The pitfalls of Kallio

They tell me most people who move to Finland, do so through Kallio. We immigrants may move further on later, to other neighbourhoods or townships, but this is where we take our first steps in a brand new civilization – this is where we form our new misconceptions and build complex new stereotypes in our over-exposed heads of what it actually constitutes to be Finnish. And for foreign eyes that have grown up leering at miniscule wooden houses in a small town of 3 thousand inhabitants in the north-west of Iceland – what a place! Situated 1.305 nautical miles southeast of Ísafjörður, Iceland, Kallio is, to the untrained eye, one of those places you read about in beatnik-novels and hear Tom Waits croon about – it’s the neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks, a fairytale land for anyone with a mild streak of bohemian romanticism. And a borderline paradise for those with a more solid, rampant streak.

Waking up in the morning I am free of the ceaseless chirp-and-chatter of birds, the belches of moo-cows, bleating of sheep and ripple-gurgling of the ocean that has swallowed so many – sounds that thus far have plagued my life with mundaneity and a sort of rustic backwardness. Instead I’m softly awoken by the sweet and melodious song of the drunkard, the smell of traffic driving through rain-soaked streets while teenagers on skateboards scuttle by. The world is born anew when the hierontas open for business, with their yuletide neon-illuminations flashing in rhythmical splendour, as if to welcome one-and-all. The last of the grill-shacks close as the bars reopen, and the incence stemming of newly implemented smoke-law victims trails across the street. Ah, ‘tis a new day in a new world, ours to seize! These truly are the bee’s knees.

My parents still live in the old country, the old world, and I’m obliged to understand that they may worry, as all people fear what they do not know. Nobody fears a drunkard as much as he who has never seen one, and the city-bred invariably avoid the sight of such country-side standards as udders, dung, fish entrails, straw hats and denim overalls. I’ve even heard of city-folk who live in fear of meat, which would suffice to get oneself institutionalized in the part of the world I originate from.

And sure enough there’s no shortage of dangerous situations in Kallio. To begin with it seems to me that highly infectious plagues of allergies are rampant in these parts. Since coming here I have not met a single person who doesn’t suffer from lactose-intolerance, hay fever, pollenosis, glutein-intolerance, dust-mite allergy, or one of the other species of city sickness. My own body has completely stopped understanding midge-bites and city-gnats, and chooses instead to puff up all over in pinkish inflammations. Apparently experience doesn’t come free.

Automobiles incessantly hustling and bustling up and down every asphalt-covered surface provide the ideal setting for a country-bumpkin to get himself roadkilled; cheap bars are traditional pitfalls for the bright-eyed surrounded by big city bright lights, and even Google Earth knows that beer doesn’t get much cheaper than round these parts; the the house of our benevolant Lord, The Kallio Church, doesn’t seem to bode anything remotely nice after dark, casting it’s pitch-dark gaze over Karhupuisto with such weight as no man can withstand; and I don’t think the naked guy standing outside my front door yesterday evening, flapping his hands like a monkey apeing a whooping crane, was particularly safe company. In fact I’d dare venture that he was downright dangerous, to both of us.

But I’ve survived so far, and hope in fact to survive a little longer, in this human forestry of civil (and uncivil) engineering, macheting my way through the thicket of passengers crowding the trams. For a while perhaps I may remain wary of the bright lights, but eventually I guess even the drunkard’s song will become as mundane as the ocean-ripples, and the midge-bites will stop itching, but until that day arrives I shall be the happy recipient of my own blue-eyed alienation – fully nelsoned by the bee’s knees.

Written for the finnish magazine MoveOn.

Thou shalt not Morgan

Thou shalt not Morgan
- a word of advice about the world abroad

Sifting through surfers with syphilis sipping insipid substances
on Sidney’s supersandy surfaces – „shoosh“ says the sea
seeing monosyllabic surfers with syphilis sexing
sesquipedalian superstars of cellular searchery.

Sabre-toothed surfers with syphilis in their sartorially taylored sailor suits
seeking saints for some seditionary missionary –
seismically salivating their saline sewage, sickly son-of-a-guns
slobbering on soft-hearted sassy sanguine seductresses

Savage sausages with syphilis are like sawn-off shotguns says the say-so,
saboteurs of sensual salubriousness, symbolizing the submissive she-dom serfhood
to surfhood in systematic semisapient soap-operas – sucks for
soberminded and sanative sylphs simply seeking sun in the sand!

No, Mo!
No mo’!
Go, Mo!
No mo’!

Syncreting with syphilis is synonimous with soliciting saddle-sores,
solidified souvenirs of sultry sub rosian suffixal suitors,
soundtracks of surely sour grapes in the sordid southern hemisphere
submersed in the see-through seepage of stark-nakedness.

Sundials striking in stagnant staccato, stopping sterilized stigmas
when suppositories with syphilis suggest seven sestertiums
for superpositioning on said sylphs supinity,
severing their suspenders in sensual shaggification.

Shallow are the seas for synchronized swimming of
syncopated syphilitic semen from shapeless
shopsoiled sharpshooters surfing on their soundbytes
of soft soap, unsheathing their subhuman soul mates.

No, Mo!
No mo’!
Go, Mo!
No mo’!

Sophisticated sweeties in sweat-pants stunning sunning in
solar flares should snicker at snake charmers, snarling snide
and snearingly snap back, snub snow-ballingly: Snuggling with
snorkelers scantily clad is like scavenging for scabies.

Seismic sensationalist sceptres stiff and soaring;
succoured to scented succulence, swatting the sacrosanct
and surfing the seven seas on skinflicky skiffs,
these skulduggerous scruffy skitters of sick scrotums.

See, this smarmy smooth-spoken smorgasbord of orgasmic
surfer-smurfs with serums of seashore sensualisms,
seahorses of sacrilegious sickening salami-shafts
will salaam at the shreaking sound of syphilitic sextuplets.

Reading Pol Pot

You are a pipe

I

One’s understanding of one’s own language is limited, one’s understanding of other languages is even more limited, and a perfect transferal of a text from one language to another is impossible simply because the languages are two different ones. “Boat” is not the same as “bátur,” which is not the same as “Boot” or “båt”, let alone “bateau”. So much is obvious.

To translate poetry is to write poetry by procedure, inasmuch as such an act is possible. One is made to choose which characteristics get to remain the same, inasmuch as they can remain the same – form, appearance, alliteration and other similar phonetic characteristics, rhyme, ideas and association of ideas, wordplay, continuity, story, allusions, semantics, semiotics, etc. – and then one is made to choose what gets to enter the work that wasn’t there previously. It is inevitable that many things will, since any kind of transferal of text adds layers to what was written, while peeling others off. If we take for example Borges’ famous story about Pierre Menard, who takes it upon himself to rewrite Don Quixote word for word in the 20th century, then that book, as Borges ironically points out, is another phenomenon than the one Cervantes wrote in the 17th century: Menard writes in a style which is unnatural to him, whereas Cervantes merely wrote in the colloquial of his time. The two works are different because they are written by different men in different times, even though the letters, words, sentences and paragraphs are the same and in the same order. The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith performs similar acts; he writes down previously existing language – including an entire issue of The New York Times (Day), everything he said for a week (Soliloquy), the weather report (The Weather). This has been called a N+0 translation, named after the Oulipo method N+7, where the words in a text (e.g. all nouns) are replaced with the seventh following noun in a certain dictionary. Translation as fair copy, the recreation of the same is an impossible feat, the translation is always new.

A large portion of foreign experimental poetry today (avant-garde, post-avant, radical, language, digital, flarf, post-langpo, post-prairie, etc.) deals with a presentation, interpretation and a representation which to some extent strives for some sort of transformation, or even destruction, of language itself. Language is treated as any other raw material – its meaning is split and stretched, and its physical attributes (sound and picture) are split and stretched.

A text is a collection of meanings, phonemes and morphemes used to express something about “reality” through “reality”. Metaphorical “reality” is used to convey something which the reader can relate to in his own “reality”. Language is an independent reality within reality. The task of poetry is then to punch holes in the language of either, or both, of these realities – to seek a way out of the predominant social pact of text as reality and life as reality. Through the holes it might be possible to see something new, and language will heal in a different shape.

Many of the poems in this book are translated from English, a language which is diffferent from Icelandic mostly for not being a single language, but many. The poems in English are written by people of many nationalities who have English as a native language while others are written by people who have other native languages (Caroline Bergvall is French/Norwegian, Gherardo Bortolotti is Italian for example) As the Finnish poet Leevi Lehto has pointed out, this language – english-as-a-second-language – is the real lingua franca of the world, being spoken by considerable more people than english-as-a-first-language.

