A poster for Nýhil's Poetry Parties - a tour around Iceland in 2003.

‘Twas the eve of Nýhils 2nd international poetry festival, late autumn 2006. I was the manager for the second year in a row. For some reason I can’t remember we didn’t have any microphones. The Norwegian poet, Gunnar Wærness, had misunderstood his flight-information and missed his flight. The Swedish poets Anna Hallberg and Jörgen Gassilewski would be arriving late from Copenhagen—just before going onstage —and they’d be accompanied by their one month old son, Bruno. A storm was ripping through Europe and the Canadian poet Christian Bök was stuck at the international airport in Frankfurt, waiting it out. We were an hour from opening the doors.

Two hours earlier my neighbour in Ísafjörður had rung me up to inform me that when I left the town ten days earlier I’d forgotten to close the big skylight window over my bed. It had now been storming for three days straight in the Westfjords and as my bed filled with melting snow water, it had started to drip down into my neighbour’s apartment.

The week prior to this I’d made some rather harsh remarks on the radio about a member of the Liberal Party who’d written a fiercely racist article in the newspaper, titled “Iceland for Icelanders?” As I was standing there, waiting for microphones and foreign poets and a message from my sister who’d gone to check out my wet apartment, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I said, trembling and sweating. “Is this the guy that was on the radio” a husky voice asked me. I admitted that I was indeed I. The voice on the phone threatened to kill me. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember he spoke in a “we”—as in “we will kill you” and not “I will kill you”.

My apartment turned out to be wet but not destroyed. The foreign poets all showed up and got on stage on time and I haven’t yet been assassinated by some anonymous group of Icelandic racists. But it’s probably the closest I’ve come to having a complete and utter mental breakdown (and I’ve come pretty close). And still, the two years I arranged the Nýhil International Poetry Festival was some of the best times I’ve had in my life: Neurotic, beer-marinated madness on a shoe-string-budget, to get some of the world’s best poets to perform in a country where (almost) nobody had ever heard of them. But as it was all rather nerve-wrecking and I myself, being rather susceptible to such fear and trembling, decided to let other people have a go at helming the madness.

This’ll be the first year though, that I don’t get to attend. In a week’s time (the weekend of 21st to 23rd of August) the festival will once again be realised in Reykjavík. Be on the lookout for a bugger-eyed, sweating lunatic in the crowd. That’s the person responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle. Be nice to them. Give ‘em a hug and a pat on the back. Thank them for their work. The Nýhil International Poetry Festival is no mean feat nor easy task.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

I’d read books about poets. They were absent-minded and sentimental – check. They liked drinking and smoking – check. They read a lot of books, but in schools they were flunkies – check. They loved nothing more than lounging about – I remember hearing the Icelandic poet Sjón (I think it was him) say that 90% of a poet’s job consisted of sitting at cafés talking about shit. Double-check.

It all seemed so easy. You don’t need any formal education and nobody can say (without a doubt) that what you do sucks. It’s all a matter of taste, and anyways, most poetry doesn’t even get noticed, let alone deemed good or bad. And poems are short. It takes years to write a novel. You can write a 60-page poetry book in a decent afternoon.

At some point I, and my friend (and poet) Steinar Bragi, calculated that we could technically write 10,000 poetry books in one year. Most of which would be better than most of what we were reading. And some years later, if you’re lucky, you get a government stipend and get sent to exotic countries to read onstage and lounge about with like-minded (lazy) individuals and being admired by people who wish they were as good at being lazy as you are.

If you’re a loser, a drunkard, if you’re mean to people – it’s all a part of the game. Poets are supposed to be alcoholic, rude and emotional, self-centred (wo)manizers – people love it! It means they are really gifted; they’ve seen the depths of hell and are reporting back (to offer up one cliché on the matter).

I’ve been a (serious) poet now, with intermittent jobs, for about a decade. And let me tell you, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I used to be a slacker. (Wo)Man, I was king of the slackers. I could hardly be bothered to keep up with a conversation, let alone participate in one. But times have changed. I haven’t had three consecutive days without working in years. My day starts at eight in the morning and sometimes stretches past midnight. You know that time just before you fall asleep and all the weirdest thoughts in the world seem to crowd your mind? Well, that’s the most important time of the day for a poet. One has to keep vigil. Stay concentrated. And woe to him who falls asleep, for he will lose. (What he loses is not certain, but he loses nonetheless). And still you have to get up at eight because there’s stuff to be done, deadlines to be met.

