Niels Frank (b.1963) made his debut in 1985 with the poetry collection Øjeblikket, which was followed a year later by Digte i kim. These two short and exclusive collections reduce the lyrical moment to a minimum, to a concentration of moments and embryo. In The Instant it is the small movements of vision and the body that are sought.
In Digte i kim it is the topography of space that is poeticised. With the third collection Genfortryllelsen. Erindringsdigte of 1988 a shift away from the minimalistic features of the first two collections is noticeable: the poems are now longer and more open and the collection has more than double the amount of text than the first two books put together.
In Genfortryllelsen the concentration of European lyrical modernism on the moment merges with the sense of the American poetic tradition for meditative fluctuation. In the books that follow, this tendency is taken further in different ways. Here there is an increasing focus on a blending of different genres and styles, metaphorical breakdowns and the impure or open text as an essential poetic challenge.
In Tabernakel the poems undulate across the pages, often in long cadences. There are meditations about poetry’s occasion and function, reports on self-observation, challenging gestures, experiments with haiku and much else. There is a general preoccupation in the individual poems with mixing viewpoints together, breaking down metaphors and altering tone. Contrasts provoke one another and let the extremities collapse in order to create new levels of meaning in a formally open process. There is a general, frequently imperceptible alternation between pathos and irony and between what in several of the poems is called ‘life and art language’. It is about coming out of the ‘ecstasy of metaphor’: rounded metaphors tend to create identity in the direction of the same ideal images and in false ways.
In order to counteract this tendency images must constantly be produced that form themselves wildly, as it says in the poem ‘Du’ets bekendelse’.
This poetic principle, which is launched in earnest in Tabernakel, today stands as Niels Frank’s poetic credo. In Livet i troperne it is formulated almost programmatically: ‘All metaphor is a breakdown of thought. Metaphor pollutes thought, blends it with its opposite and thus makes it unthinkable. In metaphor there is a conflict between two worlds or two word pictures that compete with each other, they destroy each other, so that from the destruction a third element may grow, constituting an elevation of them both.’ The book also bears the very logical subtitle ‘Metaphorisms’ and demonstrates a logical blend of many different genres: essay, treatise, lyric, short story, memory, fragment and aphorism.
As director of the School of Creative Writing, Frank has written some very polemical articles and essays. In them he contests all idea of formally closed, self-sufficient and non-experimental poetic expression. At the same time his poetic credo bears the character of a more general critique of any kind of cultural border-drawing. This consciously ‘impure’ demand for border-breaking blends of traditionally differing genres, figures and textual forms means that Niels Frank, with his poetry, essays and cultural-critical activity emerges as one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary Danish poetry.
