From Dearth to Deluge
By : Marianne Stidsen
If we try to produce a miniature overview of Danish literature in the last
fifteen years, it will fall naturally into three waves. The generation of the
80s is already an established concept, while that of the 90s is gradually
becoming one. In between these two clearly defined waves, however, a collection
of idiosyncratic but nevertheless striking oeuvres slosh about, oeuvres which
it is completely impossible to assemble under the pedagogically convenient
umbrella definition of a generation. I am talking of poets (a further five
years were to elapse before prose really became interesting again) such as Pia
Juul, Morti Vizki, Thomas Boberg, Simon Grotrian and not the least - Niels
Frank.
Niels Frank first put in an appearance in 1985 with an impassioned little
collection of poems with the Kierkegaardian title of Øjeblikket (The Instant). Right from the start, Frank revealed
himself as a poet who had ambitions, even very lofty ambitions, on behalf of
literature. Øjeblikket is an attempt
to cultivate what one could call "the voice of poetry". There are no
disturbing references here to extraneous reality. Language is reduced to pure
suggestive repetitions that invoke a kind of fragile word music, a composition
of wovels and consonants in which the letter "s" is a recurrent
motif. Simply take a line such as "tankstationers tændte lamper langs
landevejens dis" (petrol stations' lighted lamps along the highway's
haze). There is really no substantial image making itself felt here (the words
are almost neutral in meaning), but there is a very powerful sound impression,
borne by the interplay between alliteration and syllable stress.
Images Outlawed
Niels Frank is one of the few poets who have actually given rise to a national
joke. On one occasion he said that he would never dream of using the word
"radiator" in a poem. This has since been used almost as an
epigrammatic characterisation of the young generation of poets. There is a
feeling that there is too much metaconsciousness and too little bold realism.
Meanwhile, the fact that almost from the start Niels Frank renounced the image
in favour of the words' potential for spontaneous ignition, is related to his
fundamentally romantic aesthetics. He
follows a programme asserting that art must neutralise the barriers between
those realms of existence that are normally distinct from each other: dream and
reality, real and ideal etc. Just like grammar, vision requires a strict
distinction between active and passive, consciousness and object, and therefore
it easily makes the world congeal beneath its Medusa-like eye. In contrast to
this, hearing is the world champion in osmosis. It can quite literally go
through closed doors. And so it is a matter of letting the poem listen to its
own breath, its own pulse, and then the poetry of nature will automatically
speak through it. Indeed - the absolute
will speak through it.
The Great Great Light
"...and it happens here", it says in the next volume, Digte i kim (Poems in Embryo), which
appeared the year after Øjeblikket.
Here, Niels Frank continues the course he had laid down in his first publication.
A chorus of murmuring voices makes itself heard through a poet who has melted
half away. The poem is a rythmical equation that has to come out right rather
than an imaginative "visual delight". And when the poet succeeds in
reducing himself to a purely receptive membrane, the result is a feeling the
personal: this is precisely the romantic sense of unity with the Cosmos - which
is deeply rooted in mysticism.
There is no doubt that in Frank's early work the poet aspires to enter into a
"unio mystica" and to allow language to speak unencumbered, freed
from images and meanings that limit and petrify. In the poem forming the
prologue to this second collection there are the admonitory words: "You go
back / You go back and look / up towards the ceiling's sloping lid / You go
back and a / door of light arises / leading through itself / and into its own
lonelyness / and you go in / You go back towards the door / and through your
self / into your own poem / You go back and fall / from sleep infinitely back /
in water that is illuminated by dream / You go back and wait / You go
back" (p. 7). And a little later: "Come out on the other side of
myself / and never say I again" (p. 14).
Genfortryllelsen(Re-enchantment)
This
enormous confidence in the potential of the poem, understood as pure music,
culminates in Genfortryllelsen, which
appeared in 1988. By this time, Niels Frank was a familiar name on the
contemporary poetry scene. Not because of his frequent appearances (Frank is
delightfully free from the kind of intense ego boosting characteristic of quite
a few other contemporary poets), but rather by dint of his unassuming, but
always enormously assured sense of what is poetical and timeless. Many see Genfortryllelsen as a key work in his
work so far. Here the romantic striving for the absolute and the resultant
singing pathos has spread over as many pages as in the first two books
together. But the result is not more images. The principle is still a
minimalistic repetition of phrases ŕ la Philip Glass.
The "substance" in this volume of poems - if that is what it can be
called - is water, water and water again. The poems in this collection are
literally written in water: water beneath the sky, the water we consist of, the
water that flows unhindered under all thresholds. And love... Genfortryllelsen circles principally
around love as suffering. As the title of the collection suggests, it is a
desire to clothe the world in the magic of which the sociologist Max Weber was
so unkind as to denude it; a desire to reach out across individual and material
limitations to a greater unity. The "you" is not necessarily a person
with a body; it encompasses everything that can go under this appellation: the
other, into which the ego seeks to melt.
