Poetry Driven by Anger
By : Michael Bo
Last yearīs newcomer moves from poem to prose - from doggedness to a new openness
Kirsten Hammannīs debut publication Mellem tænderne (Between the Teeth), a collection of poems which appeared in the spring of 1992, anticipated future work in the form which, this season, she has indeed tackled for the first time - that is the novel. The leap from prose poetry to lyric prose has taken her just one year. But the labels deceive: the development from Mellem tænderne to the novel Vera Winkelvir (Vera Vinkelvir) does not so much signify a new epic scope in her style, but rather a publisher"s perplexity as to which formal heading - poetry, novel ect. - the hybrid form can be sold under.
When she threw herself brazenly into the arena with her deeply personal and caustic Mellem tænderne, the reviewers were somewhat taken aback: most diverting, when an experienced fellow-poet described Kirsten Hammannīs language as "almost mature"; then startling, when elsewhere she learns that she is so exceedingly gifted taht she will undoubtedly be hauled over the coals", and most prophetic, when a reviewer drew attention to a disposition to prose which found expression in the distance she sets between consciousness and body.
Found platform away from hometown
Teh chosen platform that the 26-year-old Kirsten Hammann hoister herself onto in preparation for taking the plunge, is a comparatively new institution in the Danish literary world: The Writerīs School under the directorship of leading critic, poet, and controversialist, Poul Borum. In 1989 Hammann left her hometown of Århus and moved to Copenhagen with one aim: to attend the Writerīs School and meet people who, like herself, lived to write.
"At that time Iīd been writing poems for some years, since Iīd been writing poems for some years, since I was twenty actually, so it was not to learn the craft that I applied to the school Kirsten Hammann tells Danish Literary Magazine. I had a clear cut dream of a career as a writer, but I cultivated that quite independently of my daily round at the Writersī School."
Kirsten Hammann gets angry when she is confronted with the common criticism of the Writers Scholl as a factory producing poets on an assembly line, following a standardised recipe: "What Iīm saying with my things today, I was already saying when I was quite young, sitting alone and writing for myself. The best of what I wrote before I came to Copenhagen can be found in Mellem tænderne. The problems that there were in my texts - well, Iīd have found a way to solve them by myself, but I wanted the process to og faster. In Århus, when I read through my poems I could pull up short and think: "Hey, this is great", but I needed that direct criticism which I later got from my fellow students at the school. The Writerīs Schoolīs prime attraction for me was the opportunity of collaboration, where I could og home and, based on qualified criticism, work on the same themes from new angles. Mind you it was always the same things I carried on working with."
Vulnerable and bold
Kirsten Hammann is quite bold in her artistic expression as well as in the demands she makes on herself. Her declared ambition is to be "dead good - among the best!" but face to face she comes across vulnable and lyrical. The poetic fuel is nevertheless palpable energy and intensity.
"My motivation force is a huge anger in the face of a world I donīt understand much about. I just canīt sit back contentedly. Now and the I resign myself to it, like so many others do, but most of the anger is used in the things I write."
The anger can be clearly read as a hissing between the teeth, where a privately affected self-loathing fertilizes each stanza. The opening poem, "Vi er alene" (We Are Alone), begins:
In the salvia we swallow, lies half-decomposed food
We fall asleep with remains in our mouths
With unswallowed cocoa
With muck on our clothes
and replete, music, the irascible heat from the readiator
The body as the narratorīs worst enemy - a deadweight that seperates the spirit from its true resolve - crops up in almost every one of the 44 poems of the collection; the self distaste is robust, the anger tangible. The body has to be bossed around and spoken to roughly so as to prevent it from running amok in filth and indecency, and even then it will have the last word - "Iīm so tired of my body".
Vera Vinkelvir - from poem to novel
It was the preoccupation of Kirsten Hammannīs, the disparity between the mortal frame and the spirit, that led the reviewer on the newspaper Information to scent a great prose talent, but seemingly there are other reasons behind Hammannīs debut this spring as a novelst:
"When I carried on writing after Mellem tænderne, I could see that my poems had a tendency to get longer and longer and eventually I thought that it didnīt really matter if they ended at all. Vera Winkelvir began as a poem, but finished up in a sort of novel form. I donīt tell a story in the sense that the book has a plot that starts at the beginning and carries through to the end. It is rather a series of little stories about a woman who first appeared in one of my poems from 1988 which was published in the poetry magazine Hvedekorn.
"Vera Winkelvir will be recognized by everyone who has read my poems," says Kirsten Hammann. "The reader will become quite breathless from the upbeat tempo. Vera is a person who someone has invented. They perform tests on her every day, but the rest of the time she has to herself - the rest she has to invent herself. She lives in a huge rage, splinters her surroundings, goes to the hairdresser all the time and neither understands nor likes the world in which she finds herself. She personifies everything around her: cigarettes, for example, are the Westīs Grand Killer, almost a kind of person she relates to, and the months appear as active agents in her universe."
The six months that Kirsten Hammann spend writing Vera Winkelvir were her most satifing ever:
"It was glorious! Everything just flowed. Somehow I didnīt have to make so many decisions as when Iīd written poems. I didnīt have to sit and fiddle with the words, laboriously replace one with with another and grind, grind, grind! I wrote every day, but there was no master plan for the project - I had no idea where I was going from one day to the next. It was excruciating when the book was finished. There was a long period of panic and impatience, but Iīve taught myself that if I can possibly keep quiet, then I ought to. In Vera Winkelvir I say what I had set out to say and then of course one can do other things and I can be involved with just as much thatīs important without having to publish something new all the time. In any case I think that I ought to move into some new areas next time you hear from me."
My own-I and my poet-I
Kirsten Hammann has been kept busy with public readings for the last year, since she published and received much praise for Mellem tænderne. She was invited to the big Nordic poetry seminar, Nord poesi, which took place last autumn in the Swedish university town of Lund and in readings she has found a communication form that she values very greatly, quite apart from the fundamental importance of getting out.
"Every though the poems in Mellem tænderne can be read as very private, I donīt get embarrassed when I read them in public. Similarly, when Iīm writing, my poet-I is not my own-I. Everything that I have done falls somewhere between poetry and reality. I donīt think: "Here am I, Kirsten Hammann, telling you about myself. So long as what Iīm saying is set within a form then it is outside of my. And then Iīm free to choose according to principles of a certain entertainment value. Iīm never afraid of being recognized in what I write or give readings of - if anything I sometimes get anxious that Iīve given so much away that there won"t be anything at all left for me..."
Kirsten Hammann denies that her poetry - however personal and private it might be - has a therapeutic effect.
"if that were the case, then poets ought to be of an extreemely well-balanced disposition, but in reality writing causes just as many problems as it can be lucky enough to solve. I can be hit by my moral scruples when I re-read Mellem tænderne and Vera Winkelvir - because, I am actually mocking life, arenīt I? That gift I received at birth? I cast a slur on everything instead of building up to something beautiful. But how on earth can I write a nice story when the world looks pretty graceless seen through my eyes?"
The themes from Kirsten Hammannīs very first, unpublished, poems, to Mellem tænderne and on to Vera Winkelvir merges into one another, she is still absorbed by the same things. She would like to "beak out of the Vera-tone that I just canīt get finished with" next time she writes, but she has reached a stage where she dares to keep quiet" for a while and communicate her messages by way of the numerous readings she is asked to give.
As she expresses it: I am no longer so afraid of the void."
The article was first printed in Danish Literary Magazine 4, 1993
Translated by Gaye Kynoch
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