There is no way of translating Australian English into Australian Icelandic, or American English into American Icelandic. You can’t even localise by using homegrown dialects, since the little that remains of such things in this nation of the linguistic holocaust, quite simply won’t suffice (not that it would produce a more accurate “translation”). In this aspect Icelandic and English belong to different worlds.

Experimental poetry as represented in this book has been produced in the English speaking world for several decades by dozens of thousands of individuals, each of whom has done their bit to widen (or tighten, blast, transform, deform) the idea of English as a language – while Icelandic has enjoyed a rather limited amount of similar experiments in its literary history, and has, it seems, had to deal with a serious nutritional deficiency in the last years, there not being very much that escapes from under the petticoats of Icelandic proof-readers. Maybe the poets like it there.

II

Just as you can not translate anything between two languages, nothing is untranslatable once you realize that nothing is translatable. A translation of literary work is never the same work, but a new work related to the former – the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1763-1834) said that an artist could view a translation of his works by imagining what his child would look like, had his wife had it with another man (the gender roles of this example are from Schleiermacher – they can be reversed without getting sand in one’s vagina).

Since nothing (and yet everything) can be translated between two languages, it must be just as (im)possible to translate between more than two languages. That is to say to translate someone else’s translation of a poem from a third party. This used to be common practice in Iceland, but this transit has since been deemed shoddy according to the classical theory of translation, or so I’ve been told. But seeing as the final outcome – the translation – is only a relative of the original work, it should not really matter whether it’s a first or second cousin. It is only fair that the relations are mentioned – who begat whom with whom where and whatfor.

Most of the poems in this book are translated from the original language, although a few have been borrowed from other translators. Details can be found in the commentary section at the end of the book.

III

Even the greatest prudes in Finland would regularly say “voi vittu” without flinching, and this goes for everyone from winterwargrandmothers to pillowfightinghomosexuals to lollipopgirls. The words can be literally translated in at least two fashions – either as “oh, cunt!” or “butter cunt”. Most probably most Finns believe themselves to be saying “oh, cunt!”. But the weight and meaning of these words are not necessarily “the same” from one language to another – he or she who shouts “smörfitta” at the dinner table in Sweden, is not performing the same act as one saying “voi vittu” on the other side of the Baltic, and it is to be expected that Swedish housewives would shake their fists vigorously at such language.

In traditional translation the phrase would be “damn it”, or similar. But the words are of course not “damn it”, they are “butter cunt”. Or, I mean, in a matter of saying.

The Swedish profanity linguist Magnus Ljung divides profanities into several different categories, including theological (“damn”), expletives (“oh!”), fecal (“shit”), sex-related (“cunt”), and many others. The different categories are used differently in different languages. The most powerful of profanities seek to break taboos, go further than others have gone before, even though most of those used on an everyday basis stay far within those limits. But when we wish to go further, we employ the unusual, or original, and seek new ways to express our dissatisfaction. So it happens that something which is completely mundane in one language, like “voi vitto” in Finnish, becomes excruciatingly vulgar in another.

There is somewhat of a tradition for normalisation in the translation of literary work. An idiom in the language being translated is changed into another idiom in the target language, the names of places and characters are even changed, word-plays are twisted to be understood etc. Anything exotic is normalised.

Naturally people disagree on whether it is more important, in the consumption of art, to understand or to sense, but most (perhaps too many) seem to avoid that which they don’t understand, or even reject it completely.

Were I to paint a picture of Kallio (my neighborhood in Helsinki) for the Icelandic market in the same method as many translations are done, I would normalise it – I would change the supermarket chain Alepa into the supermarket chain Bónus, a tram would become a bus, brothels would be solariums, and the flowers grass. Because for an Icelandic person bus means the same as a tram does for a Finnish one (except the trams are on time and used by many – but then translations are merely approximations).

When you come to a new place one of the most enjoyable things to see are those that are different from those places one is used to. Here in Kallio I become amazed seeing three brothels side-by-side, with a sex-shop on one side and a strip-joint on the other. I look into the bottomless misery of the winos in my neighborhood like a well that no one knows where ends, or whether it does at all, and I learn something new about man, where he can get (out of sight).
In a recent book of poems from Linh Dinh (whose poetry can be found in this very collection), Jam Alerts, there is a poem in the form of a book review on the poetry translations of a man named Reggis Tongue – and Reggis deals in unnormalised translations. The poem quotes a prologue by Reggis to his selected translations:

Slovenly translators - bums, basically - think they have to choose between music and sense. To pin down meanings, many of them squash the tune. To ape the melody, they ditch or deface the semaphores. They don't realize that syntax is melody. A translator must ignore the indigineous drumming echoing in his lumpy head and obey the alien word-order, rhythm of what he's translating. Make it strange - never try to domesticate a foreign poem!

In most cases in this book no attempt was made to normalise text, and that which sounded strange was simply allowed to sound strange. In the light of the work being translated, i.e. work that deals with language and stretches it, it is very possible that in some places the poems are more strange, more incomprehensible, than were they to be read in the original language, although I still hope that they will allow access to some of the thought originally bestowed on them.

As well as being capable of producing weirdness, unnormalised translations can cause misunderstandings which can even be dangerous, particularly when the reader is not aware of the fact that other paradigms govern other languages. In this way I suspect that when the media proclaims that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that the American movie mogul Oliver Stone is “a part of the devil”, it is only proper to wonder what meaning that translation, which I expect is literal, has. Do they mean that Ahmadinejad literally believes that Stone is possessed – that the devil lives within him – or was his point quite simply one I suppose we can all agree on, that Oliver Stone is a part of the machinery of American capitalism?
It has also been claimed repeatedly that Ahmadinejad wanted to “wipe Israel of the map”. This has been chewed, back and forth, as the God’s honest truth. However, the British newspaper The Guardian printed the following correction on the 22nd of February, 2007:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has not “called for Israel to be wiped off the map”. The Farsi phrase he employed is correctly translated as “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. He was quoting a statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Then of course we might wonder where Ahmadinejad is going with this.

It should be duly noted that the author of this text is no specialist in Iranian politics, and does not take a stance on whether or not Ahmadinejad is “evil” or “good”, but is mostly skeptical of both the media and politicians.

IV

The poems in this book were chosen quite simply because they interested me. It really isn’t more complicated than that. It would have been enjoyable to add many other poets, as well as many other interesting (enjoyable and important) poems by the poets that are included in this book, but for reasons of time it was impossible. If all goes well another volume will be produced in the next one or two years.

Lastly, it is right to thank those who put their shoulder to the wheel. Firstly the poets, of course. A list of the poets can be found in the table of contents, but it is also right to mention Ellie Nichol who gave permission to include the texts of bpNichol.

The following people read either single poems, the whole manuscript and/or gave useful tips: Arngrímur Vídalín, Ingólfur Gíslason, Haukur Már Helgason, Haukur Ingvarsson, Derek Beaulieu, Nadja Widell and Hildur Lilliendahl. Many of the poets also helped with translations and answered quickly and surely the various questions that popped into the translator’s mind. Last but not least Finnish poetry-activist Leevi Lehto gets heaps of thanks; without him this book would never have become reality.

----

This text is an english translation of my prologue to my new icelandic poetry translation anthology, 131.839 slög með bilum, which features poetry by the following poets:

Charles Bernstein , Jon Paul Fiorentino, Susana Gardner, Oscar Rossi, Kirby Olson, Leevi Lehto, Sharon Mesmer, Jan Hjort, Jesse Ball, Markku Paasonen, Jack Kerouac, Derek Beaulieu, Katie Degentesh, Paul Dutton, Nada Gordon, Paal Bjelke Andersen, , Gherardo Bortolotti, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Iain Bamforth, Michael Lentz, Anne Waldman, Teemu Manninen, Mike Topp, Ida Börjel, Amiri Baraka, S. Baldrick, bp Nichol, Charles Bukowski, Mairead Byrne, Mark Truscott, John Tranter, Sylvia Legris, Maya Angelou, Bruce Andrews, Haukur Már Helgason, Craig Dworkin, Shanna Compton, Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Vito Acconci, K. Silem Mohammad, , Frank Bidart, Rita Dahl, damian lopes, , Jelaluddin Rumi, Rachel Levitsky, Tom Leonard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, e. e. cummings, Saul Williams, a. rawlings, Stephen Cain, Jeff Derksen, Linh Dinh, , Nico Vassilakis, Martin Glaz Serup, Malte Persson, Anna Hallberg.


The book can be ordered by clicking here.

