In Other Words

Concerning Henrik Nordbrandts Poetic Language

By : Thomas Bredsdorff

How do you go about being so present?" the westerner asked his Zen teacher, who as a good Buddhist knew something about the consummation that is in true absence. When I sleep," the master replied, I am sleeping, and when I eat I am eating."
   The opposite, being absent minded, is namely not to think of nothing but of two things simultaneously. To be absent is in our culture not to be nonexistent, but to be nonpresent where one is."
   This state is fundamental in Henrik Nordbrandt´s poetry. Like all poetry his also depicts experiences. But often it is a question of experiences of experiences, of experiences of the nonappearance of experience, of the expectation of experience or its recollection. The depicted often appears as traces of what is to be depicted. There is more going and coming than being in his poetry.
   It is a style of writing which is reinforced by the distinct awareness in the poems that they are poems and thus something other than the world they represent, that there is a difference between the words and what the words are dealing with. It is further reinforced by the poet´s basic addiction to paradox. The most paradoxical paradox in Nordbrandt´s semantic universe is the representation of presence as absence and absence as presence.
   Nordbrandt doesn´t excel in neologism like the generation immediately preceding him. But he has coined one word which captures both his paradoxy and the not very Zen-Buddhist version of presence which characterizes his universe. The word appears in a poem which is structured as a series of interwoven chains. One chain is comprised of the expression sad about it," which is repeated five times, a second by the formula something else," or something else again," which occurs twice.
   There is apparent symmetry. There is obviously also question of a character poem in the masculine I, for the poems persona assumes a more dotty-naive attitude in posing questions than any poet in own name would. The skeleton of the poem is: how can you be sad about it (or about something else, or something else again), when I am thinking of you (or of something else, or something else again)? What the ingeniously intertwined garlands say is roughly yes, but of course I love you, beloved, and incidentally what was it you asked me?
     Here comes the poem (1969,62) in its entirety, with the newly coined word concluding the title:
 
DOLEFUL POEM ON THE OCCASION OF HER GONEPRESENCE
 
how can it be that you are sad about it
you who are otherwise never
in the habit of being sad

about it, or about something else
or something else again
or some third thing, how can it be you
 
are sad about it when I´m thinking of you
and how can it be
that I´m thinking

of you, or of something else
or something else entirely
or a third thing, when you are sad about it
 
when I´m thinking of it.
and how can you be sad
when I´m thinking of it.
 
For the gonepresence poems it applies that the ratio between presence in the text and presence in what is assumed to be the reality the poem depicts is inversely proportional. The more absent the beloved is the more present is she. The beloved woman the poems presumably deal with and the muse who gets the poem together appear as each other´s antagonists.
 
Thomas Bredsdorff: Med andre ord (In Other Words) Gyldendal 1995

Translated by Kenneth Tindall