| |
The view from nowhere, a view “that wants to give an account of what is—of everything that is and how it is and what we are in the midst of,” is not easily conjured let alone made intelligible. This is true, debatably, whether we speak of note, lyric or paintbrush. Danish poet Inger Christensen’s collection det (it) nevertheless seeks to assail this view through a singularly unique, confident, and (though she would probably disavow such a description) mechanized poetic vision. First published in Denmark in 1969 (this New Directions edition marks its English-language debut), det is Christensen’s attempt to give shape to the mosaic of infinitesimal relationships, forces, variables, impulses, structures, systems, and continuities that comprise what you or I would probably think of, a little simple-mindedly perhaps, as the building blocks—the very stuff—of life, but which Christensen herself has obliquely referred to as “the indistinctness that a state of flux necessarily produces.” (In composing det Christensen was greatly influenced by the Danish linguist Viggo Brondal’s A Theory of Prepositions.) Whatever the case, det is more than anything else a poetic of the indistinct, where what is is always in flux, shadowy, skeletal, backlit even. This is is always suspended, furthermore, in a protective web of “word, sentence, story, reasoning, grammar, rationality.”
Someone is always alone and looks at himself dying.
Someone is lying dead in a house whose windows face the street.
Someone is lying dead in a house whose lights are all on.
Someone is dead in a house which is otherwise completely abandoned.
Someone is dead where no one ever expected to find anyone.
Someone is dead and suddenly shows up among all the others.
Someone is dead and is looked at by those walking by anyway.
Notwithstanding the extract above, if Christensen’s project brings to mind more the rigors of science or sociology than the traditional fuzzy down of well-wrought poetic beauteousness, this impression is not much dispelled by her borrowing, for det, of “eight grammatical categories” from Brondal’s book. It’s a sad fact, perhaps, but in order to achieve a fulsome appraisal of these categories (which effectively form the backbone of the complex mathematical schema that is det’s chief organizing principle), it is required of the reader that he or she redoubles efforts of the cognitive and interpretative variety. (It is also this schema, with its labyrinthine setup, arguably, that prevents a slide into esoteric meaninglessness.) For our purposes, though, it’s probably sufficient to point out that det is divided into three sections: “Prologos,” “Logos,” and “Epilogos,” and that each section contains either further subsections or a precise number of ascending or descending number of poems, lines or characters. “Logos,” which essentially constitutes the heart of the poetic conversation in det in so far as what occurs here is less obviously monotone prepositional and more, well, engaged with the specifics of soil and song, contains three sections, each with eight subsections of eight poems. The three sections are “Stage,” “Action,” and “Text”; the eight subsections “symmetries,” “transitivities,” “continuities,” “connectivities,” variabilities,” “extensions,” “integrities,” and “universalities.”
The pertinent question to ask is of course: so what does all this rigid experimentation amount to for the lowly reader? Well, on the one hand det amounts to a veritable aesthetic marvel. It’s a somewhat curiously staged marvel that unfolds in a kind of scientific lab manner and moves from abstract enigmatic vantage point to abstract enigmatic vantage point, true, but the tone is also wondrous and incantatory and det is, all at once, a collection of poems, a labored philosophical statement, a societal call to arms, and a raging epic ranging from sea to sexuality. Not surprisingly, as we learn from Anne Carson’s nimble if a little quirky and impressionistic introduction to this edition, det constituted something of a watershed collection for modern Scandinavian poetry when it was first published and Christensen is now the canonical face of Scandinavian poetic acceptability, having long ago conquered the entire Nordic (and elsewhere) plain of prestigious prizes. So galvanizing was the result of det’s initial publication on Danish society, in fact, that “the journal of Denmark’s city planners took its title, Soft City, from a line in det.” A tick in the box for the sociological naysayers if ever there were one.
On the other hand det amounts to a veritable aesthetic bafflement. A detailed field guide, while not strictly mandatory, is almost certainly necessary to help navigate and release to the reader some of the wild energy that is visible yet wholly trapped beneath what is an all too elaborate orchestration of meaning. Language, perception, reality—these are Christensen’s targets, but just as often she is theirs. As the poet says, “A word flies up.”
|
|
