Killing yourself with poetry
‘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... »
Interview on Icelandic Poetry
Recently one Robin Vaughan-Williams contacted me with a few questions for an article he’s writing for a british poetry magazine. The answers I gave are here below – this is very much thinking aloud, as you’d answer in a spoken-word interview (although conducted through email), and I’ve not cleaned it much up at all.... »
Höpöhöpö Böks
Höpöhöpö Böks premiered on the Icelandic State TV, January 14th, 2009. Click below for original text with a literal translation. More works in this vein can be found here. »
Iceland, the IMF, Russia etc.
In a nutshell the Icelandic economic depression could be described thus: nouveau riche assholes trashed the currency playing stockmarket cowboys with immense amounts of borrowed money. The newly privatized banks enjoyed generous credit with foreign loan institutions and became mega-monsters that over-shadowed the government budgetwise. When the shit hit the fan (as tends to... »
The 4th International
4th international Nýhil Poetry Festival was a hootenanny with Ida Börjel, Ann Cotten, Sureyya Evren, Hanno Millesi and Nina Sös Vinther – as well as 12 Icelandic superpoets. My reading went more or less as planned – but immediately afterwards I got crazy-flu and’ve been caughing houses and midgets since saturday. You can witness... »
Iceland Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes
Iceland Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes read at the Nýhil International Poetry Festival, 23rd of August, 2008. »
The importance of destroying a language (of one’s own) – full version
(The following text is an extended version of a previous text written as a mini-lecture for the seminar Alternativ publicering/litterær innovation in Biskops Arnö, Sweden, 10.-13. may, 2007 – but never read, since I was displeased with it, and decided these ideas needed much more than the 15 minutes given in Sweden. Instead I... »
Digital, translation theory, the news, lipograms, google-based and literary war (are we losing our minds?)
For those that missed it: The new Nypoesi double number on translation is out. Click here for the first one and here for the second one. The second one features remixes of Jörgen Gassilewskis Landskapsinteriör – in the style of Translating Translating Appolinaire, where yours truly, fully, truefully has three versions: 1) Switching out... »
A brief history of nýhilism: Felix culpa
I If a Lorentzian spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form dΣ ~ S², and if furthermore the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the... »
Nýhil in Germany and Scandinavia
Ólafur Guðsteinn Kristjánsson writes an article about Nýhil in the german magazine Norrøna – Zeitschrift für Kultur, Geschicte und Politik der nordischen länder, called Rebellion gegen den Kanon auf Island – a fragment posted below: “Angesichts einer gemeinsamen Charakteristik der Arbeiten Nýhils muss zu den Gedichtbänden bemerkt werden, dass sie in Wirklichkeit keine solchen... »