Poetics - IV

IV


No one has ever agreed that language ought to exist. For that, language is needed.

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The small child gurgles and rattles and chuckles, day by day using a larger part of language’s colour spectrum; the parents rejoice and the game intensifies. There is no doubt that at the outset what is involved is a pleasurable and purely aesthetic satisfaction in the non-utilitarian play with sounds. The sounds are already there, and via the adults they are regulated into the language the child will speak. The pleasure need not necessarily disappear, but a noticeable alteration takes place when the aesthetic attitude is gradually replaced by the attachment of practical importance to a process which starts irrationally, and occurs regardless of what language is to be learned.

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No language can be called primitive, as it will always have a grammar and an order. And no language lacks beauty, even though that beauty may express itself in very different ways.

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Language makes demands on me, it demands action. I can shape language, but it has already formed me for a long time. How many words for violence does language possess? Language is not a means to something else. No, language does something to me: ‘I am a body that language touches.’ Each time I use language, a certain retroactive energy is involved.

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Rather paradoxically, I must find my individuality in a language I have taken over. My language is my condition for living.

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In language one travels quite without safety equipment. Here the battle is for power, here self-worth and identity are at stake, here the strong may dominate the weak, here one can lie, edit reality at one’s discretion, manipulate, hide, block, talk without saying anything, and here art can continue to exploit every possibility or choose to set itself against the many forms of use or misuse. All dimensions are contained in language, from pure, clear speech to the most low and dirty, all the way from true statements to delusion and illusion, the innocent and the dangerous. And here one can keep silent…

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Where violence begins, words have as a rule long since given up.

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To produce language is among other things to procure knowledge – and thinking can only go through language, but no human being can ever be all-knowing, as knowledge does not stop anywhere.

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Society has use for the body that is able to work, and is not always interested in the self-conscious body that comes to language.

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In the last twenty years, in which poetry has assiduously commented on language, language has lost much of is concrete quality. How often is the mouth not an image of speech, rarely of eating - or sex connected with pleasure and orgasm, only exceptionally with propagation? And what has happened to physical work during this century? The contribution of work has not been eliminated, but immaterialised and intellectualised. On every level the tangible has retreated into the background before the intangible. Man’s association with matter is often replaced by programming, control by means of pictures on a screen, the use of apparatus or reparations. It is no longer physical labour that produces reality, but cultural patterns which have taken over this role in a hyperfunctional society, where more and more people become passive consumers of goods, ideologies and information.
The movement from industrial culture to information society has only just begun. We are faced with such altered conditions that language has scarcely created means of expression for them.

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I do not own language, I borrow it. There are many of us who must share the same words, but the moment I write a poem, I make the alphabet mine.

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A word is in itself no more than a word. The words that were once flesh are now events in language, pure appearance without being. In the beginning was the word, but before that darkness. Darkness and uncertainty.

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‘Words are light, not because they are empty, but thanks to their eminent width,’ Løgstrup has said.

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I write, drawing after me a sparkling trail: the writing –ineradicable – where ‘I’ am. I myself remain, seeing differently from before. With each book my fate moves.

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>From the day I discovered a secret alphabet, a code that was mine, I gave up many earlier games, I lived differently. Both visibly and invisibly.

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Individual words in themselves are not poetic, but words added to words can in the happiest instance produce poetry. It is not the world that must be poetic so that I can create poetry, but I who must be able to ascribe words a value. It is in the organisation that the transformation into art happens, in the concentration that the accumulation takes place. It is here that the designated dimension is transformed into symbol – or image-value, here the syntax unfolds – or is broken down, here new words shoot out, and new rhythms emerge with their own pattern of pressures and note-scales. In poetry tones and colours are set free, in poetry the words acquire a value beyond the every day, here musicality and the suggestive are very important qualities. Correspondingly poetry emerges for the reader first in the encounter with the poems.
Language in itself is cold, the material is cold. By material I mean the sum of all the signs I write poems with, but the material can be manipulated. It is I who make it warm and soft. Language is filled with my breathing, follows the movement of my body. Likewise, language is in itself sexless. It is only my noisy behaviour that makes it get up With its standard expressions, fixed idioms and figurative meanings language is not much different from a ruin which lays bare life’s transitoriness, time and history. A concept like ‘eternity’ is static and dead, while poetic language points to the possibility of change. Language is only language – and language should not be confused with things. I canot write with the word ‘pen’. There is no agreement between the word and the thing, very rarely does the sound connect with the object. Whether I like it or not, I have to put with the fact that a leaf is called: Leaf, a washtub: Washtub, and cream: Cream. Damn it, I wish I could have found better words for the ones I find most impossible first, the ones that lie like billowing jellyfish in one’s mouth, but a word is a word and cannot be done away with. Language has its geological layers. It contains several eras. I am not among those who hold to the idea that words have lost their value in a tragic way, or only express vague reminiscences. The original meaning may have been lost, but a new and just as valid one may have come into being. Language fluctuates. Obsolete expressions need not necessarily be reactivated, but language’s innate potential will go on developing. Thus new nuances and new entities constantly emerge. So I am not left with the last ruins of a language. I am full of verbal visions and still believe in the magic of language in poetry.


