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.

Icelandic digital poet Jón Örn Loðmfjörð has created Goggi, a text generator that uses blog entries to form sentences.

Thanks to Marko Niemi and Nokturno, Goggi can now be found in english and finnish. Click here.

Goggi has also taken to blogging about the news, in Icelandic. Click here.

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I’ve put up two new poems on the poetry blog. The first one is called Leevi is a wild dolphin – simply created with Googlism and backspace. It’s protagonist is of course finnish poet Leevi Lehto.

The second one is Höpöhöpö Böks, a univocal lipogram whose protagonist is of course canadian poet Christian Bök. The poem is presented in it’s original Icelandic along with rough english translation – and linked to readings of it, both by me and by Christian.

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Received two recent filling Stations a few days back. One with an article I wrote about Nýhil, posted here below: A brief history of Nýhilism: Felix Culpa.

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Two articles have been written recently in Iceland, one for Tíu þúsund tregawött (a webzine I actually edit) by a Davíð Stefánsson who claims my fundamental setting is “opposition”, that I write too much and don’t like things (Icelandic poetry) enough. Hermann Stefánsson wrote a similar article for Morgunblaðiðs Lesbók (The cultural section of Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s biggest newspaper) – where one of the mainpoints was that Nýhil wasn’t at all “new” (always an exhilirating attempt, measuring and proving or disproving “newness”) and that it was abnormal that people (I) always answered their critics. The end line was something like: “A new phone book was just published. Isn’t anyone going to answer it?”

Today Haukur Már Helgason, Ingólfur Gíslason, and myself have a retort-article in Lesbók – about the new phone book, and how old this crazy recycho-art is getting. At least Kenny Goldsmiths books aren’t always the same, year after year.

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I’ve stopped putting new poems in the anthology I’m translating. There’s loads of stuff that I couldn’t fit in – some simply because it arrived late and there was little time, and other because I haven’t found a way to translate it yet. If all goes well I might do another one in a year or two, if Leevi agrees – I already have a list of 15-20 people that I would like to translate. And some I’d like to translate more, actually.

I will post the table of contents here, with original titles, late next week probably.