Stumped speech

Ladies and gentleness, I bequeath youse for silence, I deplore youse!, whilst I mays reproach youse with my kind in kind words – for l’artistes freedom is what wez shall bes spanking of this smeary eve. Many a broadsword have we felt stabbing through our change of hearts, as when Jesus Breast himself took a bloated gash for our freedom of terror in the poor on drugs, and thereby cleansing us alls of our mortalmost shins. Freedom! My dames and messiahs, that libretting force of habit for l’artiste, which, when thwarted, pretends a dark, and balmy cloud over l’artistes face. Ah, through the valley of darkrooms, as the bible does sayeth, „the sheep heard is truly his finders keepers, who will strike upon the bourgoise with great annoyance and curious danger those who tempt his poisonous and viceroy brothers.“ Ah, labias of gentle menses, heal my worlds, withhold freedom and we shall undoably be up shit creek without a padlock. I thank youse for your reverent séance.

Written for Finnish vaudevillianesse, Laura Murtomaa.

Stick this in your hat and eat it

The police is in my way.

Sorry, the police is on their way.

Paying our respects.

Save some braille for the morning after.

Infant elefant sickofant infanta in Fanta.

Early morning chiming of checkerberries.

Fraud monitoring is on.

This site has been reported.

Please keep moving.

29

At little over 17.00 local time my youth was successfully regained on Vuoristorata roller coaster in Linnanmaki. Not only was the ride refreshing and rejuvinating, but the roller coaster's age -56 this year, the last of the side friction roller coasters - made me feel all the younger. Now for cigars and whisky.

I am still 29.

29

This morning at 9.12 local time I once again, as I have every year since coming into this world, lost my youth.

I am now 29.

Get what I got!

"They only got me, they never got what I got"

- is a sentence I remember from some Bob Dylan interview, hopefully somewhat correctly.

"I remember this coming up right at the time I began writing, in 69-71 - in conversation and correspondance with Ron Silliman, sitting here in the front row- around things like David Antin's famous piece about modernism and post-modernism, where he made that distinction that beginning at some point in the seventies, even for the most radical modernist tendencies in work, that it come face to face with the problematic of the sign and try to granularize language down to the microscopic level that you then could work with. But that, after a while, didn't seem sufficient. I remember as a baby-boomer, coming on the scene, in a sense, coming, you know, debuting, you know, in the poetry world, around 1970, or early seventies - that was the issue alot of us were confronted with. There had been a huge backlog becoming available of avant-garde and experimental writing, contemporary and previous, that had focused on the sign, and had pretty much stayed with it. That was as far as it got. Then this move towards thinking about adress, thinking about interaction, thinking about the discursive implications of larger units than a single word or a syllable or a letter, began to be uppermost in our minds and that became very central to the discussion that led to what people much later ended up calling, you know, so-called "language writing". And later my own work got, I think, maybe, singled out or distinguished within this body of peers, because like some people and unlike others, I became very much interested in pushing that discursive frame out into the social material. Both the social material which was the basis for people creating their subjectivities, and for people creating their social context, their ethnic or national identifications, sexual or gender identifi... you know, all that stuff became very central to me. What I've been struck by of late, among younger writers, for instance, is the attempt to bypass a lot of that, to just go directly to discurse, directly to social questions, without having gone through the gauntlet of confronting the atomized level of raw material we are confronted with using language. And what that often ends up being is just this parade of stereotypes, this parade of cliches, this parade of identification, this parade of big lumpy units which are already taken for grant... which are given. You just operate with these big phrasal or sentence or paragraphs or genre. Hideous! I mean can you imagine? The idea of thinking you are exploring language and you are trapped within the social conventions of genre. I mean, that is a joke. And yet somehow that is now being perceived as "truly radical", you know, experimental activity, by younger writers and that's just, you know, help me here, they're not confronting what the ground level is."

Bruce Andrews in Philly Talks #8

This interview is actually all brilliant, both Andrews and Rod Smith. I'm not really familiar with Rod's work, but I'm definitely very excited by it.

But yes, about the quotes. That idea, Bruce's idea of people not beginning on the same floor as he, reminded me of Dylan's quote there above. Dylan's point was that Donovan and the like weren't listening to Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, and were therefore shite. They didn't know the beginning. - Without a doubt this point of view has been the same since the beginning.

Now I know this isn't a completely fair comparison, one quote to the other, Andrews' opinion is rather more stated: What he is interested in isn't being done anymore. What he thinks matters.

I'm not sure tomorrow's poetry can be understood fully if you never watched South Park, if you weren't raised on internet porn, myspace, youtube and constant free access to public media. I'm pretty sure that textual understanding, people's reading, changes constantly based on what we are used to reading - both as individuals and generations. What Bruce reads as lumps of genre, or whatever, may quite seriously be radical, experimental and highly readable to someone else.

What I'm trying to say: Those ideas may be dangerous precisely because they are, despite being radical, also conservative. What I'm trying to say is: Now matter how much of a crush you may have on the teacher, you better not take anything he or she says for given. He or she may be a profound poet, but that motherfucker must be broken, so to speak.

Which doesn't change this: Donovan sucked. You can't just imitate Dylan and hope you're brilliant. And you can't just imitate Language Poetry and hope you'll excel. There has to be something more, a greater devotion to the art than to the vanity - though anyone in arts who claims not to be vain is a liar suffering from the greatest vanity of them all.

I have a reading in august, at Poetry Moon, Runokuu - click here for information - along with Martin Glaz Serup and Cia Rinne, of both of whom I am a fan, and Outi-Illuusia Parviainen, whom I don't know yet, but someone called Iluusia must be a great poet.

I've put up a blog where you can find all articles and reviews I've written about poetry in the last 7 years. I would like to take the oportunity to retract anything and everything I said for the first 5 of those. A few are in English - and all are available here.

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 the words for close Icelandic words 2) Using Word autocorrect with english as dictionary language and 3) Switching out the words for the closest dirty word in the Collins Concise Dictionary. All the translations can be read here.

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

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 region Ω contains a quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole.[1]

When one tries to speak of poetry one usually starts by making a really big circle, a really really big circle the engulfs the entire universe. When one actually starts mouthing the words that will – if god and effort allow - become one’s eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) one finds that the circle has shrunk. The circle is now no more than a dot. The dot, darkbrown like a mole or something of the sort, one realizes, is on the tip of one’s own nose. This, unlike the words that opened this my eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) is not merely a theory. This is the god’s honest truth.

Sitting on the edge of my bed a few weeks, days, minutes or seconds ago (depending on who you find it proper to believe in these matters) I noticed something on the tip of my nose and on the unfocused plateau in front of it I started marvelling at the accomplishments brought to life by my friends, my close acquaintances, my relatives and, oh yes indeed, by myself.

By some astonishing coincidence this was the same time as I started writing this piece. My eternal speech about poetry (and therefore everything else) – cleverly subtitled: The unspoken facts.

(It shall be noted, and probably has already been noted by the more clever of readers, that this essay, rant, or what you want to call it, is not at all entitled eternal anything or the other, and it certainly is not subtitled).

I don’t remember what it was that I promised to write about, but it must’ve had something to do with literature. Very probably poetry, and I am almost positive Icelandic poetry is what I promised to write about. Oh, the late Sigfús Daðason! The marvels of the late Dagur Sigurðarson! The late Einar Ben, late Davíð Stefánsson, late Egill Skallagrímsson, late Tómas Guðmundsson! Ahhh... one’s heart throbs with joy at the infinite beauty and bleh bleh.

Please, I don’t mean no disrespect. As of late though, I’ve found an increasing desire to dismiss the late, as being a little less than timely. The circle is closing in. We’re not crossing the creek to get water, not this time. We don’t have time, I am in a hurry. Please.


II

So Nýhil.

A few years back I was standing on a streetcorner in Reykjavik. It was a great winter of much poverty in the circles I was circulating in, and me and a friend of mine, a poet with prematurely greying hair and a knack for walking holes into his shoes in a matter of days, were sharing our last cigarette in a quiet winter still. It might have been tuesday, and I think it was around 4 in the morning.
In the night.

We had just shared a beautiful late dinner of rice and soy sauce, a treat that we had grown bizzarely acustomed to.

And there it was. Suddenly, as if it had crashed on top of our heads: an idea as beautifully upheaving and destructive as if Orville and Wilbur had taken off in a Concorde supersonic transport (crashing or soaring, one or the other, take your pick).

After jumping up and down to display our joy and amazement for a few seconds, minutes, days or weeks (depending on who tells the story) we realized that the idea, like we’ve realized since goes for all ideas worth anything, was naught but a name.

The name was, it goes without saying: Nýhil.


III

As in nihil: nothing. As in vox et praetera nihil: voice and nothing more. As in aut Caeser aut nihil: Either a Caeser or nothing. As in nihil obstat: Nothing obstructs.

