Lo, his oceanaut stereo-grip on the world, udderly unparalleled!
Lo, his unfathomable floods – Earth never saw floating like this!
Lo, his beautiful cutity, his cutiful beautity and all the King’s men bowing!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

Lo, all the frazzled futures, eating legal tender and excreting wisdom!
Lo, all the curly horizons and lock up your plutocrats, deadbolt the deadbeats!
Lo, all the puppyfied fates, don’t be sucky, and dodge thus his kitty-whiskers!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

Lo, his fuzzy snout, groggy inspectors and bitty digits of itty-bits!
Lo, his babbling baby fish mouth suckling – RE-LO, his fantastic suckling!
Lo, his turtly feet, feetly turtles, turftly ottles, inkly puddles!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!

At 9.56 AM Wednesday, 02.09.2009, the columnist/poet had a baby and went bonkers.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

I’ve just read some of your poetry and liked one line about the swastika in somebody’s nazi soup. All the rest strikes me as happily as receiving “GROW YOUR PENIS 3 INCHES LONGER AND THICKER” spam. I don’t have a penis, so haven’t the yearning to grow it longer and thicker; nevertheless, spamfolk, most of their messages eliminated by googlemail’s security force, try to sell me penis things. On balance, I suppose, the irrelevance of your poetry to more than half the world [females] is no BIG deal compared to the relevance of bothersome spam. Enjoy your new baby; he will alter your life forever. Do what your wife tells you, do far more than what you think is your share of housekeeping and childrearing ‘tasks’, and take your wife out for a really awesome restaurant meal at least once a week. Grampa will babysit.

Judy Prince

I’m at a loss. Who is this person, and why does she assume I never do the dishes? Is that what my poetry says?

And why is my poetry irrelevent to females? And does that mean it’s relevent to males? Will doing what my wife tells me (given that she “tells me” anything – that is, given that she wants to push me around any more than I wanna push her around) make us equal (relevant)? And wouldn’t me “taking her” to an awesome restaurant be rather gender-role-stilting – that is to say, isn’t that a rather classic male-role: the one that brings the bread, makes the money and treats the female?

And how in the world does a poetry-commentator (okay, comment-troll) get the idea that he or she has anything to say about my personal life? Someone I’ve never even met, decides I must be a chauvinist? Did I say that in the article she commented on?

I don’t get alot of comments so this is seriously pissing me off.

(I am, for the record, a feminist, and Judy Prince, you’re an asshole).

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.

Christian Bök

Imagine a poem so robust and resourceful that it could survive humanity. Imagine that the Americans finally go completely bonkers and rip the globe apart with liberational glee, the nuclear dust finally settles and all that’s left of mankind is poetry. The mark of craftsmanship has always been durability. A good cabinet has a couple of hundred years in it. A decent car will carry you for ten to fifteen years. The best laptops have at least six crash-free months in ‘em. The Eddas are as good now as they were a thousand years ago. But a poem that’ll outlive humanity?

Enter: The Xenotext Experiment, a “literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu” in the words of its author, multi-maniac, mad scientist and poetic mastermind, Christian Bök (né “Book” – The Christian Book, get it?). And Mr. Bök has the all the God-complexes you’d expect from a savant named after the good Book: not satisfied with simply producing dead poetry for the page Christian Bök has decided to make his poetry come alive. Literally.

“I propose to encode a short verse into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium,” says the biblical scribe / poem-god in an essay on the matter. The plan is that the text be composed in such a way that, when translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, the text will be “expressed” by the organism, “which, in response to this grafted, genetic sequence, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein – a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text”.

The bacterium will not only store a poem – it’s not only a living poem – it’s also supposed to create its own poetry, elevating Christian from mere poem-god to poet-god: creator and programmer of poets (what sort of poetry Christian’s future army of bacteria-poets will write, no one knows – perhaps they’ll make their own bacteria. Perhaps they’ll be rhyming neo-formalists).