In two and a half months I’m going to start my paternity leave, and I’m scared shitless. In ten years I’ve managed to go from aspiring sentimental loser to neurotic workaholic. I’m not worried that I’ll have nothing to do – babies are work, that much I do know. But I don’t know what’ll happen if I leave poetry alone for three whole months. Will it wither and die without me? Will I start writing in secret? Locking myself in the bathroom to scribble a hurried poem? Will the authorities find out and punish me (I’m not supposed to be working while receiving government money).

Babies are inspiring. They will not be ignored. They induce sleeplessness, which induces creativity. I’m headed for disaster. In short, I’m not sure if I know anymore what to do with myself if I’m not working.

Besides, whatever happened to becoming a loser? That was a fine and noble plan. Had I been lounging about for the last 10 years, perhaps I’d feel totally rested and relaxed and ready to face the challenge of getting up in the middle of the night to change diapers. Or perhaps I’d be totally out of shape, with cirrhosis of the liver, still mopping floors for a living, whining about never getting anything done.

And despite all the neurotic worrying, I’m as psyched as the next guy about becoming a dad. It’ll be peaches and blueberries, all day long until he becomes a teenager (at which point I’m sending him to military school).

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

This young poet laureate to-be came to the award ceremony with his family. He sat through speeches, music and recitals – and eventually the panel judge came up on stage to present the award. His poem was read and he turned white as the driven snow. This was not what he had written. Not one of the dozen or so poems he’d submitted. Traumatized he went up on stage anyway, not knowing what else to do. He was there, his grandmother was probably watching with tears in her eyes. You don’t let your grandmother down if you can help it.

The ceremony drew to a close and the cocktail after-party started. With a drink in him (or so) the young poet approached the panel judge and admitted the truth. He had never even heard the award-winning poem – let alone written it. There had been some misunderstanding.
A cloud of bureaucrats dispersed in a whiff of smoke – back to the filing cabinets, the calculators, and where did I put my Excel? The mistake was quickly corrected – the young poet had submitted his poetry under the same pseudonym as another (experienced, well-known and respected) poet. The older poet was called in immediately and the prize quickly transferred to him.

But not even in the land of the Eddic and Skaldic poetry does the mainstream care very much about poetry or its awards. Not a single reporter was on site to tell about “the most prestigious poetry award in the country”. And so the story traversed the grapevine (not the paper your holding) for weeks and months before reaching the disinterested ears of a journalist – whose ears swashed and buckled forthrightly, catching the news and pasting it frontpage.

This disinterest has not plagued all poetry awards. A few years back, around the time of the aforementioned scandal, I founded and organized the „Icelandic Championship in Awful Poetry“. As all good things it was born in the blogosphere and quickly grew out of proportion. The media can always be trusted to reinforce your idea of reality. Poetry is boring, therefore we don’t cover it, but awful-poetry is funny (and reinforces the idea of poetry being awful to begin with) and therefore we cover it. The week before the announcement of the prize, Morgunblaðið (Iceland’s biggest newspaper) ran three interestingly bad poems at a time, with comments from the panel of judges, and the top three prizes were handed out on prime-time TV’s Kastljós.

(I’m btw not entirely sure the media was completely wrong, since the best awful poems were indeed much more interesting than a lot of the award-orientated drivel being published these days).

I will leave you with the last verse of the victorious poem by Eyrún Edda Hjörleifsdóttir (in my own translation):

A pile of ringworms eddies in a bath of remoulade – mine and the Choco-beast’s,
a single unblossomed and trembling late-summer night in May.
My toenail splits and bleeds, the road up the way
and the hour of my most yellow band-aid has sunk in a pool of pus.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl will be performing his sound poetry with Paul Dutton at the Scream in High Park, Toronto, July 13.

Originally appeared in last week’s Reykjavík Grapevine.

Poets would also duel with their poetry – one throwing forth a ‘first-part’ (first two lines) of a quatrain while the other would do the ‘bottom’ (last two lines) with correct rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. You won when your opponent could not do a bottom you yourself could do. But if your opponent gave up, and you could not do it either – you lost. Thus it was mostly a game of finding hard rhymes that you could deal with – but your opponent could not.

The most famous duel of all times was that between Kolbeinn Jöklaskáld (another 17th century poet) and the Devil himself. Kolbeinn poetried the devil back to hell by rhyming the word ‘tungl’ (moon) – our ‘orange’ (unrhymable word) – with ‘ungl’ or ‘úln’: a variation on the word for ‘wrist’ – this is all highly dubious, not really words and not even really rhymes, but the devil always being one to promote the avant-garde, readily agreed and cleared off to hell.

