Marianne Larsen (b. 1951) is one of our finest poets, but because as a person she is at least as discreet and shrewd as her poetry, she has not gained as much attention as some of her more dramatically profiled and public-reading colleagues.
Marianne Larsen’s poetic voice is so inimitable and so much her own that the best way to begin a presentation is to quote a poem; like the other great and equally inimitable and unmistakable poet of the seventies, Henrik Nordbrandt – who moved out of the decade when Marianne moved into it – it is more the voice as such that has become neo-classical and neo-canonic, rather than any particular poems or individual collections, and unlike Nordbrandt she has never been niggardly about lending her talent out in all kinds of non-literary contexts, and so it seems very fitting that the following pure Larsen poem is taken from the book At ville Jeg kan Vi gør (To will I can We do) of 1981, a book "about the lives of children and adults together", written in collaboration with Erik Sigsgaard: "learn to walk/ as one rests on the earth / learn to speak / as one dreams at the same time / learn to draw / houses one does not keep in oneself / learn to stand/ still among people / as when one is happy".
What strikes one first is the simplicity and the strangely inevitable pregnancy and refinement: the feather-light resourcefulness in the midst of the quivering directness, which makes all the difference. Afterwards one can pay attention to the fact that it is seldom a didactic poem is able to keep the poetry open instead of closing it. And finally one can admire the courage to put words to a positive, a joyful vision, to give the dream a linguistic body, point by point and drop by drop, certainly, but absolutely feelably and readably.
Marianne Larsen made her debut as a poet in the magazine Hvedekorn with extremely talented but certainly not simple texts: "heavy in gushing red wetness/ on the way from one point to another / passed by misted eyeglass-red / sprains on your verge", the intensely complex style continued in her first collection, Koncentrationer (Concentrations, 1971), and in the books, both "straight" and underground, that immediately followed it; but in Ravage (Havoc, 1973) there is a shift towards a more direct and directly socially critical poetry. An important technique that is developed in this book and since has followed Marianne Larsen faithfully is role-playing in general and double talk in particular, the subversive adoption of the bureaucratic speech of authority (which the poet probably finds just a little poetically attractive): "That they termed their common situation love may perhaps not take anyone unawares".
In the very many collections she produced in the 1970s and the first half of the 80s, Marianne Larsen cultivated her refined yet simple style to near perfection, and emerged as the (only) major political poet of the 70s. Several voices have found occasion to complain about the schematic nature of her poems’ criticism of what life is like, and her vision of what it could be like, e.g. the robust but seldom very concrete dualism, nature and birds, etc. versus city and cars, etc., and this may indeed be true enough, except that they actually work, even on a post-modernist 90s critic like myself. I think this has something to do with the fact that the political pieces can be read directly as a kind of haiku poetry, a simple but richly developed game between elementary contradictions: "take my hand / so I can feel you / let’s clear a place between the shops / of blindness / let’s sit down / and stop resisting some temptations / to like people/ those who are walking past and ourselves". Yet terms like ‘proletariat’ and ‘imperialism’ jar on one’s eyes today in their absolutely non-ironic linguistic bureaucracy. The three collections that appeared in rapid succession –
Det kunne være nu (It could be now, 1971), Hinandens kræfter (One Another’s Strength, 1980), and Der er et håb I mit hoved (There Is a Hope in My Head, 1981), display the essential Larsen style in its best and most automatic format.
Where an original and powerful single-track mode of thinking characterises the first, almost purely lyrical period of Marianne Larsen’s work, since the mid 1980s it has to a high degree shown signs of experimentation. There has been a toning down of marxist didacticism and mobilisation in favour of a free exploration of the human sensibility. The first important poetic experimental work is probably the haiku-inspired Pludselig dette (Suddenly This, 1985). Marianne Larsen began to explore narrative prose. In 1989 there appeared both the lyrical roman á clef En skønne dag (One Fine Day) and the first volume of her quartet of almost traditional novel-memoirs, Gæt hvem der elsker dig (Guess Who Loves You), which tells the story of that girl called Bodil growing up in the country in the 50s and 60s; the subsequent volumes, Fremmed lykke (Alien Happiness, 1990), Galleri Virkeligheden (Gallery Reality, 1992) and Gæster hos hinanden (Guests of Each Other, 1998), describe the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, in which the portrayal of the era must constantly recede into the background to make way for the over-sensitive and distraught Bodil and her over-sensitive and distraught, not say downright eccentric circle of acquaintances: an infatuated tax official plays a central role in the final volume, the first paragraph of which characteristically enough is called ‘Sleepyhead-Passions’. Most recently, in I en venten hvid som sne (In a Waiting White as Snow, 1996) and Lille dansk sindsjournal (Little Danish Mental Diary, 1998), Marianne Larsen has super-imposed respectively an automatic writing science fiction universe (!) and a theme of Danishness on top of ordinary, extraordinary Larsen-ness, quite something for a poet who in 1999 celebrated her 30th year of publication. We shall permit ourselves to look forward to even more happy reunions and sudden surprises in that direction.
(1999)
