Per Højholt

Per Højholt (born 1928 - 2004) is a challenging writer who commands both high philosophy and the colloquial and ironically humorous style. In poetry and prose he has constantly searched out the potentials of imaginative writing, its materials and the conditions applying to it. In addition to a long series of poetry collections, theoretical works, LPs, and various essays, articles and reviews, Højholt has published an anti-novel 6512 (1969) which makes a total break with the Bildungsroman. The work is without any development – it depicts a man in a library reading classical literature without reaching any real cognition. He makes notes, but everything dissolves into fortuitousness and relativity.

A distinguishing feature of Per Højholt´s writing has been his habit of continually drawing attention to nature and its laws and emphasising how as human beings we are always placed at a distance from the world around us, nature, others and ourselves. For Højholt there is always a distance to traverse, in which we can acquire a better idea of where we are in the world. And art – including writing – can help us to do this by separating ourselves from nature as a difference. According to Højholt, creative writing should never imitate nature. The language of the individual poem forms a reality in itself. This is an attitude Højholt has always maintained.

Højholt made his debut in 1949, but it was not until 1963 with Poetens hoved (The poet´s head) that his authorship properly began. By then he had long since relinquished the time-honoured cultivation of the poet as prophet, and instead focussed on the poetical text as material and sign. He similarly settled accounts with the idea of a definite identity, for as he later expressed it: ´I am many – there are many of us who are.´ As human beings we are not one, but many individualities in one and the same body. Here he takes his place beside both Rilke and Blake, who wrote: ´We are not individuals but states, compounds of individuals.´ We meet this same cognition throughout the whole of Højholt´s authorship, for instance, in Min Hånd 66 (My hand 66, 1966), in which Højholt settled accounts with the over-emphasis of early times on the poet as a seeing solitary whose works announce themselves as products of the mind. Now it was the hand and its creative writing that held sway.
Over the years Per Højholt has made use of a series of poetic strategies linked to the labyrinth. Inspired by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Højholt has cultivated the labyrinth in poetry as 1) a narratological principle, i.e. a method of structuring his texts, 2) a means of orientating himself to the world, 3) an existential condition and 4) as itself the image of the situation of modern man.

There are very few writers who have managed to combine humour and seriousness as consistently as Per Højholt. It is often impossible to distinguish the irony and humour from the existential sobriety. For they are both sides of the same subject. Every playful game with language in no way prevents what is said from holding a deep earnestness, a scepticism or a wide-ranging criticism of the language, of norms and prejudices.

Højholt´s best poems are furnished with so many aspects and levels each with its distinctive characteristic, that it often seems meaningless to try to isolate or divide them from each other. There is constantly a surplus in Højholt´s poems, a strong energy that springs from an enormously sharp consciousness of form and of the limits of what must be said and not said. Above all, to Per Højholt it is a matter of creating a critical counter-consciousness in the reader, of finding beauty and reserving a place for it in the poem.