Freaked out already? Until recently chances of Christian actually doing this were slim. Not because it was theoretically impossible – quite the contrary, similar things have already been done (the cybernetic expert Pak Wong partially stored the lyrics to Disney’s “It’s a Small World” as a strand of DNA inside a bacterium) and Christian has already proved his capability for writing creatively within severe constraints (each chapter of his book, Eunoia, contains only one of the vowels). But science doesn’t come cheap. I don’t think anyone actually expected Christian to ever get the money needed – including the poet-god to-be himself.

A couple of months ago, the grants came through. Christian Bök now only waits for his sabbatical from the University of Calgary to start.

It’s officially time to start freaking out.

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.

Click on ‘readings’ on the right side to see the shebang.

Next up is a visual poetry conference in Turku and a reading there on saturday – with Geoff Huth, Nancy Huth, Christian Bök and more.

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.

While none of this is necessarily untrue, the same argument could as easily be applied to rock’n’roll, to movies – to the whole boatload of “popular culture” that we (as a society) simultaneously love and loathe. Many of the so-called simple songs of the Eurovision Song Contest are in fact complex constructions that meld super-produced pop-genres with ethnic music, the history of which reaches thousands of years into the past of participating countries. And yet you’ll never hear anyone say they didn’t quite “understand” the Armenian song – that its use of musical intricacies simply left you baffled. Very few people ask of pop-music that it should be more simple, or that movies should not have so many jump-cuts, should not be shot from weird angles or with unnatural camera movements. Quite the contrary, we’ve completely embraced all of popular-culture’s complexities, so much so that they’ve become utterly mundane – we don’t even notice them without a conscious effort to do so.

And yet, when it comes to literature in general, and poetry in particular, most people’s first reaction is to not “understand” it – giving up before you’ve tried is the name of the game – no matter how often poets and writers try to emphasize that you are in fact not meant to “understand” it. This is one of the problems of making art with and through language, a medium we first and foremost see as a vehicle for information – it’s what we use to communicate our thoughts. It’s how I tell you that I’m hungry, how you give me directions, and so forth. But poetry doesn’t work like that. Ludwig Wittgenstein (a practitioner of that other “difficult” art: philosophy) once said: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”

This misunderstanding is also why so many poems of poets that don’t read much poetry have more to do with anecdote or lineated prose, than they have to do with poetry – I feel like this [insert metaphor-cliché] and then I feel like that [insert metaphor-cliché] – and even more experienced poets often don’t seem able (or willing) to ever stray from the realm of the metaphor, the most basic of poetic tools (metaphor is to poetry, as 4/4 is to rock’n’roll).

In this manner a lot of the poetry that people find “difficult”, can seem very simple ditties to anyone that spends time reading it. Juxtapositioning one pretty image with the next, jumping between the lilies of the ponds – it’s not rocket science, and it’s not cross-word puzzles (i.e. you’re NOT supposed to “solve” it – it doesn’t “mean”, it is “mean”). It’s Layla, A Hard Day’s Night – but it’s also Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, Atari Teenage Riot, African tribal music and Mack the Knife. You can have your pick of the litter.

Imagine for a minute that your experience of poetry was the same as your experience with music, that it was everywhere – that there was no way of escaping it. Literacy of poetry, like literacy of pop-music, movies etc. is an acquired skill and “complex” is a very relative term. It’s of note that the more anyone listens to music the more complex their taste becomes, the less anyone listens to music, the more mainstream their taste. The same goes for poetry.

The bottomline is this: Poetry is not vitamins, and you’re not going to shrivel up and die if you don’t regular doses of it. It’s not (necessarily) any more difficult than pop-music. And you don’t need it. You can, I’m sure, live a very decent life without it. I’ve seen it done. And although you’ll miss out on the fun, that never killed anyone.

Originally appeared in the Reykjavík Grapevine, last week.