A universally orientated poetry
On Force Majeure
By : Michael Nielsen
In his long poem STOF (MATTER,
1996), the poet Niels Lyngsø breaks with the traditional idea that poetry
should be concerned above all with the emotions, where life, death, anxiety,
love, pain and so on are the preferred subjects voiced. Instead Lyngsø pleads
for a more universally orientated poetry, in which the poet leaves the
existential and the political self to describe the physically elemental world
outside my existence, my feelings and passions as principal focus.
In FORCE MAJEURE Niels Lyngsø
consciously contravenes his dogma of a universally oriented poetry by allowing
an existential self to emerge distinctly in the poems. This does not mean that
Lyngsø has turned into a poet of passion and pain, but that in FORCE MAJEURE he describes a self
subjugated to the chaotically greater powers that have decisive repercussions
on a human being's life and prevent him from being master of his own house.
These influences may be near existential experiences of birth, love, death or
external catastrophic events such as earthquake, war or forest fire.
FORCE MAJEURE consists of 54 separate
poems arranged in visual constellations that stream down over the page in
rhythmically assonant language. The
book contains nine prose pieces and three linked terza rima stanzas – one in
each of the chief sections of the book, which relate to the self's past,
present and future. The poems in the first section (the strong and the weak)
depict lying in bed, as a child or an adult, while the darkness closes around
one and memories, dreams and old muttering sorrows turn up without warning like
an avalanche. Here the poet is a child who sings himself to sleep, while
'memories dissolved into an alphabet' form the elementary dark material he must
explore (or search through).
There is a private and at the same time universal consciousness of self in FORCE MAJEURE that leads one to think of
Walt Whitman's life-affirming Song of
Myself (1855). Universal by virtue of the fact that dream and sleep take
one into a mythic kind of nature, in which earth, forest or sea can close
around one at any moment. Private in
the dark recollections of childhood and not least in the beautiful erotic
central section (Electromagnetic) in which the raw white silk of the seed
spurts out over the woman's heavenly anatomy.
One supreme prose passage in the last section of the book (Gravity) seems to me
to hold the essence of FORCE MAJEURE. The
lovers take a walk in the churchyard with the perambulator, together they carry
out an experiment in thinking. What if everything was reversed: if we were
slowly formed down in the earth, carefully lifted up as aged, and from then on
moved cautiously backwards through life and abruptly acquired close friends,
relatives and loved ones, to end up naked and helpless, forced into another
person's body and then vanishing at the moment when the seed cell withdraws
from the egg.
Whereas in MATTER Niels Lyngsø
links the self with the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, the
ambition in FORCE MAJEURE is to
embody life midway through its course through describing its contingent forces
like a steppe fire or a forgotten sorrow that unpredictably breaks out.
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 16.
Translated by Anne Born
|
|
