Extract from A Dance on Words

By : Søren Ulrik Thomsen

One might at first believe that a poet who had worked sufficiently long at his trade would have achieved such perfect control of his craft that he would at any time be able to write a poem. For instance, he could dip into the fantastic ocean of words in the great Danish dictionary Ordbog over Det Danske Sprog, select a handful of them and, as far as form is concerned, construct a text around them. Or conversely, in complying with a request from a newspaper editor for a poem on a specific subject, he might take the subject matter as his point of departure. For a skilled craftsman, it is quite easy in this way to write a poet that is not bad, but for a poem to be not bad is not the same as its being good, for in art, craftsmanship is at one and the same time the most important and the least important of it all.
   Let me express myself by means of an analogy: When I set about a new book, I unpack the surgical instruments of which I have made use so far and discover that they have become rusty in the meantime, for they were created in my treatment of a specific material and are not suitable for dealing with any other, as form and matter only come into being and gain aesthetical qualification by qualifying each other. If you are not able formally to measure up to the new material that is now imposing its presence on you, you are left to make use of such instruments as are to hand. However, you are thereby limited to writing the same book as last time and consequently forfeiting the new one, whose matter both requires and produces new skills, new instruments, new techniques. As far as I am concerned, the image can be reversed and it might be said that a new artistic technique makes it possible to grasp new material; but that mere presence of an artistic talent does not mean that the artist is endowed with an a priori ability which can at will be directed towards any arbitrary material. For his skill at controlling is conversely controlled by the need for material, which for its part is dissipated the very moment it has found, fulfilled and devoured its form - hence the enormous sense of void which comes to the poet along with the reward of intense pleasure on completion of a piece of work well done. This must not be taken as saying that experience in the craft is in vain: if we stay with this analogy, we might say that the new instruments can only be created on the background of the knowledge gained in shaping the earlier ones - to which the new ones moreover owe their existence because, as they have become tarnished, the old instruments have produced a new nescience necessitating and making possible a new work. Here we stand at the paradox denoting a crossroads between craftsmanship as normally understood, and artistic craftsmanship, in which the craftsman"s skill disappears as it is gained, and vice versa.