Poetics - VII

VII

I write for myself regardless of readers, in a process that deals with identity and continuous creation. Only later does the wish to be read arrive.

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Usually when one wants to say something one addresses a specific living person, but with the poem it is different, and must be so. If while I am writing I have a particular reader in my thoughts, I limit the poem, clip its wings by instinctively speaking into the shared space which the given reader and I have already established. The addressee ought to be unknown, an abstract subject, but the dream of a possible reader imposes itself on form and composition as an implicit and necessary structure. Only when I have surrendered the poem is it aimed at anyone who may read it. For a moment, the person who takes the poem into his or her hands is the chosen one.

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As a poet I address something that exists outside me, something that is greater than myself. Even if one prefers to call this something God, it does not change the poems. The most important thing is that I who do the writing do not imagine that I am the highest, that I as creator do not confuse myself with God.

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It helps to have literary models. Preferably dead ones, but God is and remains the highest authority. The poems do not have the character of prayers or invocations, but are written upwards towards this thing that is greater.

Yet for another, but very important reason, I also deploy God. Since God is an absolute value, God ‘sees’ the text differently from anyone else. God will not let himself be defined, but that does not prevent us from talking to God…
As a writer I am certain of at least one thing, namely that my poems will meet with countless divergent interpretations. Not necessarily because they are complex or unclear, but because every dedication is not just about the poem itself, but also implicates whoever reads it.

The Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva said: ‘All the lessons which we derive from art, we put into it.’ She gives the following example from The Sorrows of Young Werther: One reads Werther and shoots himself, another reads Werther and, because Werther shoots himself, decides to live. One behaves like Werther, the other like Goethe. A lesson in self-destruction? A lesson in self-defence? Both. Goethe, by a certain law of that hour of his life, needed to shoot Werther, the suicidal demon of his generation needed to be incarnated precisely through Goethe’s hand…’
Is Goethe guilty for the deaths that were one consequence of the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther? He declared himself not guilty: ‘He in his profound and splendid old age, himself replied: No. Otherwise we could not dare to say even a wored for who can calculate the effect of a given word?’
Marina Tsvetayeva exculpates Goethe, and I would do the same, but the example makes one think, just as the do the consequences it can have when as a poet one does not distinguish between life and work.
Michael Strunge touched several times in his poetry on the yearning to burn together with the darkness:
I could become a shooting star
and fall to rest, fall to the ground
on some planet or other

and for a catastrophic moment exchanged poems, dreams and reality. A terrible thought that cannot evade me as I read those lines.

*


The poem is at once sealed and decipherable. That is why reading is infinitely different from a conversation that is carried on between two people, where it is possible to break off, correct, expand or change the subject. Reading contains both cognitive and emotional components. Nothing can be understood without putting oneself on the line. It is not just a matter of getting something out that can be ‘used’, and above all not when it is a question of poems. Beyond the cognitive aspects there is a demand that one be involved aesthetically, that one be able to listen to the emerging parameter a voice is, perceive the many intentions that take place on several levels at the same time in a poem.

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Reading will as a rule be an inner phenomenon, a graceful and quite private activity that takes place very differently from person to person. In his short story ‘The Book’, Martin A. Hansen has depicted – with much pathos – how the boy Mattis reads, but makes his first encounter with world history an example of the fact that reading is an immensely individual process. Here intoxicating and impassioned: Mattis did not read like most people, reading was like a fever in him, his gaze moved over the lines like wooden clogs on the slippery ice, but the letters became small, real living creatures that scurried into his brain and scribbled and scrabbled there, so the blood moved thumping through him. And if the content was strong and gripping as in this book, then the people and actions seemed to rise out of his own inner being, as though he were creating it all himself.’
The dynamics are striking. A whole new world opens up to the boy. Later, when he lies exhausted in bed, we read: ‘Shivers ran through him. It’s fever, he thought to himself, one falls ill. It may be that one dies. But how I have read!’
There is a great difference between the identification patterns that exist when the text contains a gallery of characters, and what happens when it is poems, and other circumstances hold sway. In poetry the holding points are not the same. One can orientate oneself in the poem’s time, its landscape, its space and not least listen to the voice that is speaking.

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Reading is about taking an attitude that is attentively listening, asking, interpreting and remembering, about being able to go in and out of the poem in an attempt to find models in the inner relations between the signs and to construct a meaningful whole, but the process is far from merely intellectual, it also contains receptive and sensitive levels. Reading is a constant balance between objectivity and empathy, an attempt to understand what is purely factually there, and how one perceives it oneself. The degree to which one becomes visible in the poem or aware of oneself, was once revealed to me in a dream:
in my dream
books were shiny mirrors
every single page
all words a mirror for the one who read
in any book at all
the reader saw only himself
living


In ‘The reader’s dream’ from White Fever, the writer is present in more than one sense, but at the same time the reader becomes aware of his own being there, conscious of his presence, which is something different from merely seeing oneself confirmed.
Sometimes the reader does not see what the poem wants, but uses a strategy that is wrong in principle and exclusively sees himself or his own purpose. Such a reading can only lead to him staring himself blind in the mirror.

