Conversation with Inger Christensen

By : Peter Øvig Knudsen

- How does a poem get started?
By chance. I´d just finished writing a book called Azorno and one evening I was wrapping it up to send it to Gyldendal, when suddenly a voice in my ear said: æIt. That´s it. Sven Holm had said to me that you should begin a new book at once, without a period to think it over, and the very second I´d said It. That´s it´ I knew immediately that the next book was on its way. It. That´s it. Anyone could come along and say that ... But that was actually the beginning of det (It).
     Many people have asked why alfabet (alphabet) opens with apricot trees, there being so many other words beginning with ´a´. If I was to offer semi-rational explanations, they would argue that it´s about rhythm and sounds - a-p-apri-cot. But a beginning like that can also stem from an underlying fascination; a long time after alfabet I realised that, five-six years before I wrote the book, I´d tried to write some poems in which the first letters of each line made a word going down the page - and one of the poems began with ´apricot trees are flowering in Arzberg today´.
     The first line must captivate. I have to feel captured by the need to examine what it´s actually all about, this little fragment I´ve caught hold of - and which is not easy to come by. I have to be able to imagine that it´s possible to unravel the poem that´s contained in that first line. De stiger op, planetens sommerfugle. If you say planetens sommerfugle stiger op, it´s just not nearly as interesting - to me. Some short stories and novels begin in such a way that you immediately feel that a whole world is going to be revealed. While others start off deadly dull. And then often nothing at all comes of it either.

- You mean that the whole poem can be found enfolded in the first line?
Yes. Or it can be found enfolded in a single word. In a single word or a line the sound of a larger space can be heard. As in It. That´s it´. If instead you said ´That was it. It´, the line is almost imperceptible, a little grain that can be blown away. But with It. That is it´ you´ve entered a current of time that just goes on and on. If you want. And choose to.´

She has been sitting with a fresh cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other for a while now. She lights up and pours more wine.

- So your inspiration is drawn more from language itself than from the world and nature?
No, I don´t think that´s right at all. There wouldn´t be any inspiration in saying apricot trees exist if I hadn´t seen them. Inspiration is to consider a word and in so doing to consider the world. You only nurture language so that the world appears in a way that you yourself find more comprehensible than the random presentation of trees and leaves and people and I don´t know what.
     To philosophise about words is a way in which to philosophise about the world. En route you can tantalize by playing with the words, but for me it is primarily philosophising about how my world picture is going to look, not just on the day I wake up to find that my lover has vanished, but all the other days too. As language is firmly bound up with the phenomena we observe in the world, it is possible, in language, to reconstitute a shadow or replica, to which one can, to some extent, reconcile oneself as an image of the world. It is not just a language-play, but it is also to play, because music is lovely, and music in language is something joyous, something of which you do not have to fight shy.

Extract from Peter Øvig Knudsen: Børn skal ikke lege under fuldmånen (Children musn´t play under the light of the fullmoon)
Peter Øvig Knudsen in conversation with Suzanne Brøgger, Inger Christensen, Peter Laugesen, Henrik Nordbrandt, Villy Sørensen, and Søren Ulrik Thomsen.
Aschehoug 1995

Translated by Gaye Kynoch