Hallgrímur Pétursson, yet another 17th century poet and priest, was adept at getting into trouble with his poetry. Having been thrown out of school for poetrying all sorts of nasty things about his headmaster, he headed off to Denmark to continue his studies. In Copenhagen he met an older Icelandic woman, Guðríður Símonardóttir, who’d just escaped slavery in Algeria. Hallgrímur (undoubtedly) used his gift to poetry the woman – and subsequently had to leave the school and return to Iceland on account of their fornication (which lead to pregnancy and marriage).

Back in Iceland Hallgrímur eventually got ordained as a priest, but his mischievous nature did not subside. He was soon having trouble with a nasty fox who kept killing his sheep. One day, while in the pulpit, his eye caught a glimpse of his furry nemesis and he immediately proceeded to poetry it away with all his might. Hallgrímur was a modest man and did not realize his own poetry’s strength – and the fox literally sank into the ground and was never seen again (I’m not making this up!).

God, being fed up with Hallgrímur’s antics, and quite frankly enraged at him for poetrying for secular matters from the pulpit, dried up all the poet’s poetry. Hallgrímur did not get the gift back until he started his 25 thousand word anti-semitic rant, The Psalms of Passion (1656-1659), which counts among Icelandic Christianity’s literary classics, having been published over 80 times (in a country currently of 320 thousand people) – more often than any other book.

For having written The Psalms of Passion, Hallgrímur Pétursson counts as one of the most respected poets in the history of Icelandic literature – he’s up there with Snorri Sturluson and Jónas Hallgrímsson.

He eventually caught leprosy and died.

Originally appeared in The Reykjavík Grapevine last friday.

In the early seventies Gil Scott-Heron told us that the revolution would not be televised – meaning that it will belong to the masses and not the mass media. It will not be watched, you can’t subscribe to it – everyone will participate. In the nineties hip-hop artist and self-proclaimed radical KRS One rephrased it for Nike – The revolution is basketball, and basketball is the truth and thus the revolution was televised.

In Iceland the name for cellphone credit is “frelsi”. Freedom. You literally enter a store and ask for “Two thousand krónur’s worth of freedom”. This is the fruit of a succesful marketing campaign. In the UK people „hoover“ their carpets – Hoover being a manufacturer of the machines that suck carpets. All over the world people „xerox“ documents. Xerox being a manufacturer of those document-copier thingies.

Of course people buying cellphone credit know they are not getting actual freedom for their money. For one thing the people have long ago been told they already are free, and they do not believe themselves to be encaged. And yet they keep saying it. Sneaking it past the gates of their subconscious – two thousand krónur’s worth of freedom – repeating the advertisement to themselves, to the clerks, to the people behind them, to their friends and family. Until everybody’s saying it. And you realize you’re running out of freedom and need to go get some more.

Language is not where we perform our thought. Language is merely the tool we use to categorize it and “control” it. Gaining control over language is the closest anyone can come to actually controlling thought. Think of prayer. Think of slogans. Think repetitive pop lyrics (If you seek Amy). Think of all the banal sentences you hear and say every day for all of your life – meaning close to nothing. Think of your predetermined route through grammatical structures – the paths you take to form your thought.

This is where poetry comes in. If it has any role in the world, any function that I’d allow myself to describe as holy, it’s to regain language, to strike down banal structures with furious anger, to reveal the thievery that’s taken place – to steal back what I feel belongs to me (or, in your case, you). To not gain control over language, but to relinquish control and liberate language. Sometimes that means making it weird. Making it difficult. Making it damn near illegible.

The point is simply to squirm and dance, kick and struggle, hug and cuddle – the more righter it feels the more gooder it is.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine, last week.

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).

It may have been the year 1600 – on the dot – that a child was born in Iceland (probably) named Þorbjörn Þórðarson. Perhaps it was later though, it’s hard to tell. No one really knows. And I wouldn’t want to lie. You deserve the truth. And he may have smelled just as sweet born on any other date.

Þorbjörn grew up to be a poet of semi-renown, a blacksmith and a fisherman. Not much is known about the man or his life, even his identity and name being up for debate, but he is thought to have spent most of his years in the southern and western parts of Iceland. His poetry lived, as the poetry of many of his Icelandic contemporaries, mostly through an oral tradition of a nation with a fondness for rhymes – through collected folklore, and in part through myth. His early poetry is more or less forgotten, although it is said to have been rather plain – uneventful yet skillful, his art being occasional and his subject matter being (as was common) everyday life. Through an unusual act of divine intervention, this would all change.

