As well as being a poet, Morten Sondergaard is a sound artist who in recent years
has studied the relation between language and sound. This has been expressed in
several Lydmur (Wall of Sound) broadcasts on Danish Radio. His polyphonic
attitude towards reality has meant that he has never been afraid to try things
out, like a productive child at play. He has consciously spread himself over
several areas, e.g. he has been the initiator of projects and journals, of
which he has also been the editor, and he was the co-creator of a new type of subjective
lexicon, Brøndums Encyklopedi, in 1994. Morten Søndergaard has also
translated several works by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, who is one
of the writers he takes as a model.
Morten Søndergaard made his debut in 1992 with Sahara i mine hænder (Sahara In My Hands), which was followed two
years later by the verse collection Ild og tal (Fire and Number). Then
he turned to a form of poetic short story in the book Ubestemmelsessteder (Indeterminate
Places, 1996), but only to return to lyrical poetry again in his third
collection of poetry Bier dør sovende (Bees Die Sleeping, 1998), which was
Morten Søndergaard’s breakthrough to a wider public. Bier dør sovende is
also his most important work. The book is poetry as research. But there is no clear program of what exactly is to be
investigated, for ‘We are in that whatever-may-be mood,’ as they say. Søndergaard lets the world intrude and enrich the imagination, so that
new, surreal and hyper-real images emerge – with a different outlook on
the world as a result. Not quite without humour:
"I say it again, there is nothing to be done about it,
it is a way of going on,
a way of finding one’s footing,
a complicated dance inside the beehive,
the anthill’s rustling warm brain in a coniferous forest,
the force of gravity lies
awake, it can’t sleep,
but a cautious knowledge hums in the fingertips,
the sense of having everything
within one’s grasp,/…"
In 1998 Søndergaard also exchanged thoughts and ideas with the poet Thomas
Thøfner. This became the hybrid
collection Hypoteser for to stemmer (Hypotheses For Two Voices). All of his publications bear witness to an unusual receptivity to sense
impressions, which is due to his perception that we stand in a much closer
relation to things than we are aware of. We ought therefore to listen to things
and the world, instead of subjugating it to our narrow ego-consciousness, which
often limits our own knowledge considerably. Things know something about us: "it
is chaos that eats of my shadow,/ it is things that refer to me in a different/
and far more exact way."
One of Søndergaard’s basic ideas is a phenomenological perception that we as
human beings have fallen into a world that is always already there, before we
arrive with our bodies and our consciousness.
It is curiosity and wonder that keeps Morten Søndergaard’s poems, thoughts and
projects in motion. The curiosity is directed at objects and phenomena in the
concrete world. The wonder stems from asking about why we exist as we do,
why we exist at all, and how we are able to reconcile ourselves with existence.
To this must be added the clear theoretical and scientific interest that is
also a hallmark of Søndergaard’s poems. In other words: a quest for order,
reason and rationality – born of a love of systems and the beauty and paradoxes
of mathematics. Søndergaard shares all this to a high degree with the poet,
theoretician and critic Niels Lyngsø, with whom he has corresponded and
collaborated ever since they were students together at Copenhagen University.
As poets, theoreticians and sound artists, the partners Søndergaard &
Lyngsø have been among the most style-setting innovators in the Danish poetry
of the 1990s.
(2000)