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A poem is no longer my property after it has been published. Once I have given it, I must be prepared for widely different approaches to it. And there are as many versions of the poem as there are readers. Sometimes readers have presented me with aspects of my poems which I myself have not been aware of, but which I have taken on board because they convinced me. They were there in a way already, without my having seen them. Feedback of that kind is rare, but I view it as an essential experience that poems I thought I knew inside out, because I myself produced them, can still surprise me. It is only when they have lain for a long time, or I have read them aloud several times, that I take possession of them, I will always be the one who sits in the background of a given poem, its crown witness, as Per Hojholt once formulated it, but it can never be my task to analyse and interpret it.

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I always have the wish intact that the poem’s intentions will be perceived. Or just because reading seems to have such a problematic character, I aim at an authority that does not intervene noisily and disturbingly with its subjectivity, but can see the text as it is, namely God. God is the one who sees the poem as I would like it to be perceived.

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The reader’s wish is almost always the Poet’s Heart Blood, but my poetry is not the testimony of a trembling heart. That does not mean that I am a non-person, I just want to be allowed to be the person behind the poem.
The poem can never run away from the fact that it is written by a human being, a sensing subject, but should the poem be a textual testimony or a human one, that is the question…Poems must at least contain elements of life, individual fundamental parts that work like poles of reliability in the midst of the torrent of words that is produced. A shy nightingale, singing through a summer night, could be a controllable point of departure for thoughts of the universe. As long as there is this gleam of reality, the poem can allow itself almost anything at all.
My poems qualify themselves by being my truth, i.e. they are not necessarily a truth for someone else, but many readers expect to be able to use poems as living examples in their own process of formulation.

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The poem excludes no one, it is open to anyone who wants to go in. In a way, all poetry is written with reference to a ‘you’. In love the yearning moves in the direction off one who loves us, for all that we are. In poetry for one who understands all that we want.
Many of my poems speak directly to a you. In one of them appear the following quite banal lines:
reality is here
only not you

These lines may have been written with a definite person in mind. Because the other person – in this case the beloved – is not present, reality is experienced as extremely unreal. The very distance from the beloved is a condition that cannot be overcome. Only as the other can the beloved be loved, but this ‘you’ also points back at the writing subject: reality is there, but the I is not present in it, or is not in a position to take part. Or the one who is reading the poem is addressed directly. At last the I appeals to the invisible authority, God. Thus, the lines may mean: the beloved is missed. I myself am not really present. The reader is involved. And fourthly: God is not here.

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It could be said that the Psalms of David, written about 3,000 years ago, overturn my point of view. If God is the highest authority, God will not only see the poem as it is, but also know it before it is written. In Psalms 139, 4-5 we read: ‘For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.’
The first part of the quotation reveals an idea of fate and providence, while the second part expresses a present action. There is a big difference between God already knowing everything, and God being simultaneous with events. If God knows the poem before I have formulated it, God must correspondingly know ‘all things’ ending’. It is not necessarily so that God knows ‘the end’. It is no precondition of God’s almighty power. If God created Adam in his image, one must suppose that God’s image is in Adam. I cannot possibly say anything that will surprise God, because I can never come before God, but God, but God apparently manages to listen and be at the same time.
Since I myself do not know the poem until I have written it, or perhaps just because of that, it is possible to insert God as an authority, who in the last analysis is spoken to, not as the one who knows the poem in advance.

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Every significant work is itself, which does not prevent it from wanting a dialogue. On the contrary. Does not art only become art when it is perceived? When the poem acquires its reader? In spite of the fact that something will remain foreign to the reader, the poem’s will is to reach the unknown mind.
Although I have my centre, there are none the less collective patterns that make themelves valid on the other side of the subjective, but if today one ceaselessly has the feeling of living separated from other people, it is because it has become so difficult to see the common structures. Perhaps in some invisible place we resemble one another more than we are separated from one another? At least we must be said to have fantasies and longings in common. And perhaps in certain happy moments there is a bridge of seconds, where there can not only be communication from one individual’s aloneness to another, but where also a process takes place.
Rarely but sometimes the unknown reader identifies himself surprisingly with the poems. A reader once said to me: ‘If I had been able to write poems, I would like to have written yours’. Something was already there in the reader, but had not been formulated before.
I cannot possibly know what a poem means for the person who reads it, but if a poem can have an effect on another person, as it had an effect on myself, when I wrote it, is there any more one could wish?

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A poem cannot be received if the reader or listener is not in the mood, ready to be in the poem and at the same time let it be in him. When a picture is looked at, it is best seen from a given position, and there must be a balance between nearness and farness, if it is a question of listening to musical instruments, but the poem also demands that one take an attitude towards it. In spiritual intelligence take one’s bearings according to it, whether it is read or heard.