And as in nihilism: A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.[2] A wise man once said that nihilism was the black hole of philosophy. A wiser statement yet would be that nihilism is the black hole of poetry.

The nihilists of old went down the blackhole to stay there, with rotting teeth and pathetic revolutions that somehow never got farther than a shot in the foot. When the nihilist says: nothing matters so I might as well rape and pillage. The nýhilist asks: if nothing matters than why should I bother with raping and pillaging? They say buddhism is nihilism with a smile. Nýhilism is nihilism with a ‘ý’.

Ný. It’s the age-old prefix for new, as I guess most nordic readers have already guessed.


IV

This is where we start getting closer to the point. The circle keeps closing in and the spot on my nose is itching with glee. The black hole has a theoretical brother known as the worm hole. The name is derived from an analogy that a worm crawling over any surface will not circumvent an apple to get to the other side. The worm will dig through it, and therefore get to the other side much quicker than otherwise thought possible. Going down the black hole you might reappear somewhere else:

Different types of black holes have differently shaped singularities: in a stationary black hole it is a point, in a rotating black hole it is a ring. If you passed through the center of the ring without touching the ring singularity itself, the mathematics predicts you will come out somewhere else and you cannot return. This is the basis of the wormhole idea. However the mathematics gives no indication of where (or when) that somewhere else is, and no way to control or select it yourself.[3]

Apples and worms: Does anyone recall the symbolism?

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”.[4]

Yet, much like in the apple, there’s a hole in the story – there grew no apples in the Middle East. Which is hardly a great matter for anyone godlike, for anyone that has the wisdom to not circumvent the apple (malum in latin; evil is malus) but to go straight through. From one side to the other, laughing, in an action of non-action known as wu-wei within the Tao – in the old texts they compare it to moving through water. But enough of that.

What was the first thing the Lord asked, what was the first question to form on the lips (or not-lips) of God Almighty after his children betrayed him?

The Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”[5]

Man had dug through the apple and was long gone.


V

Nýhil is deliberately hard to define. For one thing noone really knows who belongs to it. It’s been claimed that anyone that has done anything in the name of Nýhil in the two weeks preceding anyone’s claim that anyone else is a nýhilist is in fact a nýhilist. If more than two weeks have passed, supposedly that individual (poet, artist, athlete, patron-of-the-arts, etc.) is something completely different.

Anyone that does belong to Nýhil (if anyone really does) can claim whatever they like about Nýhil. Manifestos have been written and forgotten, remembered and rewritten only to be deemed utter nonsense. The plan is perhaps not so much to make a symbolic gesture towards the ambiguity of truth, as much as it is to achieve contradiction, along with all the friction and movement that such an accomplishment brings. That’s how it happens that a society of not really anyone, with noone in charge, a worthless army of fools any way you look at it, has published around 20 poetry books, 4 essay collections, 2 DVD’s, a novel and a CD, produced four short films, a sportsbag, three instruments, while travelling the country for readings, holding a two-day international poetry festival in Reykjavik, and will soon open a bookstore in Reykjavik with an emphasis on underground art and poetry. During this entire time (about four years) people belonging (or not belonging) to Nýhil have continued publishing poetry books, novels, and translations with other more pristine publishing houses.

VI

Poetry is thought for those that deem it worthless. Good poetry comes from those that loathe poetry with a greater fervour than your average reader can possibly muster. There’s probably a point in explaining it, but I’ve lost sight of it. But my faith remains as firm as ever.



[1] Lorentzian Wormholes; Matt Visser.
[2] One of a few definitions in the Merriem-Websters dictionary.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes#Black_hole_FAQ
[4] Genesis 3:4.
[5] Genesis 3:8.

Out of the good of my graces

Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson - superstar of the Icelandic short story, blogs about two recent comments I've had about the Icelandic culture-media. There he has this near canonizing statement about yours truly:

"I have a strong feeling that EÖN is not and will not be in the good graces of the [Icelandic] literature world."

Click here to read in Icelandic.

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Kenneth Goldsmith's new book is out - Traffic.

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Jón Örn Loðmfjörð, one of Iceland's few digital poets, has a new machine-thingy up: click here (in Icelandic, but maybe nice for others as well).

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Reverend Örn Bárður Jónsson writes about recently deceased poet Elías Mar (in Icelandic): click here.

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Poet Kristian Guttesen published a poem by Bjarni Bernharður on his site, called Quoting Dagur - presumably meaning Dagur Sigurðarson, Icelandic beatnik poet, loosely translated so:

With a large cock
and a large heart,
you will fare well.

Read here in Icelandic.

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Danish poet Kenneth Krabat writes about barbaric Danish (in civilized Danish) - (link via Leevi Lehto) - click here to read.

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Icelandic poet Hildur Lilliendahl quotes the chilling ruling of an Icelandic court because of a fatal traffic accident - something in some ways reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. Loosely translated thus:

"As well as being caused by the raging weather and slippery ice, the slanting of the vehicle and its height over the roadway were a contributing factor to how lethal the injury was to become."

Read in Icelandic here.

For a paper from the Legal Studies Forum on Testimony - click here.
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Listening to the Linebreak interview with Steve McCaffery, he had this (among other) wonderful things to say (quoted from memory):

"As it happens, my life lends itself to cheap freudian analysis"

Which I found laughwarming. Click here to hear the interview. Hear to ear to here.

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In the recent weeks I've been quoting an article about Stalin the poet, saying that it originated from The Guardian. Today Ron Silliman links to it, and it seems it wasn't in the Guardian but in the Deccan Herald. Click here to read.

Barbaric

Yesterday evening Leevi Lehto was presented with the Nuori Voima award. Leevi read, both in "civilized Finnish" (not so civilized really) and "barbaric English" (HUMUNGOUSLY BARBARIC).

One of the poems Leevi read was byos - his translation of Lars Mikael Raattamaa's Pajkerno, a univocal rendition of a Swedish classic, Pojkarna by Anna Maria Lenngren, written in 1797. The method is quite simply to switch out all the vowels and replace them with single vowels so that the nonsense will read a bit like Christian Bök's Eunoia: "Jag mans dan ljafva tadan / Jag mans dan sam a gar" etc., changing vowels with each new verse and going through all the Swedish vowels in alphabetical order - nine in total. Leevi honoured me by asking me to read the Swedish part, while he read his English translation. The reading should soon be up at Nokturno.

Anyways. I did a similar thing last winter, much shorter and with only one vowel, and sent it to the Flarf postlist. For the occassion of Leevi's award, I have posted it to the poetry blog. Click here to read. The name is, by coincidence, some sort of allusion to Leevi's new barbaric second language.

Links, quotes and recommendations

I've posted a new homophonic translation of the first verse of Time and the Water (Tíminn og vatnið) by Steinn Steinarr, over at my poetry blog, called Teaming of what, Ned?

Martin Johs. Möller posted my Biskops Arnö reading on the Brink.

Mirroring language's tendency to mirror itself I will link to Charles Bernstein's linking of my essay The importance of destroying a language (of one's own) - linked as a "terrific essay on new transnational poetry", which makes me gleeful and giddy.

The essay also just showed up at Nypoesi.net.

For those who understand Icelandic - Kári Páll Óskarsson writes about recently deceased poet Elías Mar for Tíu þúsund tregawött here.

Kistan just published a few poems from Kristian Guttesens newest book, Glæpaljóð, here (in Icelandic). A nice change, since I don't remember seeing poetry being published there since... maybe 2002, when 3 poets were featured, Komnino Zervos, Kristín Ómarsdóttir and Bragi Ólafsson.

The debate over the power of the post-avant in Sweden continues - Anna Hallberg asks why Johan Lundberg can't be bothered to read, and Johan Lundberg retorts by saying that he never used the word "conspiracy". (Evidently he can't be bothered to write what Anna reads neither).

Reading Camus' Rebel for the first time, I get the distinct feeling that every other word is citable, which would be an interesting project (meanwhile also reading Grettis saga, and feeling that I want to write up the names of all the characters, which are beautiful and hilarious).

"Romanticism demonstrates, in fact, that rebellion is part and parcel of dandyism; one of its objectives is outward appearances. In its conventional forms, dandyism admits a nostalgia for ethics. It is only honour degraded as a point of honour. But at the same time it inaugurates an aesthetic which is still valid in our world, and aesthetic of solitary creators, who are obstinate rivals of a God they condemn. From romanticism onward, the artist's task will not only be to create a world, or to exalt beauty for its own sake, but also to define an attitude. Thus the artist becomes a model and offers himself as an example: art is his ethic. With him begins the age of the directors of conscience. When the dandies fail to commit suicide or do not go mad, they make a career and pursue prosperity. Even when, like Vigny, they exclaim that they are going to keep quiet, their silence is piercing.