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Norms are bound up with conventions, with the expected. Art involves the opposite. Here all the preconceived must be got out of the way so that something can begin. The words are already there, but the poetic dimension only reveals itself during the creative act. It is when the elements are put together that the work of art arises. It is my devices that are important. It is what I put into the words that gives them their value. A new creation and mastery is there each time.
To be a poet requires a certain amount of defiance. I cannot take everything as given, cannot take over language with its lacunae. It is my editing and instrumentalisation that decides how successful the poem will be.

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‘The Plough, how fast does it go?,’ asks my son.

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Language makes a distinction between the factual world and the linguistic world, but writing need not be an excise for getting out of making things.


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Different languages seldom have the same word for the same object. Apart from a few instances of onomatopoeia, there is no relation that connects the sound with the word’s content. A word is not an adequate expression for reality, it is not identical with the object, is rather a symbol in relation to it. Where the letters are, everything else is missing. Language signals absence, but does not rank any lower on the scale of reality for that reason. Language constitutes a part of reality.

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Even though language does not designate a reality, If I say ‘bird’, a concrete bird is absent., but the image of a bird is called forth. The idea bird appears at the arbitrary sound of the word ‘bird’. If I say ‘knife’, correspondingly a knife appears on the inner video, but not the same bird or the same knife with two different individuals. In poetry it is not the oibject but the word that is the centre. Poetry is a goal in itself. The referential function is however a constituent feature of language, which not even a poet can run away from… The problem in the critique of language is that one considers poetry in its isolated poetic function, which does not cover it, because it is art. The condition for art is that one should suspend total referentiality. For language contains degrees of referential meaning. There are poems that point very directly, and others where the words have torn themselves free in such a way that they are inwardly connected in an unusual manner. Words must have ‘five fingers on each hand’, as Sophus Claussen says. Words must be fully valid. They must have the possibility of catching hold of one another. Or they must function like a molecule model, in which the atoms each have their values and can connect with each other in widely differing structures.

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Many things have never been given a name, because they are intangible. The depths of the sky and the beating of waves cannot be easily rendered precise, and yet the feeling of infinity can be written about in a network of distinctive images.
My poems try to give linguistic form to psychological and existential states or metaphysical dimensions I have not had words for previously. Each word has its own sound and its own meaning, it points to something, but when the word is freed from its referentiality it becomes capable of entering into a new totality – to re-emerge in another sphere.

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There are large, abstract words in language which are particularly difficult to use in a poem: yearning, lack, pain, soul, and so on. Words of this kind cannot carry a poem, though they are deeply felt –or precisely because of this. It is the poem which in a dialectical tension should be able to carry them.

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In view of the fact that its material is language and the body its instrument, the writing of poems is a strangely silent work.

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Only when language attains the character of material can it be shaped.

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To see language solely as a material is a reduction. Words are an independent world freed from the rest of the world. A kind of realm of freedom, a realm of sounds from which the I discovers itself as existing. Language is a highest possibility.

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An animal can produce sounds that signal hunger or call to its mate, but can never name the specific. All we know is that whales sing, or dolphins communicate over long distances. Animals probably have a form of consciousness which human beings have so far managed to suppress, but it is not language in the sense in which human beings develop it. The nuances are unique in our language, and we are equipped with a very impatient instinct to exploit its many functions. Creating, dreaming and remembering.

