Maintenant #51: Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
I think of perfoming as one of many logical consequences of a situation where poetry, given it’s economic impossibility, is both forced into, and in itself looking for, other territories than the usual, i.e. the poetry collection. And of course the poetic result is in correspondence with these circumstances. For example I have a ongoing poetic project on Twitter where the phrase by definition can be no longer than 140 signs. You can look upon this as a sort of Oulipian restraint but for me Twitter-poetry is also an experiment in speed, I write it very fast and use it as a sort of notebook. It is potentially stimulating but in the same time possibly just an expression of poetry’s desperate and hopeless situation. Poetry’s outsider position is in fact it’s pharmakon — etymologically speaking — at the same time both it’s remedy and it’s poison.
In the 51st in the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Swedish poet Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson.
Five Poems
My life was good but everything was ruined when I was buried alive.
I got up every morning, had breakfast and brushed my teeth but then I was buried alive.
I took the bus to work but then I was buried alive.
I played table tennis and football, I enjoyed biking and reading books and in the summers I was sunbathing, I cleaned my house and made nice dinners, I enjoyed a good night’s sleep but still I was buried alive.
My life was good, it was practical, I managed to avoid starving and poverty but I didn’t avoid being buried alive.
There was particularly one thing I wanted to avoid and that was to be buried alive.
I told my doctor… to rigorously and seriously scrutinize… that there was absolutely no risk that I would become buried alive.
I told my wife to wake by my corpse very, very long to ensure herself that I could not wake up in the coffin and discover that I was buried alive.
But in spite all my efforts I was buried alive…
By Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson.