Inger Christensen was once asked to explain the lengthy intervals between her books: "...I´m an ordinary mortal, I cook, I do this and that and it is only on very rare occasions that I lose my bearings. That I forget what I knew and therefore have to have it formulated again." Her answer tells us something about the artistic ambitions which motivate her poetry and the level of reflection thus demonstrated.
Inger Christensen made her debut in 1962 with the poetry collection Lys (Light) and the following year she published the collection Græs (Grass). In her early poems she cultivates the short form and seeks to capture the music of the language itself. On numerous occasions she has focused attention by singing her poems in an extension of this aspect; a song that emerges from the encounter between the sound, the rhythm and the cadence of the words.
Experimenting with language continued in the two novels Evighedsmaskinen (The Eternity Machine), a modern legend of salvation written around a fictitious industrial society, and Azorno (Azorno), which tells a complex and enigmatic love story. The novels take issue with the relationship between language and the writer, so that one must constantly ask oneself whether it is the writer who is writing the story or vice versa; or is the language writing itself?
Azorno is constructed like a nest of Chinese boxes, and systematization features even more clearly in Inger Christensen´s next publication, the cycle of poems det (it) from 1969. She has said that she had just finished the novel and thought to herself æIt. That´s it´, and thus the opening line had appeared. it is a landmark in Danish poetry. It embraces life itself and is itself a significant creation. it is a brilliant example of how Inger Christensen´s use of systems in no way inhibits the evolution of poetry. On the contrary, it is as if the poetry comes about by virtue of the systems; as if it emerges in the interplay and friction with a random, but fixed order. Similar factors prevail in the poetry collection alfabet (alphabet). Here Inger Christensen has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonacci´s numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc. alfabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation. With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move - from the first wondering confirmation apricot trees exist - out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.
1991 saw the publication of Sommerfugledalen - et requiem. This time the mathematic systems give way to the classical sonnet, or rather, the sonnet-cycle. Butterflies, so beautifully named, dominate the picture. But the picture is ambivalent as, on the one hand, butterflies are characterised by their glowing colours and suspended weightlessness and, on the other hand, by their obvious fragility and mortality. In the fluttering of the butterflies, the veil is lifted from early memories, the dark and the bright sides by turns, like the top and the under sides of wings.
(1998)