One day Þorbjörn was minding his blacksmithing business in Skógarnes at Löngufjörur, Iceland, when a group of travellers approached, looking for a safe way to cross Haffjarðará-river. The travellers greeted Þorbjörn heartily, seeing as here they’d found a local man who could advise them on their journey through terrain that they knew very little of. Þorbjörn was by all accounts having a bad day. His blacksmithing was tiresome and not moving along with the expediency he would have wished. Perhaps he was, like many contemporary poets, fed up with his dayjob and wishing to have the time necessary to hone his poetic skills.

When the travellers asked where they should cross the river, he answered (as was poets wont in his time) with a poem. More precisely, a quatrain:

Though with hammer to iron I cater
‘tis all for naught I slammer.
Take the course for Eldborg-crater,
and cross at Þóris-hammer.^[1]

This would all have been well and good, had the advice Þorbjörn gave to the travellers, in his mindless irritation toiling away with the iron, not been a bit inaccurate. Or to put it plainly (we do strive to make it simple): His advice was dead-wrong, erroneous, false, reprehensible and vicious – put it how you will: Þorbjörn sent the travellers towards an impassable part of the river, straight into the rapids of hell. The travellers however, being sufficiently naïve to believe a poet’s pretty words, tried to cross where they were told. Needless to say, they all drowned.

Now in those years God was not the forgiving fellow we’ve come to admire in later years, and he did not at all enjoy having to receive the all-too early travellers (perhaps he wanted time to work on his poetry). So he smote Þorbjörn with a curse: He bereaved him of the ‘gift of poetry’. But Þorbjörn, being of stubborn stock, wouldn’t take no-poetry for an answer, and kept at it, poesying like a mad-man, quite literally: no matter how he toiled away at his quatrains and tercets, they all turned out nonsensical, full of words that weren’t words, sentences that alluded meaning, leaning on nothing but the verse-framework:

Loppu hroppu lyppu ver
lastra klastra styður,
Hoppu goppu hippu ver.
hann datt þarna niður.^[2]

Some of the words in the first three lines can be seen as having ‘meaning’, while some are ‘meaningless’ – the context is complete nonsense, beautiful nonsense, soundbouts in rounds galore – he is less literati than alliterati, or even illiterati – and yet it sounds like something a fisherman-blacksmith would write, it sounds like a fisherman-blacksmith’s vocabulary, nevermindyou that the words don’t mean anything – they SOUND.

The final line was all Þorbjörn had left of more traditional poetry, word-by-word: he fell there down. From the moment his curse became reality, more often than not, only Þorbjörn’s last lines would be ‘readable’. As his poetic career continued, Þorbjörn got to be known as ‘Æri-Tobbi’, Tobbi being a nickname for Þorbjörn and ‘æri’ meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’ – and so he’s known today.

Little did God know, on the day he smote his curse on Þorbjörn, that he’d be giving birth to Iceland’s first avant-garde poet – a sound poet, no less, whose control of zaum is first-class, putting him in a category with such 20th century greats as F.T. Marinetti and Hugo Ball.

Æri-Tobbi was not the only poet in Iceland to be treated in this manner by the vengeful God, to whom the countrymen swore allegiance (although hesitantly, and merely in public) in the year 1000. Hallgrímur Pétursson, another 17th century poet and priest, was given a similar treatment for abusing his gift. At the time, the gift of poetry was seen as being magical, and poems would be written for magical purposes, be it to poetry the evil out of things, or to poetry a pretty girl/guy into bed. People would even fight with poetry, the most famous duel of all being that between Kolbeinn Jöklaskáld (yet another 17th century poet) and the Devil himself. Kolbeinn poetried the devil back to hell by rhyming the word ‘tungl’ (moon) – our ‘orange’ (unrhymable) – with ‘ungl’ or ‘úln’: a variation on the word for ‘wrist’ – this is all highly dubious, not really words and not even really rhymes, but the devil always being one to promote the avant-garde, readily agreed and cleared off to hell.

Hallgrímur had no such worthy opponent. He was having trouble with a fox who kept killing his sheep – a nasty biter, though no devil. One day, while in the pulpit, he saw the fox in question, and immediately proceeded to poetry it away, with such an astounding result that the fox literally sank into the ground (I’m not making this up!). God, being enraged at Hallgrímur for poetrying for secular matters from the pulpit, dried up all the poet’s poetry. It was not given back until Hallgrímur started his 25 thousand word anti-semitic rant / psalm of passion, which counts among Icelandic Christianity’s literary classics, having been published over 80 times (in a country currently of 320 thousand people)^[3].

As far as posterity goes, there’s no remnants to be found about Hallgrímur ever having been a sound-poet or avant-gardist, despite his standing as one of our most respected poets. Quite the opposite.

He eventually caught leprosy and died.