Further Thoughts
After the publication of Genfortryllelsen
it was to be a full five years before Niels Frank was heard from again. This
time it was in the form of a volume of essays.
In contrast to certain of his contemporary and older colleagues, Frank does not
see a problem in the poet's being conscious of the material in which he is
working, i.e. language. So he is eager to reflect, and he reflects at lenght,
on the possibilities and "extent-logical status" of the poem. As he
sees it, the discursive genre of the essay is not an antithesis to the
epiphanic quality of the poem, but a continuation of it. In Yucatán (1993) he attempts - not least
by directing his attention to other art forms - to obtain a clearer insight
into the potential of poetry. It is first and foremost about form and style. In
a wonderful essay on Wallace Stevens (one of his personal gurus) Frank
establishes what it is that enables art suddenly to raise itself above the
grimy hotchpotch of reality.
"In 1915, when Wallace Stevens walked into Duchamp's studio somewhere in New
York and saw all these curious things scattered around the room and thought
that they reminded him of absolutely anything but pieces of sculpture, he must
in the time taken by the transition from one single second to another have
become a poet. And in a train of thought that might have sounded something
like: Wellyes, but is this not a bottle stand, and that, well, a bicycle wheel?
- he must immediately afterwards have thought of the word style.
Parables and Sundry Hotchpotch
Something must have happened to Niels Frank's view of what poetry is and what
it can achieve in the course of the years between the first collections of
poems and the volume of essays. It is a general characteristic that he is never
content to repeat the star turns of the previous day. But the enormous leap
between the first volumes and the most recent which - by way of the
poetological reflections in the collection of essays - he published in spring
'96, proves more than anything that he is principally a poet engaged in an eternal search.
Tabernakel (Tabernacle) is simply a
brilliant, fantastic book. The tone is radically different from that in the
first three volumes. It is devil-may-care, it is formalistic as if on speed.
Put more soberly: whereas the aim in the early work was to scrabe down, layer
by layer, until the great translucency was achieved, now it is as though Frank
is eschewing forcing reality down into the system of the spirit and saying:
"What the hell, it still does as it thinks fit!" Tabernakel is dominated by a more honest confusion which the author
certainly is not boasting about or proud of, but which is simply more -
clear-sighted.
Tabernakel can be read as one vast
commentary on the earlier work, in which the author is mocking himself and his
own tendency to pathos. The poems which previous flowed like pure crystals, are
now muddied with proverbs and commonplaces and platitudes and everyday jargon.
The tone is an unwilling fascination with what pearls there lie hidden in the
apparently unadorned everyday language. As in surrendering to completely Mae
West-like one-liners such as "God help you / if you express my lofty
thoughts / without my knowing, or before / I have had them" (p.16) Tabernakel produces the same sensation
as when you have been oppressed by some heavy, heavy burden and suddenly feel
the urge to throw it all off and dance a polka. It is an eminently delightful, unrestrained, vigorous book,
amusing, full of life and indeed life-asserting.
And characteristic of this new style is the fact that - the images are back.
Lots of them. They almost queue up to get in. Frank has ceased "purging
adjectives and substantives", as was the challenge in his earlier work,
and now gives both kinds a free rein all over the pages so that it is a sheer
delight to the eye. However, if anyone thinks he has returned to the attitude
of a naive poet ŕ la national pet Aladdin, they have another thought coming.
The image asserts itself, but with no more veneration than that poetry's blue
flower must see itself transformed into poetry's blue bull in a series of
hilarious haiku parodies. Here is the latter-day haiku:
The blue bull stands staunch in the gusts between the high-rise blocks.
It is a fortunate beast. The fly
on its shoulder isn't a heavy fly (p. 46)
The leap for Frank is not from meta-conscious poetry to unconscious poetry, but
from grandiose pathos to tender irony, what Americans call camp. Where Genfortryllelsen
is about itself as literature with a capital L, Tabernakel is really almost entirely itself as literature with a
small l. It does not attempt to get rid of sensitive pathos, but to find a more
reasonable place for it in the chaotic hotchpotch of reality. The moral is that
the images are not new at all, but that they are the only ones we have:
"He thinks: there is no more to be seen. He thinks: / Everything's been
seen to death. But what has once been seen to death / must expect to be seen
again, conjure, conjure / to death and to death again." (p. 82)
Let us hope that Frank will continue to let the pictures run - "as
imprecisely as possible, but with a quite special precision."
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine no. 10
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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