But at the very heart of romanticism, the sterility of this attitude becomes apparent to a few rebels who provide a transitional type between the eccentrics and our revolutionary adventurers. Between the days of the eighteenth-century eccentric and the "adventurers" of the twentieth century, Byron and Shelley are already fighting, however ostentatiously, for freedom." - Albert Camus, The Rebel (transl. Anthony Bower).

My runner-up prize winning poem for Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör, Parabólusetning, was published in the latest Tímarit Máls og menningar magazine as well as my retort article to a review of the year 2005 in Icelandic poetry, that was published in Són magazine last year.

Books I've acquired recently and recommend:

Martin Glaz Serup - 4: et digt - for which he received the Michael Strunge prize. Published by adressens forlag.

Oscar Rossi - Kelvinator and Brev till polisen, published by Söderströms.

Agneta Enckell - innanför/utanför, also published by Söderströms.

Audiatur - katalog for ny poesi - The catalogue for the Audiatur poetry festival in Bergen, 2005. A massive book that I'm not fully through with yet, but will munch on in the following months.

said like reeds or things by Mark Truscott, from Coach House books - a Basho meets bpNichol sort of book.

Nerve Squall - Sylvia Legris - Coach House books.

Dyslexicon - by Stephen Cain - I've only read little bits of this, but I really liked his American Standard / Canada Dry, and this one looks good. Also Coach House.

Another Coach House book I just got is bpNichols Zygal, but that hardly needs introduction.

FIG - Caroline Bergvall - from Salt publishing.

fait accompli - Nick Piombino - Heretical texts.

Scrawl (from the markings of a small her(o)) by Susana Gardner. A wonderful chapbook from dusie.

From the Nifin (Nordic institute in Finland) library I've been looking at Svenska dikt by Lars Mikael Raattamaa, På era platser by Anna Hallberg and Swinging with neighbours (huge with many poets), all of which are recommended.

I've also received a lot of poetry through email, word and pdf's, for the Ntamo anthology, including works from people like gherardo bortolotti, Nico Vassilakis, Malte Persson, Rita Dahl, Rachel Levitsky, Rod Summers, Craig Dworkin, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, derek beaulieu, Jan Hjort et al.

And in Helsinki the sun is shining. I need new pants and shoes that don't hurt.

When the revolution comes

Apparently there's a lit-clique spectre haunting Sweden. One Johan Lundberg has written an article in Expressen, expressing expressively his express opinion that a small clique of rabid avant-gardists has taken over swedish poetry. Evidently these malefic stasi-like langpo figures not only publish their own magazine, but write reviews for bigger media as well. And as if that wasn't enough, the prone-to-experimentation writers seem to have suspiciously much interest in other like-minded writers. And they've taken over!

So I guess that's it for Tomas Tranströmer.

Johan Lundbergs article.

Malte Perssons reply.

Leevi Lehto has had some things to say about this as well.

I'm starting to plan to begin to prepare for maybe submitting poetry in english to something, somewhere. Suggestions for suitable addressees?

What works?

Pennsound plugged in Icelandic newspaper.

Ran into an interesting article, via Susanne Christensen, in Ett lysande namn by Sigrid Nurbo about Swedish language poetry, most notably Lars Mikael Raatamaa, Jörgen Gassilewski and Maria Silkeberg. Reading swedish works, but it works slowly, so I'm only two-thirds through it, but those two thirds are safe to recommend. Click here to read (in Swedish).

Icelandic poet Birgitta Jónsdóttir comments on Handsprengja í morgunsárið (Hand Grenade in the Morning), a recent collection of translations and radical translations that I did with Ingólfur Gíslason, with traditionally-translated authors including Radovan Karadzic, Avraham Stern, as well as various Icelandic politicians, more radically translated.

“Handsprengja í morgunsárið is mere brilliance. Ingólfur and Eiríkur manage to create poetry from the words of the power-wielders that evoke morbid merriment and righteous anger at the same time. It’s been long since I’ve had as much fun reading a poetry book.“

She also says the book is crawling up her top-ten list.

Click here to read (in Icelandic), here to buy.

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 im eigentlichen Sinne sind. Die unter dem Etikett der Norrænar bókmenntir erschienen Bücher sind Formexperimente, die jedoch nur bedingt als neu gelten können. So liebäugeln sie mit Elementen des Dadaismus, der Konkreten Poesie und der Collage, die unter ihren Pionieren auch Burroughs verzeichnet. Während Schriftsteller wie William S. Burroughs und Allen Ginsberg zu Vorbildern afsteigen, ist eine Annährung an Klassiker wie Laxness oder Gunnarsson kaum beabsichtigt. Obwohl die Autoren Nýhils sich an verschiedenen modernistischen Strömungen orientieren, kann man nicht behaupten, dass eins besonderer Stil bestimmend wäre; auch wenn die Einflüsse eher avantgardisch als realistisch sind.

Wenn man nun versucht diese Gruppierung auf einen gemeinsamen Nenner zu bringen, wäre Mischung das richtige Wort. Sowohl als eine Art von Zusammenschluss unterschiedlichster Individuen, als auch auf formaler und inhaltlicher Ebene ist es ein Konglomorat aus den verschiedensten Ideen. Was die Bandbreite der Themen angeht, könnte man damit allein einen eigenen Artikel füllen. Innerhalb der Themen versteckt sich das Spiegelbild unserer chaotischen Gegenwart. So ist das Interesse für Britney Spears größer als die für die Ausbeutung in der >Dritten Welt<. [...] Dank der Arbeiten Nýhils in den letzten fünf Jahren und ihrer ebenfalls revolutionären Einstellung ist die Dichtkunst in das öffentliche Bewusstsein zurückgekehrt. Diese Wiederbelebung der Poesie ist der beeindruckende Verdienst Nýhils. Und obwohl nicht alle der gleichen Meinung über die Vorzüge dieser Dichtung sind, ist es sehr wahrscheinlich, dass Nýhil seine Spuren im isländischen Literaturleben hinterlassen wird. Ob sich das Ergebnis allerdings jemals zum Kanon verwandelt, ist heute noch ungewiss."

Björn Kozempel translated from the Icelandic.

So evidently we might not get canonized. Bummer! Maybe we'll get lucky and be anthologized, metadwarfosized or fossilized.

Ingi Björn Guðnason also wrote a note-worthy article for the last issue of Nordic literature, that can be found in english here and in danish here.

The importance of destroying a language (of own's one) TAKE TWO

(The following text is an extended version of a previous text of the same name. It is to be noted that although it starts more or less the same, some changes have been made to that part, and the whole thing is nearly 3 times longer then the original).

The myth about the Icelandic language among the population – the myth that is propogated in the school system, from kindergarteners to doctorates – is that in some ways it is a purer language than that spoken by our brethren in Scandinavia, which at best is considered to be some sort of pidgin Icelandic, “broken Icelandic”, languages not really fit for proper discussion – let alone poetry! – simplified and almost childish in their limited capacity for the use of cases, inflections or the melding of new words. This point of view, whatever merit it may have, has yielded a rabid conservatism within the Icelandic writers community that, despite what people might think, and despite the “official” view, is ever increasing: The idea is partly that we must not fall into the blackhole of becoming scandinavians.

Anyone that reads Icelandic books from the first fifty years of the last century – let alone older books - will notice the lack of uniformity in the use of Icelandic– the grammar is regional and personal, the idioms are regional and personal, the spelling is regional and personal, etc. In the years since there seems to have been a steady movement towards a uniformist coordination – linguistic scholars will often, although it is not fair to say always, mean that one usage is right and the other wrong – often this is a battle of cases and idioms – and believe-you-me, Icelandic professional proofreaders are among the most anal of the lot, scoffing at those who take liberty with language: “What silly mistakes!”

The general consensus seems to be: If you don’t do it the way the rulebooks say you should, then that’s because you don’t know how to – a peculiarity is written off as a mistake. I have even found the need to justify the use of the few colloquials that originate from my own home area – which are mostly about which prepositions to use – in my work as a journalist in my very own hometown, as well as having had battles with proofreaders from the south of the country. The conservative uniformism is so strict that there is quite literally no room for lingual diversity – be it experimental or traditional.

There are of course exceptions, the Icelandic literati – if indeed there is cause to call the half-illiterate a literati – will now and again ordain a poet or writer into a freedman, one that should no longer be revered as a mere servant of the language but as a genius (often rightly so) and granted permission to play – normally though, this permission is given afterwards, and it’s nearly a matter of coincidence who gets it and who doesn’t. To name two brilliant experimental writers, Megas has been ordained, while Steinar Sigurjónsson has not (outside a very small lit-clique).