II

While Æri-Tobbi was far from making any common-sense with his poetry, while he had totally lost his grip on words, sentences and their meanings, the verse-form remains, fully equipped with rhyme and the old Nordic rules of alliteration: ‘props’ & ‘mainstaffs’ – the anchors of poetry that even some modern Icelandic readers would openly claim was an unconditional requirement for any poem (worthy of the name). For a quatrain the most common form these rules take (there are variations) goes something like this: A pair of alliterations in the first and third line (props), and one at the beginning of the second and fourth line (mainstaffs). It’s to be noted that all words in Icelandic have the stress on the first syllable, so that’s where the alliteration goes (moreorless) without exception:

Ambarar vambarar skrumburum sker
skrambra þumburinn dýri.
Vigra gigra vambra hver
vagaði hann suður í mýri.

The rules of props & mainstaffs are so intrinsic to the Icelanders’ idea of poetry that when foreign verse-forms, like the sonnet, are imported they get a permanent injection of props & mainstaffs: A sonnet in Icelandic without props & mainstaffs is a rare exception – and this includes translations of foreign sonnets.

And the same evidently applies to 17th century sound-poetry in Icelandic. Although being a sound-poet freed from the burdens of meaning Æri-Tobbi could move more easily through in-rhymes, and would consistently over-alliterate (which was / is a semi-crime in Icelandic poetry), and repeat words or similar word-forms and thereby layer his sounds where he was unable to layer his meaning. This is not poetry meant to be taken sitting down:

Aldan skjaldan galda grær
græfra ræfra russu.
Sæfra tæfra síldarmær
sussu sussu sussu.

There’s a consistent use of R’s in various combinations in his zaum-words – the R in Icelandic being particularly rolled, the alveolar trill of [r] – a common blend being ‘br’s and ‘fr’s and ‘vr’s, with some notably difficult consonant-sequences like ‘glr’. Where one of these sounds occur in a line, it’s more than likely to reoccur, either in the same line or the next one. Some of this is a dire strain on the tongue:

Aglra geglru guglra stögl
og geglra rambið.
Gaglra stiglu giglru strambið
gaf hún þér ekki stærra lambið?

If living to be seen (read, enjoyed, enlightened) by posterity can be used as a measurement for the worth of poetry, the poetry of Æri-Tobbi is by far more excellent than that of Þorbjörn his predecessor. Its unique type of nonsense has kept it alive for over 400 years, because, quite frankly, it’s inimitable, mad, lingually destructive, fierce and beautiful.

III

Sound poetry is the art of treating all words (or phonemes) as if they were a peculiar form of onomatopoeia – that is, instead of treating words as if they imitated the sound they describe, you treat words (or phonemes) as if they imitated the sound they make.

An interesting and (perhaps) descriptive recent example of this is to be found in the poem “1,2,3” by Swedish poet Klas Mathiasson, from his book urklippt ^[4] (trans. ‘cutout’)– the first three lines are written thusly:

BRA        BRA        BRA        BRA         BARA       BRA
BRA        BRA        BRA        BRA         BARA       BRA
BRA       BARA      BARA     BRA         BARA      BARA

‘Bara’ is Swedish for ‘only’ and ‘bra’ is Swedish for ‘good’. The poem, magnificently read by the poet on a CD accompanying the book, becomes an incantation where one word melds into the other in a seemingly endless circle. Now, in Icelandic, ‘bra’ is literally onomatopoeic – being the sound ducks make – and in English its short for brassière (French for ‘bra’ I believe). ‘Bara’ is ‘coffin’ in Italian, and ‘gregarious’ in Latvian – in Japanese, ‘bara’ means ‘rose’, but it’s also short for ‘Barazouku’, an influential gay magazine, according the online Urban Dictionary, as well as being a ‘delicious guyanese food which can be eaten at special occasions’ and slang for ‘penis’.

Is it legume from a press, that makes me so digress? These so-called meanings will tell us nothing! Yet it recalls the dictionary-philic attitudes of some of the first sound-poets – the movement of Dada, who claimed their club-title could be made to mean anything from everything to nothing in the various languages of the world. And perhaps I’m not digressing at all.

Phonemes do not mean, they sound, and if I’m wrong and they in fact do mean, they only ever mean what they sound. It’s the mechanism, I guess – I shouldn’t apologize, this is how it might work:

1)    Subject hears sound.
2)    Subject interprets sound.
3)    Sound doesn’t exist in subjects innermost dictionaries.
4)    Subject starts fabricating the evidence, eventually landing himorherself in poetry lock-up for fraud.

