The Missing Links
Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche. * Trailers for imaginary B-movies. * F. Scott Fitzgerald documentary. * A Kiki de Montparnasse biography. * Tura Satana RIP. More on the cult actress here. * Lena Nyman, Maria Schneider and Edouard Glissant RIP. * Can you get something for nothing? * The A to Z of Spurious. * […]
Maintenant #48: Morten Søndergaard
In 1994, a group of poets and editors made a poetical encyclopaedia, in which we set out to gather all poetical knowledge at the time, instead of scientific knowledge. In the encyclopaedia you could look up the definition of words like yes and no and The meaning of life and freedom and love and cannibalism etc. Freedom was written by a prisoner who was king of the prison escapists, the entry fantasy was written by a prostitute, and so on. A lot of poets contributed, around 300, it was a kind of Wikipedia of poets. It sold 40,000 copies, and critics have now labelled the generation from 1990-2000 the encyclopaedia generation in Denmark… But a group or a generation is difficult to identify, and these groupings are often constructions made in retrospect. I have been away from Denmark for 8 years, which has given me a chance to see Denmark from outside.
In the 48th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard.
Four Poems
The night is here again.
Someone has let me in to the control tower and thrown the keys
away. Words request permission to land. Come in.
I believe in the conspiracies of the words behind the back
of the syntax.
You just have to keep going.
Full throttle. Hope it goes okay. Even though we’ve nowhere
to go. Write like the evening light that rips open chasms
in all the colours. A spectrum from violet to phosphorescent green.
A light falls on the words inscribed here…
By Morten Søndergaard.