The need in Iceland to overthrow the language regime is quite dire (“Tear this wall down!”). Viewing a language as such a rigid object does not only promote idiocy, it is literally a pathway to fascism (“No pasaran!”). A postmodern fascism, of course – where people are culled into action rather than forced (“Make love, not war”). A father saying to his child: „We really do have a great need for protecting our language, we are such a small nation. Now, you wouldn’t want to live in a world where noone spoke Icelandic, would you? You know, maybe then we would all speak Danish, and the pronunciation is not very easy.“

And the child whispers: „Yes, daddy, I promise to rid myself of dative-illness.“

Yes, it’s called „dative-illness“ – and it means that you have a preference for the dative instead of the accusative, or in some cases, the nominative. According to Icelandic parents and elementary school teachers, this is a life-threatening condition.

Enter: Experimental poetry. The eternal fucking with language – in the sense of disturbing it and loving it at the same time. Fooling around with it. Cheating on it. Taking it apart and putting it back together again – inverted or otherwise malformed.

Iceland doesn’t not have a particularly rich tradition of experimentation. Not to say that people haven’t experimented, not to say the experiments haven’t at times been brilliant – but mostly they’ve been discarded as momentary flippancies, and the postmodern fascist’s answer to the artist’s weeping is: „Now now, you are very talented, we know. But you should focus on something more suitable, perhaps...“ – And the most talented of people turn to rewriting Knut Hamsun or Halldór Laxness.

A necessary statement to make at this point is that Icelandic literature (or poetry) isn’t in all senses bad. What is done is often well done – it is possible to thoroughly enjoy this conservatism, it may even border on the same profoundness that characterized the literature of old, you may feel yourself swept away on a pathos-tour-de-force. But somehow it’s often just more of the same. Their qualities need to be recognized, not doing so would be the same as saying the Da Vinci Code isn’t a page-turner – a statement intended to scorn it, I guess, but the truth is that while being one of the most awful pieces of literature published in years, it is nevertheless a page-turner. Icelandic literature is good at pathos. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that pathos is good at "literature", or good in general.

Experimental writing isn’t thrown out with brute force, it’s thrown out with the tenderness of the understanding, yet ultimately intolerant. Like when the Icelandic police a few days ago „removed“ two dozen gypsies from Reykjavík – by showing up in police uniforms, giving them plane-tickets and driving them to the airport. Officially noone was deported, officially noone was forced to go anywhere – even though it seems the police hinted that they could deport the gypsies if needed – but still they went. Apparently there was a need to clear the streets of musicians for the Reykjavík Art Festival, that has just started.

The same social-democratic-postmodernist/diet-fascist – or whaddyawannacallit – approach is used on anything else that annoys the precious middle classes, the burgeoning structural enthusiasts that now populate Iceland to such an extent that rebellion doesn’t only seem hard, it seems futile. Like storming city hall is pointless for todays revolutionaries – the powers that be don’t need no city hall. And picking apart language as if it were a grandfather clock, is not really either a practice anyone hands out Nobel prizes for. But yet it seems that ever more poets find a calling within exactly those structures, or non-structures, of taking language apart and putting it back together, inverted or otherwise malformed. It is what defines most experimental poetry, and to a lesser extent probably almost all poetry worthy of the name. From TS Eliot to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to the Flarfists, from the silliest of slam-poets to the Four Horsemen

The infinities of the world, every word and every meaning, all the meanings behind every word and all the words behind every meaning, have been divided into categories of right and wrong, and questioning those categories is nigh pointless – the machine will in all probability have it’s way. Yet, it’s probably the only possible course of action for anyone who actually cares for a language or for language itself.

Viewing language as any sort of finite object is the equivalent of giving up on thinking. Icelandic popstars who sing in english are often criticized with the argument: “You should be able to express it more precisely in your own (natural) tongue”. This is in many ways a misunderstanding of how language functions. To begin with, saying anything precisely, is as impossible as it is impossible for a road-sign-arrow to turn into the object it points at. It quite simply is not an option. If I were to deduce the “actual” meaning behind said criticism, it would be something along the lines of: “You should go the road more travelled, do not stray into unfamiliar territories for you might get lost.” A stay-at-home message to the boldly adventurous.

It is well and right to mention though, that when aforementioned popstars are asked to defend their choice of language, they do so with a logic that is of the same origin: “English is the language of rock’n’roll – the lingua franca of music.” That is to say: “We want to stay at home, we don’t dare to be adventurous.”

Both ideas are equally lingually conservative, and therefore (in my mind!) repulsive.

To begin with language needs neither to be known nor understood to be profound or beautiful. One could mention such strangeness as Christian Bök’s Motorized Razors, Caroline Bergvall’s Hosts’s Tale, Leevi Lehto’s Sanasade or Kenny Goldsmith’s habit of reading in languages he doesn’t understand, with similar experiments being done at Nokturno’s In another’s voice series.

Another valid example is the nordic poetry community, and the discussions that take place within it. At a recent seminar in Biskops-Arnö in Sweden, the linguistic gymnastics were quite interesting, even to one who has a very basic understanding of the scandinavian languages, but as Biskops-Arnö conductor Ingmar Lemhagen noted the Nordic collaboration is mostly founded on misunderstandings. Having a decent understanding of written Scandinavian and spoken Swedish, about 70% of spoken Norwegian, 85% of spoken Faroese, all of the Icelandic and most of the English, while none of the spoken Danish, made discussions a very interesting terrain to cover. It was well nigh impossible to know what had been said, what had been covered and what had been discarded – and yet the discussion wielded ideas from somewhere, bits and pieces that form some sort of chaotic structure that is far from meaningless, one that is rather impregnating, in the same way as half-finished ideas can generate millions of finished (or half-finished) ideas, whereas a finished idea is just that.

Paal Bjelke Andersen noted in an article at the communal blog for the seminar.

„The languages spoken in the seminar-room were Norwegian, Swedish, Finland-Swedish, Danish and English. And Norwegian with a French-British accent, Swedish with an Icelandic accent, Swedish with a Finnish accent and Danish with a Faroese accent. And English with a Norwegian accent, English with a Swedish accent, English with a Finnland-Swedish accent, English with a Danish accent, English with a Finnish accent, English with a Finnish accent, English with a Faroese accent, English with a Dutch accent, English with a French-Norwegian accent and semiotic Swedish.“

It is only proper to add to this Icelandic and Finnish – even though it wasn’t much. Zoning in and out of this debate was, although admittedly tiresome, an interesting experience. Paal also mentioned to me that he found it interesting to read Icelandic, seeing as there are mutual codes in the two languages, and the codes can be cracked more or less just by looking very hard and thinking very long (something which can’t really be done verbally – unless you’re all the more clever and the speaker talks all the more slowly). The finnish is a game of its own, although even the tiniest of understandings or misunderstandings can be very enjoyable – as I do remember listening for words and word-parts in discussions by Oscar Rossi and Leevi Lehto, even just trying to realize where one word ends and the next begins. It’s a bit like being an infant again, you get to poke at the world in near blindness, trying to figure out how things work and although it all sounds more or less like bababeebeegaga, you get the distinct feeling that there is actually something more there. Oscar and Leevi actually seemed to be communicating, with laughter, frowns and gestures indicating that the words being past between them was some sort of firm ground to stand on, even though for me the same terrain is pure quicksand.

Some weeks ago I was sitting at a café in Helsinki with two finnish poets discussing the whole “writing in english as a second language” thing, that has become more and more popular – there are several blogs in the world for this, books have been published – amongst those Leevi Lehto’s Lake Onega and other poems – and as Leevi has pointed out it may be a way for non-english speakers of gaining the upper hand on english-speaking constraintual super-poets like Christian Bök, which would otherwise be unavailable to those merely schooled in their native languages, spoken by few and hereto stretched by next to none (whereas english has the benefits of having been fucked over so often, and by so many people for so many different reasons, that experimenting with it often seems like the equivalent of surrogating wild and sweaty sex with standing naked in a field letting the warm breeze arouse you – it’s not that it’s not nice, it’s just not the same).

Of course although Christian could not learn to speak English as a second language, he could learn how to speak Finnish as a second language – but there really is no language in the world that can compete with English, it’s the only one with proper momentum, and perhaps especially English as a second language.

Reenter: Experimental poetry. Sitting at said café, discussing the niceties of actually having a common culture with the international avant-garde, post-avant, experimental, radical writing, language whaddyawannacallit, it also dawned on me that the need to fuck over our own languages is imminent. Well, it’s either that or jumping ship completely, somehow. Let’s say I feel aroused by the idea of fucking over Icelandic. Let’s say I’m really, really aroused. It may hardly get through to anyone interested in it – seeing as the interest for such things is rather limited with only 300 thousand possible readers – and it may even be enough to induce interest in less then seven people, which again according to Leevi Lehto is the prerequisite for changing the conscience of the masses. The size alone makes Icelandic a damn fine upper hand.