One of the aspects of sound-poetry, one of the facets that makes it such an international phenomena, is that its untranslatable weirdness is (moreorless) equally untranslatable in any given language. Yes, Jaap Blonk’s work sounds like Dutch, and Marinetti’s work sounded like Italian – just like Æri-Tobbi’s work sounded like Icelandic – but none of it is a “correct” representative of the respective language. Yet it’s not a given that the words chosen for a piece of sound-poetry don’t correlate to an entry in the dictionary. Much of sound-poetry’s oeuvre consists of actual words, and even grammatically correct sentences. And can even be found in many dictionaries, in different languages and cultures – simple one-syllable sounds (like ‘bra’ or ‘da’, ‘bra bra’ or ‘dada’) often exist in several languages and most sound poetry being merely strings of one-syllable sounds means that it might to some extent be interpretable by your brain through a ‘close listening’. Hugo Ball’s “Gadji beri bimba” might be “Gat í beri bimbult” (Hole in berry nauseous, in Icelandic) or God Gee Berry Bimbo.

All sound-poetry is to a great degree something that advertently/inadvertently becomes subject to an inner homophonic translation, because ones head interprets a spoken voice as language, and interprets language as being something that inherently has a meaning one can look up in a dictionary (I’m not saying it’s a ‘right’ way of understanding sound poetry, I’m saying it’s inevitably always part of the mix). This also goes for word-based or sentence-based sound-poetry because the weirdness incorporated into the sound tends to lead us as listeners astray, regarding their spelling or dictionary-meaning. So even words in sound-poetry that exist in dictionaries and are strung together into grammatically ‘correct’ sentences tend to get appropriated by sound-poetry and turned into ‘pure’ sound at some point, that can (and tends to) be reinterpreted back into ‘traditional language’ – and not always in the original meaning.

The categorical difference between sound-poetry and instrumental-music (including sound-poetry’s cousin, scat-singing) is that the listener inevitably interprets what he or she hears as ‘language’ – not only is it the framework that the work is presented within, but it’s also inherent to much of the actual work, that it actually ‘resembles’ language. It mimics language. So I theorize:

Zaum is to language as onomatopeia is to an actual quack, an actual bark etc.

IV

One of the aspects of Æri-Tobbi’s sound-poetry is that it intersects its zaum with perfectly dictionariable words, and I’m told other words can be traced somewhere (go, etymology, go!) – but in any basic non-researching reading (let alone incanting) of his poetry you’re not gonna be sure what is a word and what is zaum. It’s not intentionally written as nonsense, at least that is not how the myth goes – it’s an attempt at writing poetry by a poet bereaved of his gift. This, I interject, seems to imply that God is firmly on one side of the content vs. form debate – as he did not choose to bereave Æri-Tobbi of the gift of form, but only his meaning-content (again, in the dictionary sense of meaning (no, not ‘meaning’ as the word’s described in the dictionary, but the way a dictionary conveys meaning)).

And so, once in a while, a sunbeam gets through, a single word or even a sentence:

Imbrum bimbrum ambrum bambrum apin dæla
skaufra raufra skapin skæla
skrattinn má þeim dönsku hæla.

The tercets closing line means something like: The devil can praise the Danish. What of the rest of it? ‘Dæla’ is pump, ‘skæla’ is whine – but without the help of a dictionary the rest of it eludes me, and the endings (conjugations?) are unusual, in the sense that they are repetitive, which in Indo-European languages is more an exception than a rule – especially a 4X repetition, as in “Imbrum bimbrum ambrum bambrum”.

Portions of other words can be ‘translated’. Thus ‘imbrum’ might refer to ‘imbra’, the fast that begins every quarter of the Catholic church year; the only word starting with ‘bimb’ I can find, is ‘bimbult’, nauseous; ‘ambrum’ might refer to ‘ambra’ which is (amongst other things) the wailing of a child. ‘Bambrum’ could be from ‘bambra’, to drink fast or swig. ‘Apin’ might be a form of ‘api’, a monkey, or ‘opin’, that is to say: open. ‘Skaufra’ might be ‘skauf’ – the foreskin of a horse’s penis. ‘Raufra’ might be ‘rauf’, an opening. ‘Skapin’ might be ‘skapaður’ or ‘sköp’ – created or female reproductive system (more commonly: her genitalia) or even destiny.

Most of these words that I’ve linked to the word-forms in the poem through etymological guesswork are very uncommon.

An attempt at a translation (sans form, plus more guesswork) might look like this:

During the catholic fast,
we felt nauseous
from the wailing of children
and swigging from the open pump.

The foreskin of a horse’s penis
made the cunt’s opening whine.

The Devil can praise the Danish.

