Oh, To Be a Matchbox

On Four

By : Marianne Stidsen

Whereas the first collections were closely related to the collage and montage techniques of painting, the fourth collection, which is simply called Fire (Four, 1990) is closer to the total art and emblem books of the baroque. Here, Grotrian refers to painting not only on a significance level: not to put too fine a point on it, he attempts to “write a painting” in exactly the same way as baroque artists wanted to “paint an ode”. It is the so-called allegorical technique, such as was developed in the baroque emblem books, that is behind the structure of the individual poems. Typically, the poems consist of a series of images which so to speak constitute a puzzle, to which the title then provides the solution. They might be the ancient Caryatids that have been wrested from their fixed places in the Erechtheum Temple on the Acropolis and put down on a lay-by on the European motorway E10. The title “400 meter forude” 400 metres ahead) helps the reader to understand that this is a question of one of the very visions one can have when looking through a car window, lulled in a kind of dream state by the speed, a condition in which time and place can momentarily be suspended. Another, more radical example is the poem “Svaner set gennem tårer” (Swans seen through tears):

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In Næste himmel (Next Heaven) there are also approaches to poems based on letters – thus there is a reference in one of them to “the J of the nose”. But here in Fire, they are found in their purest form. As can be seen, the poem in all its concrete simplicity consists of six zeroes and two figure twos, piled up above each other in the four line system that is the general compositional principle of the book – see Simon Grotrian’s demand that the poem should be “started like a mathematical problem” to be solved. This quite arbitrary and wayward principle (determined by the title, which again refers exclusively to the chronological position of the book in the oeuvre) means that some new images and meanings can emerge. Images and meanings that are not implanted in the poem by a central-lyrical subject, but on the other hand arise from the letters – and numbers – themselves, precisely in their concrete quality, as printer’s ink.

So what we see in Fire is writing reduced to its smallest components – exactly as in the baroque poems, and this “atomisation” of the writing results in its now being allowed to emerge with all the secondary senses that are inclined to fall off as slag in the modern communication context’s determined search for the intended meaning.

However, this total fragmentation or deconstruction of the language – taken to its logical conclusion in the first poem in the book, which consists of an accumulation of letters of the alphabet as they appear if you type at random on the keyboard - has paradoxically the consequence that the torpid things of the world in fact for this very reason find their expression, so to speak “via the back door”. For when form is uncoupled from matter and “hovers on the iron figure of the frame” without any organic link with it, the things and the signs can also be experienced in their concreteness, as graphic shapes and figures. And thereby – as the French literature ontologist Maurice Blanchot has put it – the “obscurity of existence”, the “torpidity of being”, which in the first instance made Simon Grotrian choose the work of the hand rather than of the voice, finds expression.

Extract from Marianne Stidsen’s article in Danske digtere i det 20. Århundrede , Vol. 3, Gads Forlag, 2000.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones