Tenderness and Care

Speech for the poet's acceptance of the Emil Aarestrup Medal

By : Neal Ashley Conrad

Re-Enchantment
It is in the field of tension between the familiar and the unsayable that Niels Frank writes, in the place where the poem borders on stillness and silence. He distinguishes interestingly between stillness, which he thinks is always there, and silence, which one creates oneself as a poet. In Genfortryllelsen the silence is used linguistically, as a means of making the poem a confessional space. Linguistically produced silence creates a closing on the outside and an opening on the inside. The poem is thereby turned into a quiet place for a reclamation of neglected human values such as tenderness, humility and a caring relation to the other and to the things that surround us. According to Rainer Maria Rilke’s prescription Niels Frank throws space around feeling.
   In Frank’s work the individual poem is an image-forming continuum. But how does he view the process of creation? In an interview with the journal Passage 3/4 in 1987, before Genfortryllelsen, he gave approximate answer: ‘It’s the continuum I work with in the writing itself. The words are written down on small pieces of note paper, and sentences and ideas are jotted down, producing a great mass of fragments, whose only shortcoming is that they do not hang together. Thus it is the coherence of the continuum that I have to work on – everything else is already in place. This is a pure task of coordination, so to speak, where I think: which words stand in relation to one another? Which words can stand side by side without under-emphasizing one another? Which words can literally illuminate one another? The creation of a continuum and the creation of coherence is for me the lyrical task itself.’

Existential inquiries.
Niels Frank acknowledges his affinity with tradition as an artistic and perceptual precondition. But it is important that as a poet and thinker he relates to it freely. This is clear from the collection of essays Yucatán, which Frank published last year (1994 ed.), and is a camouflaged poetics. It is characterized by complexity and the attempt to write an artistic comprehension of the whole. In it, Frank continues his attempt to identify with an artist’s personality and intentions, so as to understand what art is, which waas introduced in Genfortryllelsen, with portraits of 10 traditional authors, poets and theoreticians. By relating to other poets, painters and musicians – from John Ashbery via Andy Warhol to John Cage and Per Højholt – Frank sees the possibility of outlining his own inner poetics. In the essay on Højholt he asserts that art stems from nothingness, defining nothingness has ‘a kind of non-place in the form of the poem, as its images only exist once and are constantly replaced by new ones.’ In another about the poet Wallace Stevens he distinguishes between form and style, saying that the form is the pattern, which the author masters and brings to his text, while style is something organic and invisible which the author cannot see in the text, but by which he is fundamentally guided when he writes. Thus as a poet Niels Frank is involved in an exciting alternation between writing and being written, between mastering language and being mastered by it.
   Niels Frank’s poems are existential inquiries that call on sensory, imagistic meetings and crossroads. They are a poetry that is widely ramified with germinations and a constantly outward-directed questioning. With a methodical use of detail and sense-borne reflection, the poem becomes a field of research, where both poet and reader are unclothed and in long continuums share space with a mysterious world which the lyrical languages themselves create.
   Congratulations on the medal, Niels Frank.

The full version of the speech was first published in Information, 18 May 1995.

Translated by David McDuff