Now, we might have different opinions on whether this makes any more sense than the original, but at least these are sentences – not even the most arid critic would disagree with that. But those looking for more finality of meaning, might want to distance themselves even further from Æri-Tobbi’s sound-poem, interpreting the interpretation – The poem discusses sins of the flesh and juxtaposes animal(istic) intercourse, crying infants and barbaric drinking habits with the strict medievel Catholic church (abandoned in Iceland, for Lutheranism, in 1550). The final line could be read as an indictment of the Danish colonial-lords of Iceland, either saying that they’re on the devil’s side (literally) or more colloquially saying something along the lines of “who cares about the Danish”. To be noted: When the protestant reformation occurred all the property of the Catholic church was appropriated by the Danish king, and he replaced the pope as head of the church, becoming more influential and eventually subjecting Icelanders to a commerce-monopoly where all imports had to be from (or through) Denmark.

We would not dare such interpretations, would not bother (the devil can praise these interpretations!) for we are only interested in the sounds. And then again, while phonemes sound more than they mean, the sounds tend to inadvertently mean while sounding.

V

My own relationship with Æri-Tobbi stems from my childhood – I don’t remember where or when, but I remember being enthralled and giddy about his poetry. It wasn’t particularly hard to recognize or play with (in the sense of reading, like writing, being a game) because I found in it something that reminded me of Þórarinn Eldjárn’s (1949 – ) children’s poetry (and reminiscence is nine-tenths of the discovery). Eldjárn’s poetry is often nonsensical, a distortion of sayings and colloquialisms, double-entendres and the like. It’s playful in a way I wish all poetry was playful. And in Eldjárn’s recent poetry book from 2001, Grannmeti og átvextir ^[5] (Edible neighbours and eating-interests, perhaps – a wordplay on Grænmeti og ávextir – Vegetables and fruit) he includes a poem called “Takk takk Tobbi” (“Thanks thanks Tobbi”) that consists of some of Æri-Tobbis most famous zaums and stream-lined variations of them. While the poem is infinitely more ‘understandable’ than any of Æri-Tobbi’s work, it somehow shows more clearly the connection between these two poets – the 17th century madman, and the 20th century children’s poet – than any of Eldjárns previous work. Or perhaps more precisely, it underlines that which was always there: The joy of (the sounds of) words shared by the two men. And for me personally, it came with the vainglorious feeling of having been right all along (yay!), iterated in the last two lines:

Þambara vambara, Þorbjörn minn
þakka þér fyrir arfinn þinn.

(Þambara vambara, my dear Þorbjörn
thank you for the inheritance)

In early 2008 I wrote the poem ‘Úr órum Tobba’, (trans. From the madness of Tobbi) a six-to-seven minute long sound-poem carved from Æri-Tobbi’s zaum ^[6]. The poem was first performed at the Scream Poetry Festival in Toronto, at the Lexiconjury Revival Night, and has in fact not been performed since^[7] (although published on CD, along with more of my sound-poems^[8]).

‘Úr órum Tobba’ is at once a found poem and sound poem, collaged and cut-up lines of zaum taken from the quatrains, tercets and couplets of Æri-Tobbi – the first of the thirteen stanzas is written thus:

Axar sax og lævarar lax
Axar sax og lævarar lax
Hoppara boppara hoppara boppara
stagara jagara stagara jagara
Neglings steglings veglings steglings
Skögula gögula ögula skögula
hræfra flotið humra skotið
Axar sax og lævarar lax

Each stanza has eight lines, and all are intersected with two of Æri-Tobbi’s most famous zaum-lines:

Agara gagara agara gagara
vambara þambara vambara þambara

The eight-line stanza recalls for me the ballade, yet the exclusion of Æri-Tobbi’s more straight-forward lines (leaving only the zaum) brings a darker element into the mix, and the stanza-length brings with it more momentum than is to be found in Æri-Tobbi’s much shorter poems, and increases the iniquitous nature (sound) of the work. It is indeed still playful, but the game may have turned a bit sinister.

The handling is in some ways opposite to the handling of Eldjárn mentioned earlier. While Eldjárn keeps Æri-Tobbi’s signature zaum, he funnels it into more literally understandable stanzas – underlining the light nature of the original poems. My own version of 13 eight-line stanzas where little to no “sense” can be made, becomes more of a dark matter, more of a druidic incantation, and I feel myself stressing the sounds quite differently than I would stress the original – at times moving them back in the throat for a guttural approach. I should mention that these decisions, and I’m not fully comfortable with calling them decisions, were something that came quite naturally through the process of piecing the found-sound-poem together. I would have guessed beforehand (and I think I did) that the poem would turn out much more “pleasant” than it eventually did.