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The essence of language is also music, phonetics, metrics, atmosphere, mode. ‘Poesie ist ein Zustand der Sprache’ (Poetry is condition of language) Helmut Heissenbüttel has said. Poetry is only one way of using language, but characterises itself by a nuancing of expression. Poetry is a question of concentration, a language inside a language, where the crystals are packed closely.
Poetry is not a mystical act, but to take Helmut Heissenbüttel’s thoughts further: an anti-grammar, an anti-syntax, a strange passion, a phonetic, acoustic and rhythmic possibility, which plays a part in determining the linguistic expression. Poetry is an acrobatics of sound, an orientation in the world. Poetry is a life form. Poetry is.
Poetry builds, as Helmut Heissenbüttel stresses, on language’s figurative power, its musicality and suggestive values, but also equally as much on the side of meaning, semantics. Poetry’s density of meaning is not a wish to block interpretation, but an attempt to open up to multiplicity.

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All creation also contains elements of destruction. Even though words cannot be cleared out of the way, at least the daily intercourse with language must be broken down for poetry to come out of it. Rather than something being destroyed, it is more correct to say that elements are separated from one another, so that something can be built. What falls apart are the old meanings. Deconstruction is therefore not a purely disintegrative movement in language, but is equally as much a constructive device.
Every poet will at some stage in his work experience phases of linguistic scepticism:
Language that shouts so loudly
that there is only One Leaf
to all the forests in the mountains around
A drop of the lake
whose shiny peace the body at any moment may plough up into furrows of silver.
If I want to go any further than this experience of the limitedness or insufficiency of linguistic expression, I must find language’s liberating potential. Language is the prison in which I have complete freedom to tear walls down. Linguistic scepticism is a continuous and at times cynical insistence, not a stage that is soon ‘overcome’. The border between imprisonment and dignity is sometimes surprisingly small.

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Poetry is not an asylum for emotions. Every conception in language is hard work. In Rilke’s ‘Requiem für Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth’, this aspect of the poetic is unfolded:
· O alter Fluch der Dichter,
die sich beklagen, wo sie sagen sollten,
die immer urteiln über ihr Gefühl
statt es zu bilden; die noch immer meinen,
was traurig ist in ihnen oder froh,
das wussten sie und dürftens im Gedicht
bedauern oder rühmen. Wie die Kranken
gebrauchen sie die Sprache voller Wehleid,
um zu beschreiben, wo es ihnen wehtut,
statt hart sich in die Worte zu verwandeln,
wie sich der Steinmetz einer Kathedrale
verbissen umsetzt in des Steines Gleichmut.

If the poet is to transform himself into words, language must be brought beyond the place where it is put to daily use. The language of art is thus a different one from the one in which we communicate. In poetry the words must have an existence beyond their ordinary meaning, and like the logic in a bird’s wing enter into complex relations, where musical and acoustic phenomena have their equivalents with semantic values.

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Syntactic accretions can give the word an unusual heaviness, but the image is the place where all original meaning disappears and a new concretion emerges. What one often overlooks is the fact that image-like effects are also attained through such devices as sound, rhythm, displacements, crossings and synchronisations. All poetry’s devices are more or less image-creating.
Images are not just thoughts, but summings-up of a different order:
associative leaps. In images elements from widely different spheres are brought together, values that are apparently contrary to one another. Here the impossible is encountered, and yet it appears obvious. Precisely because images have such a special intensity and sensuousness do they have such an alerting effect in the poem.

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It is not just the individual image that is decisive: much depends on how they appear within the poem. The images must balance, sometimes in a soft and delicate dance. If the images fall too closely they lose weight, and if they point in different directions they cancel one another out instead of throwing light on one another. They are like spotlights all of which must be directed towards the poem’s idea. Does that sound like a search for harmony? No matter how experimental the work, it is of the essence of art that the work should ‘open’. Striving is beauty, in one sense or another. The images can form complex inner relationships, but they must speak inwardly, it is in their combination that the leap takes place, and a new meaning is created.

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Poetry’s picture language is not necessarily a two-dimensional entity. Precisely when the metaphor becomes sculpture is a higher degree of sensuousness attained. Poetry’s plastic moments should at once be expression for thought, feeling and also contain a philosophical, existential dimension.