Then again, this is also a certain disability: The groundwork for destruction, the methodical planting of bombs along the frontwalls of nouns and windows of adjectives – pardon my metaphorizing – has not been done, and the destruction of a language is no small feat that can be achieved by single individuals, no matter how hyper-active their lutheran work ethic is.

It needs to be said that when I say destruction I mean it in the most creative sense. As the crumbling of a house creates a field of interesting rubble, as taking down a tree lamppost leaves you with a nice log for bonfires and an electrical light lying on the ground next to it.

There is very little in Iceland that could be called an avant-garde tradition – if that is indeed not a contradiction in terms. Experimental writing has been limited to a few groups or individuals taking small detours that have ended in deadends only to be (more or less) forgotten about. A contemporary example would be the Medúsa group – one of the founding members of which was Sjón, who received the Nordic Literature Prize in 2005. An experimental group of late surrealist poets and artists (1979-1986) whose work is very hard to come by, outside the national library in Reykjavík. I have in fact, although being at least mildly interested, not seen much of it at all. The other members of Medúsa have, as writers, mostly been forgotten about – including the poet Jóhamar, who remains an experimental writer somewhere in the invisible outbacks of Icelandic literature.

As much as one might find it near-kitschy to canonize and anthologize avant-garde poetry, being interested in it in a society that doesn’t canonize or anthologize it isn’t particularly much fun. For one thing it makes continuation of experimental writing seem less plausible – the tradition is elsewhere, experimentation doesn’t have a tradition (which is probably a lie – most contemporary experimental poets I know get turned on by the experimental poets of the bygones, most of them read anthologies wet& wild, hot&bothered with flaming hard-ons).

It’s hard for me to say how much of this, to which extent and in which areas, these are international concerns, which ones have a home in several countries and which (if any) are Icelandic phenomena, simply because of the rift that divides Icelandic poetry from it’s foreign counterparts, the pervading lack of interest in foreign poetry in Iceland – although there are individuals interested, the poetry-culture as such, could more or less not care less – which means, for instance, that very little is written about foreign poetry and, outside of Whitman and such gargantuously canonized figures, foreign poetry isn’t found in Icelandic bookstores, and even then, I would dare to estimate that foreign poetry for sale in all of Iceland would not reach 3 shelf-metres.

Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött (for Biskops Arnö)

(The following text, as well as the text following the following text, was written for a seminar in Biskops Arnö about alternative publishing and literary innovation. They were both (mostly) written to be read aloud - I only read the first one, which I wrote when displeased with the second one, and I kept to the text in most aspects, but deviated in a few places).

Mulling over what would be appropriate use of these given 15 minutes I wrote an entirely different segment called „the importance of destroying a language (of one’s own)“, which I intended to read here, now, as I am reading this, the segment I wrote when displeased with my first segment. The first segment was mostly about uniformism in language, in the name of lingual protection – the eternal struggle Icelanders are faced with: Let not the language slip away, or we will end up speaking like our brethren in Scandinavia – some sort of broken pidgin Icelandic that noone in his right mind would ever consider for poetry, let alone anything else.

After sleeping on this I decided to relay a different message, one of hope and possibility, instead of fascism and despair.

It was about 7 years ago that the artgroup Nýhil was founded by myself and poet, film-maker and philosopher Haukur Már Helgason, on a quiet street-corner in Reykjavík. To begin with it was nothing but a name that we decided to use as a common label. In the summer of 2002 the first book, my first book, Heimsendapestir, was published. It was a cheap affair, 160 copies that cost less than 300 Euros to produce, with the help and discount of some valiant artists and printers. And even though the following products would not all be this cheap, a path had been chosen: cheap but as beautiful as limited means could afford – a reasonable enough conclusion.
In the beginning all costs were paid by the poet himself or herself, but we would supply cheap print-deals, free layout, free cover design, and edit eachothers works.

But now I am getting ahead of myself: First we moved to Berlin, that is to say the only members of Nýhil at the time, Haukur and I.

In Berlin we were both supposed to be doing something else but life started to revolve around literature – we started holding monthly poetry-parties in a small place called Versuchstation in Prenzlauer Berg. The idea was quite simply to invite our friends to join us for live music, poetry and whatever came to mind – we took turns running the bar, which paid for the rent. We wanted to make poetry as exciting as we thought it was, as instantaneous, thought-out, chaotic and structured as we longed for it to be. In short, we wanted poetry to be all it could be. And it worked – those were some of the best parties and readings I’ve attended in my life.

When the winter came to an end, we had both finished manuscripts for new poetry books, and our lease for Versuchstation was broken – the parties were evidently not meant to become that wild, and the neighbours didn’t like it – this wasn’t their idea of poetry readings, nor was it, indeed, meant to be.

Meanwhile a new member of Nýhil, film-maker Grímur Hákonarson, was planning a venture of his own. Having visited Berlin in the winter and witnessed and participated in one of the poetry parties, he sought out grants to tour Iceland – a travelling circus of poets and other artists. When we came home in the spring of 2003, all had been arranged, except we needed to fill all the cars. So we wrote out a list of favorite young poets and invited them along. The people that went on this trip, that was wildly successful in some places and rather more mildly successful in others, are mostly the core members of Nýhil today, as well as some others that have joined in midway.

In the winter that followed we published our first essay collection, in a series called Afbækur (debooks), Af stríði (about war). Two more have been published, About us in 2004, and About poetry in 2005. The idea is to deal with topics through both critical essays and art. Several more debooks are in the making, including About theatre and About learning.

In the summer of 2005 we held our very first international poetry festival, and in november of last year, we held the second. Guests included Leevi Lehto, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anna Hallberg, Jörgen Gassilewski, Katie Degentesh, Catharina Gripenberg, Lone Hörslev, Matti Pentikainen, Derek Beaulieu, Jane Thompson, Billy Childish, Jesse Ball and Gunnar Wærness – with several dozens of Icelandic artists participating as well, mostly poets and musicians – we still have a rule of breaking up the poetry readings with music, so the poetry-parties, of which there are two at the festival, usually last about 6 to 7 hours. The third and fourth festivals are in the pipelines.

In 2005 we also launched the series Norrænar bókmenntir (Nordic Literature), 9 poetry books published in the span of about 7 months, by various authors, that was mostly sold through subscriptions.

Last year we held a poetry competition entitled „the icelandic championship in awful poetry“ – where poets struggled to write the worst poetry imaginable. We got support from the media – Iceland’s biggest newspaper Morgunblaðið, printed interesting poems with declarations from the panel of judges, for three consecutive days, and then the three winning poems. The award ceremony was held live on the biggest magazine-tv-show on the Icelandic state television. Now we are planning „the icelandic championship in other people’s poetry“ – which will feature poetic remixes of texts. This is inspired by the book Handsprengja í morgunsárið (A hand grenade in the morning) which features translations of poems from various foreign ill-doers, such as Radovan Karadzic, Ronald Reagan and Osama bin Laden, as well as text-remixes from articles of Icelandic politicians.

For about one year, Nýhil has run a small poetry bookstore, within the Bad Taste Records store in Reykjavík, which mostly features Nýhil products, and the few foreign titles that we’ve been able to afford.

Besides poetry, Nýhil has published four novels, 2 noise DVD’s, T-shirts, a sportsbag, a CD with readings of Allen Ginsberg translations, and a photocopied four page biography of an icelandic liberalist idealist and biographer, that incidentally, at about 10 swedish kroner, was the bestselling biography in Iceland last christmas – the proceeds were given to charity.

Most members of Nýhil also publish with other, more commercially viable publishing houses.

The poetry webzine Tíu þúsund tregawött (www.tregawott.net) was founded a little over a year ago, and half the editorship is in the hands of members of Nýhil. Since then it has published 59 icelandic poems, 17 articles, 14 reviews, 39 found poems, 21 foreign poems in the original language (mostly readings, visual poems or videos) and 47 translations. It was founded for the same reason as the poetry festival – that is to say, mostly to be a gateway to some sort of foreign experimental writing, seeing as those connections have been scarce in Iceland in the past. There are five people on the board of editors, and like bloggers we put up individual posts instead of entire issues. Indeed, seeing as the board of editors is HTML-blind, the zine started as a blogspot blog – but later we got a web-designer to do a proper page for us, for free.