Úr órum Tobba is the only sound-poem I’ve done that’s made from zaum – the rest mostly consisting of grammatically “correct” sentences. I guess it’s some sort of ode to the old man, and perhaps also to Þórarinn Eldjárn in part, and it may say more about my own interest in reading, writing and sounding than it pleases the audience (although, vainglorious as I am, I should mention that its only performance was received very warmly) or than it says anything in particular about Æri-Tobbi (let alone Þórarinn Eldjárn). For a love-song it’s pretty dark, I can’t imagine anyone wanting a love-song like this:

Viggjara þöggara vúgrar brúgrar
frugrar skrugrar frá því skreytti
Vampara stampara vumparar bumpara
frumbara þumbara fjandans lómur
ára diks á priksum, krunkum
nagla stúss og nafra púss
klastra stir og kjóla ruð
hellirs dagra hallar suð

But then again, we don’t get to choose who loves us, or even how.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl

Originally published in aslongasittakes, and in finnish translation in the Nuori Voima magazine. Both beginning of may, 2009.

FOOTNOTES

When, eventually and at long last, modernism reached Iceland in the mid-fifties understandability wasn’t anybody’s main concern, but lack of rhyme, alliteration – that is to say, traditionality, singalongevity and rememberability. People asked, how am I supposed to remember this drivel if it doesn’t drive on alliteration? Where is the song in irregular metre? Why are you disregarding the Icelandic heritage?

As interesting as these questions are, I’ll leave them be for now, and ask instead (I already have an answer – it may be right, it may be crazy, but it just might be a lunatic we’re … wait, back to the text at hand): why didn’t the readers criticize the difficult visuals of the poetry? Why weren’t they pissed off at Steinn Steinarr’s “Sun-winged circle-waters / equipped with hollow-mirrors / of four-dimensional dreams”? (The Time and the Water).

The answer is to be found in the crossword-puzzly nature of ye olde Icelandic metaphors: the kennings of skaldic poetry. A kenning is (I’m copypasting from Wikipedia) a circumlocution used instead of an ordinary noun […] For example [you] might replace sverð, the regular word for “sword”, with a compound such as ben-grefill “wound-hoe”.

Kennings can be rather complicated, and Icelanders not having anything simpler to be proud of (this is way before the rise and fall of Merzedes Club), had to make do with being proud of ye olde Icelandic poetry (and ye olde Icelandic Sagas, bien sûr). This meant at least reading it and perhaps, occasionally and with some luck and a scholarly background, understanding bits of it.

But, you ask, enraged: what’s so difficult about a metaphor? You don’t need to have a doctorate in literature to get that “wound-hoe” might mean sword?

Well, no, I answer, blushing yet happy to have this opportunity to expound: wound-hoe ain’t that hard – but I’m a fairly literate person, and I had to look up both ben and grefill. I’ve heard the latter, and I might’ve guessed correctly (we’ll never know), but that doesn’t make it part of my active vocabulary, snoozing on the outskirts of my passive vocabulary. And ben? I thought that was Michael Jackson’s rat (the two of us need look no more!)

But wait! It still gets more complicated. You can replace one part of the metaphor with another metaphor. That is to say, instead of just simply saying “ship of the desert” (camel), you can replace either ship or desert with yet another metaphor, making, for example “sea-steed of the desert”. “Steed of whale roads of the sand-sea”. or “Hay-grinder of the greenpeace-kitten earth-channels of the desert-asphalt sugar-free beach-found transparent salt-Coke.”

And all it “really” means is camel, in a more fun and interesting way. According to Snorri Sturluson, you can have up to six metaphors in a kenning, and although more are to be found in some poetry, they’re considered useless (Snorri is too dead for us to ask why). Add to this allusions to Nordic mythology, the gods etc. – Sif’s hair is gold, for example – and other particulars which you can’t really know without being well versed and read in this particular form, most of it is completely unreadable to a layman reader, and even a scholar must delve into it to solve these puzzlified mysteries. A lot of it’s actually easier for me to understand in English translations, having been modernized and interpreted, than it is in the original – although I was taught in elementary school that I could read it, and made to read it in high school (with thorough notes explaining every step, and it still was hard to get).

Oh, and yes, the word order could be totally messed up as well, making the piecing-together of base-word and determinants quite a challenge.

So when modernism finally, finally (hurrah! hurrah!) made it to Iceland, it’s no surprise that the people, so used to reading poetry they couldn’t understand, didn’t really react much to it as being difficult. Because when it comes to being hard to decipher, Ezra Pound and Steinn Steinarr can’t hold a candle to Snorri Sturluson.

Written for The Reykjavík Grapevine.

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.