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To leave one’s trace in language is to avail oneself of the difference of others. Poetry is birn by finding its own figure. As pollen has its pattern or a finger leaves its specific imprint. Every poem is neither more nor less than an isolated phenomenon.

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Originality is a danger one should not avoid. Originality means that one is authentic, distinctive and completely oneself. Originality is not a guarantee for quality. But a courage to go one’s own way is an essential condition for growth.

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It goes without saying that poetry in one sense is untranslatable. While music, dance and pictorial art allow themselves to be transported over borders, other circumstances hold sway for poetry. It is also differently disposed from the other literary genres, which can usually be translated without too much damage. But even though language most often attains its most extreme sensitivity and most refined structure in poetry, one should try to make, not real translations, but recreations.
If poetry is to be presented to a foreign public, it must of course be semantically defensible, which is something that can usually be managed, but it must also be an expressive and phonically strong poetry in the other language, which on the other hand may prove to be more problematic. Good poems can turn out awkwardly in a foreign language, and less successful poems sometimes gain in strength. A volume of selected poems in the original language will therefore not always be identical with a selection in another language.
So it is possible to recreate, but these are different poems, and remain so. It would be ideal, therefore, if the foreign language reader would not be satisfied with an echo of the real thing and instead learned a given poet’s language so as to be able to read the original version.

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It is not only words that will express something. Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders both tell stories cleverly and overwhelmingly and almost without words in their works. Their films are not poems, for poems are words, but they are great poetry,

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It is in the selection that condensed expressions arise. Attention to choice is all-important. But choice also affects that which consciously or unconsciously is kept silent about. Something must be left untouched. There must be a secret to return to.

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As the moon’s sickle paradoxically emphasises that part of the moon which cannot be seen, every poem points to what is not said. Every time language mentions something, something else is left out. There will always be something left over. It is the body that registers that it is there, that to every poem belongs something unsaid. It is this irreducible but changeable value that constitutes the constant possibility of entering new constellations. What cannot be captured in a poem can perhaps be discovered later, and there is hardly a giddiness greater than the thought language’s unutilised resources.

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To write something is to put it at a distance so as to freely be able to move somewhere else.

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Poems were originally connected with song. Poems are not sung nowadays, but are bearers of music. Words roll sounds out. The poem has its position, its tone, which may alter in strength and height. Its authenticity is greatly dependent on the sound aspect, the integration of the sound figures.

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Language is not just words. It breathes. It opens and closes. Is pushed forward or trickles quietly out of one human being and into another. With its dreams.
So many forms of breathing are censored. The song and the poem are the places in language where it is most freely allowed to unfold itself.

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I once witnessed a poet reading his poems aloud standing on the floor with bare feet. Had I not been able to hear him, I would have been able to see from the spellbinding movements of the musculature under his skin how musical his poetry was.

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A poem is more than words, it also calls forth countless physical states. The rhythmical element in particular designates the poem’s essence. It is the rhythm that above all suggests, it is rhythm that is the poem’s forward-driving power. Akin to song and dance the poem enters the reader’s or listener’s blood.

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I don’t write to music, but listen my way into the poem’s own music. It is best if I can bring everything around to silence – or at least avoid listening to anything but the poem that wants to come out.

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Silence is the central concept in ‘The Bridge of Seconds’. Silence is the precondition of everything, after it everything can begin. The nightingale that introduces the book is a bird which almost according to a mathematical principle ‘works’ with the pause. It is in these intervals that the most important things happen, when strictness and order in a diffe rent dimension unfold behind all the beauty.
A poem does not consist merely of words, but also of silence, the space between one letter and the next, between word and word, stanza and stanza, interstices that point to what is implied or quite simply at the empty space itself. Even the single word has a blind spot called silence. It is this silence that is an ineluctable value, what works to organise the written and make it comprehensible.

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The poem speaks, listens and is silent. All at once.

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If a poem is not to be drowned in its own noise, it must have a relation to silence. The silence that almost cannot be found anywhere any more, must be heard in the poem. Silence is a very relative value. Here it is silent now, because I am absorbing myself and cannot hear the distant noise, but if I lose my concentration for a moment, the sound is back again at once. There is a world beside the poem, and it is full of sounds that cannot be heard as long as the concentration lasts.

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Poetic language is not just a chance to set oneself out over something, but also to set oneself open to something. The poem is a magic potential.

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It is not all you see: there is more to hear.