I'm Here Now
A Conversation with Simon Grotrian
By : Rolf Sindø
(extracts)
- You are considered by some critics to be a cult writer, a difficult and
inaccessible poet read by eggheads. How would you describe yourself as a poet?
- In a way I’m a big child throwing words about, but I’m also a grown up, and
to blazes with the critics! According to them I’m supposed to be more or less
mad … All good poets, incidentally, are more or less mad. Just look at Michael
Strunge: he was manic-depressive. Grundtvig was manic-depressive, too. Hölderlin was schizophrenic. Georg Trakl went mad in
the end. Celan suffered from severe bouts of depression. Nelly Sachs became
paranoid. There are so many examples, and it is without any doubt the mad poets
I rate highest. They are the ones I am fond of, they are the ones I fish out
when I need strengthening. They are not models, but rather they are friends –
who unfortunately are all dead.
[…]
- What importance or role does a poet have today? For instance, there is so
much noise about nowadays. What can you do as a poet?
- The exact opposite. In a poem from Poetens
hoved (The Poet’s Head), Højholt says that anyone wanting to be creative
these days must be a needle going counter to the current. That is to say a
needle against the general drift, and
I have in fact – as a greeting to Højholt – thought of writing a book called
”The Gramophone That Went the Wrong Way”. Here it is not even a needle, but the
gramophone itself that goes counter to the current. Probably nothing will come
of it, but I think that is the matter in a nutshell. Karen Blixen with her
stories, Hans Christian Andersen with his fairy tales and Kierkegaard with a
mixture of philosophy and poetry. Popular poetry will inevitably die. The kind
that simply blathers on and goes with the flow will die, and if you wander off
in the middle of the road, you’ll be run over.
Someone who never reads a book can generally speaking have the same experiences
as a university lecturer in literature. In that sense I don’t think that poetry
and literature can have much impact on anything at all, but you can derive a
feeling of not being alone.
Peter Laugesen, incidentally, has a poem that I have re-cast. This poem says: I
AM ALONE / YOU ARE ALONE / WE ARE NOT ALONE”, and I would rather put it like
this: “I am alone. You are alone. We are alone.” The reason for this is that
when you have said “We are alone”, you are also together: We are only us. In a
way this is a company in every conceivable figurative sense. Although you never
sit directly facing your readers, and although a book is six months on the way,
there is nevertheless contact. The exciting thing about this is that even if
you yourself and your readers disappear, there might be others who set about
your books. In principle, this can go on for ever. When someone closes the door
and sits down with a book, that is company: “We are alone”. I like that idea,
for you mustn’t think that you are more social with 20 people than with a
single person. I take language very concretely and say that you can’t in fact
be alone together in a poem.
From Ildfisken 21, 1999 .
For further information about Rolf Sindø see: www.sindoe.dk
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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