Most of what has been done by Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött has indeed been possible because of people’s willingness to work for free, since our income from selling books is minimal, and most of the cost comes from either our own pockets or government and private grants. The idea that drives us on is the same sort of determinist idea that plagues small-town people – like myself, coming from a town of 3000 people in the northwest of Iceland – that if you don’t do it yourself, noone will. It is pointless to wait until somebody spoon-feeds you culture, anything worth witnessing is worth seeking out, and in most cases it needs to be sought out. It lies on the internet, hiding behind bookshelfs in libraries, in the heads of those seeking out similar things as yourself – and precisely for this reason the poetry festival has been very influential within the icelandic poetry scene, as younger poets have become more prone to experiment, to break out from the structures of language that is seemingly called „good“ or „proper“ for literature in Iceland – Icelandic poetry has been, in many ways since the middle of the last century, with a few exceptions, increasingly homogenic, increasingly incestuously imitative and, sad to say, increasingly bad. Many poetry books published in Iceland today are like photocopies of photocopied 1950’s poetry, bound as if they were new books – which would somehow be a nice project, if it was intentional and admitted.

What ties the members of Nýhil together as a group is not necessarily a shared aesthetic, as much as it is an opposition to the ruling aesthetic of our small country – which governs the big publishing houses who ordain poets, governs the ideas about poetry (which is snobbish in Iceland), governs the education system and therefore governs the ideas of most young poets. Instead of writing poetry, tackling language, metaphor and madness, they tend to „make like a poet“ – putting together sentences that sound like something they once heard in a poem.

The importance of destroying a language (of your own)

The myth about the Icelandic language among the population – the myth that is propogated in the school system, from kindergarteners to doctorates – is that in some ways it is a purer language than that spoken by our brethren in Scandinavia, which at best is considered to be some sort of pidgin Icelandic, “broken Icelandic”, languages not really fit for proper discussion – let alone poetry! – simplified and almost childish in their limited capacity for the use of cases, inflections or the melding of new words. This point of view, whatever merit it may have, has yielded a rabid conservatism within the Icelandic writers community that, despite what people might think, and despite the “official” view, is ever increasing: The idea is partly that we must not fall into the blackhole of becoming scandinavians.

Anyone that reads Icelandic books from the first fifty years of the last century – let alone older books - will notice the lack of uniformity in the use of Icelandic– the grammar is regional and personal, the idioms are regional and personal, the spelling is regional and personal, etc. In the years since there seems to have been a steady movement towards a uniformist coordination – linguistic scholars will often, although it is not fair to say always, mean that one usage is right and the other wrong – often this is a battle of cases and idioms – and believe-you-me, Icelandic professional proofreaders are among the most anal of the lot, scoffing at those who take liberty with language: “What silly mistakes!”

The general consensus seems to be: If you don’t do it the way the rulebooks say you should, than that’s because you don’t know how to – a peculiarity is written off as a mistake. I have even found the need to justify the use of the few colloquials that originate from my own home area – which are mostly about which prepositions to use – in my work as a journalist in my very own hometown, as well as having had battles with proofreaders from the south of the country. The conservative uniformism is so strict that there is quite literally no room for lingual diversity – be it experimental or traditional.

There are of course exceptions, the Icelandic literati – if indeed there is cause to call the half-illiterate a literati – will now and again ordain a poet or writer into a freedman, one that should no longer be revered as a mere servant of the language but as a genius (often rightly so) and granted permission to play – normally though, this permission is given afterwards, and it’s nearly a matter of coincidence who gets it and who doesn’t. To name two brilliant experimental writers, Megas has been ordained, while Steinar Sigurjónsson has not (outside a very small lit-clique).

The need in Iceland to overthrow the language regime is quite dire (“Tear this wall down!”). Viewing a language as such a rigid object does not only promote idiocy, it is literally a pathway to fascism (“No pasaran!”). A postmodern fascism, of course – where people are culled into action rather than forced (“Make love, not war”). A father saying to his child: „We really do have a great need for protecting our language, we are such a small nation. Now, you wouldn’t want to live in a world where noone spoke Icelandic, would you? You know, maybe then we would all speak Danish, and the pronunciation is not very easy.“

And the child whispers: „Yes, daddy, I promise to rid myself of dative-illness.“

Yes, it’s called „dative-illness“ – and it means that you have a preference for the dative instead of the accusative, or in some cases, the nominative. According to Icelandic parents and elementary school teachers, this is a life-threatening condition.

Enter: Avant-garde poetry. The eternal fucking with language – in the sense of disturbing it and loving it at the same time. Fooling around with it. Cheating on it. Taking it apart and putting it back together again – inverted or otherwise malformed.

Iceland doesn’t not have a particularly rich tradition of experimentation. Not to say that people haven’t experimented, not to say the experiments haven’t at times been brilliant – but mostly they’ve been discarded as momentary flippancies, and the postmodern fascist’s answer to the artist’s weeping is: „Now now, you are very talented, we know. But you should focus on something more suitable, perhaps...“ – And the most talented of people turn to rewriting Knut Hamsun or Halldór Laxness.

Experimental writing isn’t thrown out with brute force, it’s thrown out with the pathos of the understanding, yet ultimately intolerant. Like when the Icelandic police a few days ago „removed“ two dozen gypsies from Reykjavík – by showing up in police uniforms, giving them plane-tickets and driving them to the airport. Officially noone was deported, officially noone was forced to go anywhere – even though it seems the police hinted that they could deport the gypsies if needed – but still they went. Apparently there was a need to clear the streets of musicians for the Reykjavík Art Festival, that has just started.

The same social-democratic-postmodernist/diet-fascist – or whaddyawannacallit – approach is used on anything else that annoys the precious middle classes, the burgeoning structural enthusiasts that now populate Iceland to such an extent that rebellion doesn’t only seem hard, it seems futile. Like storming city hall is pointless for todays revolutionaries – the powers that be don’t need no city hall. And picking apart language as if it were a grandfather clock, is not really either a practice anyone hands out Nobel prizes for. But yet it seems that ever more poets find a calling within exactly those structures, or non-structures, of taking language apart and putting it back together, inverted or otherwise malformed. It is what defines most experimental poetry, and to a lesser extent probably almost all poetry worthy of the name. From TS Eliot to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to the Flarfists, from the silliest of slam-poets to the Four Horsemen.

The infinities of the world, every word and every meaning, all the meanings behind every word and all the words behind every meaning, have been divided into categories of right and wrong, and questioning those categories is nigh pointless – the machine will in all probability have it’s way. Yet, it’s probably the only possible course of action for anyone who actually cares for a language or for language itself.

(This text was 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. This will probably be expanded upon at some later date --- Instead I wrote another mini-lecture, about Nýhil and Tíu þúsund tregawött).

Call for submissives

It may be a little late in the game - but I will post this letter here, that I sent to various places some two weeks ago, anyway:

DEAREST POETS.

I am working on a book of poetry translations into Icelandic to be published by Leevi Lehto in Finland in the fall. Most of the poems in it have already been translated, but I will be adding to the book until the middle of June. For this reason I am searching out poems and poetry books in english or one of the nordic languages (swedish, norwegian, danish or faroese), and it is therefore I write to you. Some poems might even be translated from finnish, french or german. Poets wanting a translation can either send me poetry by email (kolbrunarskald@hotmail.com) - or books in the mail:

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Fleminginkatu 9A 10
00530 Helsinki
Finland

Kein eintritt

Well yes.

A literary blog! In english as a second language - barbaric and cruel. I'm not sure my english is bad enough to be interesting - my swedish certainly is, and blogging in finnish would be a wondrous feat. Matkaautoesta. Höpöhöpissa.

I just came back from Sweden - spent the weekend at a seminar called Alternative publishing/literary innovation in Biksops Arnö (just outside Bålsta), a collective blog can be found here. Among the participants were Caroline Bergvall, Leevi Lehto, Paal Bjelke Andersen (of Nypoesi), Martin and Jannik of FLY, Oscar Rossi and many more. The days were spent at lectures and the evenings at readings, marinating in wine and poetry. Plenty of the readings have been posted on Martins blog, including two of the largest scandinavic poetic cacophonies (a quiescent one and a circularly mobile one), and my reading of four poems (Snurvoðin snýst á veggjunum, Höpöhöpö Böks, Pol Pot (Pantún) og Swing Ding). It's safe to recommend all of them, but I will let do with mentioning Paal Bjelkes and Martins reading of Paal's prime minister poem - and if Leevi or Caroline show up in that player, then suffice to say both of them were profound.

A summary of the course can be found on the group blog, www.publicering.blogspot.com.

Since this is the first post I will put some links to my own stuff on the internet, that could be enjoyable for english-as-a-second-language-speakers.

A few translations and originals
My sound poetry on UBU-web
My sound poetry on Nokturno (same recordings, but with explanations in finnish)

If other links come to mind I will add them later.