Angel of Light, a Tafdrup Composition.

By : Marianne Barlyng

Pia Tafdrup belongs to the generation of poets who, in 1980s´ Denmark, created a modernist counter-language in response to the essentially ideologically-based literature of the 1970s. The earlier lite which in many cases consciously gave a lower priority to the aesthetic in favour of the cause. Tafdrup´s generation represents a new poetry which is aware of the physical, the subject and the language, whilst abandoning the gilded perspective, as one of the distinguished interpreters of the ´80s generation, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, has expressed it. It became more important to be than to know what it is all about.
    Tafdrup´s poetry turns on such philosophical and existential core problematics as time, repetition, tranquillity, memory and the relationship between art and life. The endeavour to capture the multiplicity of meaning at the irreversable moment is central to her work.
    Through her poetry, Pia Tafdrup insists that philosophical doubt must be kept alive. It is essential to sharpen an awareness of the primary conditions of art and life and pose the fundamental philosophical questions again and again without harbouring any illusion of finding the answer in conclusive form or of becoming familiar with the conundrum, that enigmatic other, as this would simply deprive life of its magic. The light of understanding must clarify the obvious as well as the cryptic.
    But Tafdrup prefers an evocative textbook - poetry, in other words, as only poets can make it - to the traditional deductive discourse which generally characterizes philosophical and theoretical thought. The idea must, in Tafdrup´ opinion, occupy the poet as composition and vice versa. Poems must give form to the abstract. In order for the idea and the abstraction to develop, a concrete visualization has to be possible.

    In her poetics Over vandet går jeg (Walking on Water), Tafdrup speaks of writing poetry as being driven by an inner imperative. This calls to mind Vassily Kandinsky who, at the beginning of the century, radically formulated the principle of inner imperative in relation to the art of painting and with resonance in music. But Tafdrup has varied this imperative, its prerequisites and consequences, by talking about, on the one hand, inner imperative, and on the other hand, an external compulsion. Tafdrup´s poetics is a poetics of experience rather than an aesthetics of precepts as we know it from the poetics of Antiquity and classical scholarship, as she deals with forms of subjective perception and experience. It is not a question of a doctrine concerning the art of poetry, but rather reflections on a concrete poetic practice. With Tafdrup there is a double endeavour: to commit the self to paper and find a way in to the inmost zone, a Rilke-esque Weltinnenraum of tranquillity, from which the voice can speak afresh, and in an opposite gesture to direct the sense perceptions outwards towards things, towards the outer world, to be in the open. In this condition, which Tafdrup calls by a Feilbergian category ´captured´, both angels and demons dance. The body and sense perceptions are central, but, once given over to the world of the senses and realities, one must also accept that the ´shine is taken off´ the angel in various ways. Death, loss in love, disintegration of identity, the anguish of angst and the perception of constantly being somehow detached from that which is outside oneself, are some of the open wounds which Tafdrup´s poems consider, but which at the same time in a kind of creationem per destructionem become creative potentialities. For we find melancholy embedded in euphoria, as the contrast to and prerequisite of ecstasy.
    This tightly-composed lyric universe is characterized by a considerable degree of continuity. There is an immanent logical growth from collection to collection. In all of Tafdrup´s books one can find material which refers to earlier collections, but also material which sets the scene and points the way forward to the next collection, as a kind of echo chamber for both the preceding and the forthcoming.
    Increasingly, nature - alongside the erotic as an all-pervading factor - becomes a sort of model for the ideal human genesis. This does not lead to a romantic natural state in which the person is prepared to put up with anything. For Tafdrup, we are for ever separated from nature by virtue of the gulf made by language, and the poems acknowledge this gulf over and over again by attempting to isolate a place of tranquillity, of origin, the silence before speech, by way of a respectful, attentive listening. But the city also has creative potential, as in Territorialsang (Territorial Song 1994) in which an encounter with Jerusalem proves to be a journey out into the world in order to find the way home to oneself.
    A major theme in Pia Tafdrup´s work is thus the marvel of growth and transformation (in nature and the urban environment, in the encounter between male and female, in life and in writing) despite the experience of the final conclusion and the definitive departure when standing before the darkness of the grave.
    Tafdrup takes up residence in the roots of language and exists and generates in the here and now. The development of identity is a dynamic process with grand consequences, and the vortex or spiral is the symbol for this mode or design of creation. It is a question of moulding and re-moulding. Art and life provide inconstant and wonderful material with which to work. When the poem finds its form, the I-figure steps out of its mould: as large as life. This apparent, but only apparent, paradox is characteristic of Tafdrup´s work, in which a melting-pot of language and life merge into a warm, vivid and sensuous substance. In this way the poet steps into the sculpture, as it says in the poetics, with an implicit reference to the Kierkegaardian dictum about stepping into character.
    Tafdrup appreciates the general incompatibility of contemporary contrasts. She understands doubt and irrationality, darkness and melancholy, at the same time as she, with light as a metaphor for lucid poetic sensation and insight, comes to grips with the prevailing experience of the modern secularized world as indecipherable and intransparent.
    The poem comprehends life in all its facets. Without fabricating the existence of harmonic structures, there is nonetheless an insistence on the possibility of instantaneous experiences of equanimity and similitude, a form of symmetry, yes a momentary weightlessness. In that very instant, different levels slide into place and are transformed into language.
    Tafdrup´s method involves the cleansing of words from accumulated meanings in order to be reconstructed in a Tafdrupian architecture in which they assume new meaning. When the soul bears the impress of the world, when the writing becomes urgent, then the shine is taken off the angel. Wounds appear, which can undoubtedly be healed, but the scar formation retains - as a kind of mark of remembrance - things that can never or should never be forgotten.
    The individual emerges in the difference. The poetic language transports, in a kind of rescue action, words, places, incidents and phenomena away from uniform nothingness over to significance and abundance.
    Tafdrup herself talks about reaching, through the transformations process, beyond the subjective - to the angel. Following the pre-articulation phase of non-capture, psychic and existential conditions in which personality and integrity are broken down, non-awareness allies itself with total presence. It is an almost Kantian experience of the sublime, the prerequisite of which is a register of pain, grief, loss and disappearance, which enables Tafdrup to achieve the transformation of darkness to light, to discover where the light lies buried.
    The de-personalization should by no means be confused with de-individualization; on the contrary, it is the prerequisite for the formulation of identity. With a notion not of identity, but of integrity in the relationship between language, the self, the world and imagination, Tafdrup steers clear of the modernism of despondency. The words are invested with life, time and again, by a constant interaction between the inner and outer, between vision and concretion.
    Light breeds in stillness, in pain, in the confrontation with life and death. In TafdrupÆs best poems, ease and exuberance go hand in hand.
    In that sense the poetry is a happy meeting place between the poet and the world. An oasis between the past, the present and the future, where the contrapuntal reality and the enigmatic are isolated in now simple, now complex images which whisper among themselves about the enigma, without, however, restlessly proclaiming it - the secret of existence neither can nor will be uncovered. What would be left to desire, if everything was known?

Marianne Barlyng is MA. Excerpts from "Lysets Engel, en Tafdrup komposition" in Perspektiver i nyere dansk litteratur (Perspectives in Resently Written Danish Literature), Forlaget Spring 1997.

Translated by Gaye Kynoch