Peter Laugesen's first publication was the poetry collection Landskab (Landscape), which appeared in 1967. He went on to publish several collections, to do translations of poetry and drama, essays on art, television reviewing for the daily newspaper Information besides readings, recordings and a film portrait of the author with the trio Mind Spray.
His writings took their roots in the American aesthetic of the 50s and 60s, linked to beat poetry, free jazz, action painting, happenings, and the new body and dance theatre. Among European exemplars were Dylan Thomas from Wales, James Joyce from Ireland, Arthur Rimbaud from France and the Finn Pentti Saarikoski. Several years of reading and writing preceded his debut – a prose piece appeared in the literary periodical Hvedekorn as early as 1962 – membership of and exclusion from the international avant-garde movement Situationistic Internationale – begun in 1957 by the Danish Cobra Group artist Asger Jorn and the French philosopher and film producer Guy Debord – and association with the poet Dan Turčll – which resulted among other things in a collaboration entitled Dobbeltskrift (Double Work) – and training in typography.
Peter Laugesen, with Turčll, Klaus Høeck, Per Kirkeby and Jørgen Leth, belongs to a generation which broke away fundamentally from the preceding Danish culturally radical modernism. Characteristic of Laugesen's work, and his authorship can well be seen as a collected work, is the use of mixed forms and re-use of tradition. The kind known as impure aesthetics in the heated discussions on art during the 60s, but which in postmodernity is understood as eclecticism and hybridisation. Laugesen combines various genres and forms, high and low culture and different branches of art: music, pictorial art and poetry. He works from a faith in the spontaneous writing process, in materials and circumstance, consequently that which is here and now. Now is the time, one could say with a Charlie Parker hit from the 50s, a motto that captures the writer's insistence on the importance of what is at hand in the writing and reading process. Laugesen's texts spring from the concrete, momentary experience of the world transformed into poetry through mutual perception and the use of collage technique. The text moves without intervention from impression to impression, from an exterior to an interior world, from the author's present time to childhood recollections, from experiences with art and literature to reflections on life, death, love and the formal work on language and poetry. Quotations from world literature are blended with repartee from daily speech and tough comments on political questions. Poetological considerations and impressions of nature lie side by side with descriptions of freakish existences in society.
A distinguishing trait in Laugesen's writing is being in and confessing to 'permanent change'. The model is known from nature and was formulated in the presocratic natural philosophy of Heraclitus. In Laugesen it can be expressed in the form of a poem to the beloved: "Don't you know/that what is changed that change occurs/guarantees that everything is the same/as the wind that weeps with clouds/amidst the leafless tree crowns/and the stars' slow wandering/that whispers out the words/and lays snow on the dead…" The shifting mode can also be read in the many different forms in the work: long poems, diary entries, loosely formed prose improvisations or wild, rambling nonsense poems in the tradition of Dada and Surrealism; short poems – right down to snapshots and aphorisms of one or two lines, 17 syllable haikus, palindrome poems, epigrams, transcriptions of the Danish treasury of song and of pop texts, satire in rhyme and verse, experiments with free verse inspired by Shakespeare and Dante – and much else. Peter Laugesen's writing demonstrates that literature has many forms.
(1999)
