Klaus Høeck

Klaus Høeck’s work is unique in modern Danish poetry, partly because he works with large-scale forms in the tradition of Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda, and partly because he uses cybernetic system theory and structuralist linguistic philosophy to control the linguistic material.

Høeck took his master’s degree from Copenhagen University in 1970, but gave up his post at the Philosophical Institute and chose to use philosophy in his poetry. He made his debut in 1966 with a short collection of poems, Yggdrasil. The title refers to the tree of life in Nordic mythology, and the poems link an extensive knowledge of mythology with cybernetics and theories of language. In the books that follow Høeck often refers to Yggdrasil as a metaphor for his poetry, and a mythological and philosophical consciousness characterizes his experiments with ever more complex poetic forms.

Projekt Perseus consists of cybernetic computer and science-fiction poems that lead the reader out into space, back into mythology and into language and the literary tradition. As in several of Høeck’s works the language is both Danish and English. There is talk of a material aesthetics, in which letters, syllables and sentence elements serve as fuel for poetry’s spaceship on its journey to the constellation Andromeda and the myth of Perseus’s victory over the monster Medusa.

In Canzone sonnets and canzoni are used to study and describe everyday life in Nørrebro throughout the economic crisis of the 1970s. At the same time an experiment is made in what classical metre can be used for in a post-modern poetry. The poet’s’I’ walks in the district’s polluted streets and the poems demonstrate a different ecological praxis by using and reusing the poems’ linguistic material and the literary tradition. Metamorphoses takes us on a journey of pilgrimage to Lerici, Missolonghi, Rome and London, where the poet visits the graves of Shelley, Byron, Keats and Blake. All of it through a constant study of the sonnet as poetic form and material. The volume also illustrates a stylistic characteristic of the oeuvre – which attaches it to the poets of the Romantic era – namely, the distinctive use of the genitive metaphor or the morphological metaphor.

Hjem (1985) is a major masterwork of the Danish poetry of the 1980s. The 600 page-long poem cycle is composed in three general channels – those of nature, culture and the mind. The linguistic material is generated from the chemical formulae for Denmark’s underground (?) and from Bible quotations. The poems tell a story of the ‘I’-narrator’s love and faith.

Another major work, Heptameron (1989), is inspired by the European tradition of writing poetry about the story of the Creation. At the same time the poems reflect the structure of the A-molecule.

In Eventyr (1992) a theme of loss is elaborated in connection with the death of the poet’s mother. As in the fairy-tale tradition, it is three small stones, representing faith, hope and love, that help the poet’s ‘I’ to say farewell, but also show the way back to life. Inspired by the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, the poet emphasizes that a human being can never attain an exhaustive understanding of the totality of living, concrete existence, no matter how many bits and pieces he finds to create his interpretation. Man is himself a part of the whole he wants to describe and which can therefore only be described and understood in fragments. In contrast to much traditional modernist poetry, in the poetry of Høeck one finds no regret at this limitation imposed by existence. It is accepted as a fact that mankind is in a perceptual paradox: we know something that we cannot explain. It is the task of fairy-tale and poetry to demonstrate these conditions and point to the great adventure that is our life.

It is typical of Høeck’s poems that the philosophical, political and epistemological themes spring partly from the concrete reality of everyday life, and partly from traditional masterworks of painting, music and literature. In addition to the romantic and modern poets already mentioned, inspiration is derived for example, from Hölderlin and Novalis, rock poets like Bob Dylan, Brian Eno and David Bowie, modern classical composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis or the machine-sculptures of the avant-garde artist Jean Tinguely.
 
Høeck’s collections are often structured as narrative durations in the style of classical epic poetry. The works absorb and transform material and forms from the whole tradition and culture, elements from art and everyday life penetrate and lend perspective to the whole. Deep experiences of love, sorrow and faith alternate with descriptions of everyday activities like listening to music, watching television, having a cup of coffee or smoking a cigarette. The oeuvre is in constant dialogue with music and visual art.