. Hippie, with it’s diminutive ending, was reserved for those not fully hip, those only half-hip, so to speak, but still making the effort.)

Many of the beats had reservations about the hippies, as well as the socalled beatniks – the mainstream deformed variation on their own ideals. Jack Kerouac felt he was being forced to become a symbol for something he didn’t agree with, and that his literature wasn’t being taken seriously, while Burroughs did not approve of the political correctness or buddhist spirituality associated with this new movement – likening buddhism to spiritual castration. Burroughs and Ginsberg, as well as many other Beat-poets, did keep in close contact with younger artists though – Ginsberg collaborated with Bob Dylan, The Clash and others, while Burroughs waited through the hippie generation and had later collaborations with artists such as The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Kurt Cobain. Kerouac shunned the lot, and died in 1969, before the hippie generation was over.

Ginsberg also played a big part in the protest movement of the sixties and seventies, attending and organizing many of the biggest rallies.

Ginsberg’s major poems are Howl, “a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths,” as he himself called it, recollecting excessive events in the history of the Beat generation. It’s a highly personal poem, free-spirited and blunt. The opening lines are among the most quoted in American poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro-streets at dawn”.

Another major-poem is Kaddish, Ginsberg’s liturgy for his deceased mother, Naomi.

Ginsberg is one of a few major twentieth-century promoters of the long-line in poetry – his poetry is blown-up, employs hyperbole and excessive rhetorics, that Ginsberg got principally from Walt Whitman. His sense of imagery, as well as his philosophy of prophetism, can be linked to William Blake – of whom he had an auditory hallucination, hearing the voice of the poet recite Ah Sunflower and The Sick Rose, lying in bed after a masturbatory stint. He was also influenced by Rimbaud and his theories of a systematic derangement of the senses, in order to attain a higher (poetic) being – using drugs, flirting with insanity and engaging in a very excessive lifestyle, including more sex-partners than any of us can count (mostly men, but also a few women).

Ginsberg’s vocabulary is often “dirty”, and as he said at one point: “I have achieved the introduction of the word fuck into texts inevitably studied by schoolboys” – and he put a great emphasis on using rhythms from normal conversations in his poetry – a method he picked up from another native of Paterson, William Carlos Williams, whom he got to know personally – as well as from his friend Jack Kerouac. His attitude towards sex was that it was holy – as indeed most things were to him – and this is evident in many of his poems, most notably Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman and Please Master.

Ginsberg’s poetics can be seen not only as being highly influenced by the abovementioned poets – Williams’ and Kerouac’s speech-writing, Whitman’s prophetic long-line, Blake’s incessant, delicate imagery, Rimbaud’s fierce drive – but also as being derived from more spiritual writing. In the poem Kral Majales he says: „I am of Slavic parentage and a Buddhist Jew who worships the Sacred Heart of Christ the blue body of Krishna the straight back of ram the beads of Chango the Nigerian singing Shiva Shiva in a manner which I have invented,“ – and indeed one could easily make the argument that his primary influences were Jewish religious writing, with the softness and anger of God in the mix, and the hypnotic repitition methods of buddhist chanting. If you add to that a touch of communist rhetoric, handed down from his mother – a card-carrying socialist – the only big piece missing is his ardent sexuality.

Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, shortly after having been diagnosed with liver cancer. In one of his last poems, Death & Fame, he writes about his hopes for his funeral – who should come and why – and mentions that he hopes he’ll be remembered for giving good head.

P.S: Entrance is free and green tea will be served

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl was born in Reykjavík on July 1st 1978. He finished his secondary education in Ísafjörður in the Westfjords in Iceland in 1999 and later studied German in Berlin in 2003. As well as being a writer, Eiríkur has done a number of jobs through the years, taught at grade school, done painting jobs at a ship yard, been a night guard at a hotel, worked at homes for handicapped people, been a caregiver at old people’s homes, a cleaner at a cruise ship and a chef at a day care center, to name some. He is one of the founders of Nyhil, a publishing house that focuses on writings by young people and also organizes various cultural events.

Mathias Rosenlund is working on a Master’s Degree in Nordic literature at Helsinki University. He has a particular interest in 20th century Central European and American literature.

A little over a month ago my sixth poetry book, Ú á fasismann, was published with Mál og menning in Iceland. It’s a collection of 20 two-frame visual poems (20X20 cm or about 8X8 inches), and 20 sound poems on CD. I just returned to Helsinki from Iceland where I did 10 readings in 6 days. While no recordings were made in Iceland, J.P. Sipila recorded my reading in Turku, at their Poetry Week, which can be found here, along with older performances. Sound poems from the CD can be heard in the sidebar of my homepage: www.norddahl.org. Visuals, movable poems, concrete, whateveryouwannacallit can be seen in the concrete section of my page (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance of ‘Iceland Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes’).

Ú á fasismann can be bought here on a 25% discount, at just under 8 Euros or about 10 dollars (at the current exhange rate (as it is calculated in foreign banks – the whole currency thing is being weird these days) – which is changing all the time now).

As some of you may know, Iceland is going through something which might be described as a national bankruptcy these days – the government has sought out IMF support, and all in all the situation is rather revolutionary. There is something about it on my blog, but you could also check out Surviving Iceland, for info. My first response to the crisis was Kreppusonnettan (IMF! IMF! OMG! OMG!), which can be heard read in Turku, but also in this poetry-cartoon-video I made.

I very rarely get any comments on my work in english, but this week Robert J. Baumann had some interesting things to say about my ‘I am a Letterhead’ on the Bathtub Collective blog. I’d like to use this opportunity to remind people of the poetry section of the english half of my homepage, where you can find translations of my poetry into English, French, German, Finnish, Swedish and Spanish. Click here for suchthings.

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.