Erotic Epistle

By : Asger Schnack

Concerning Pia Juul, a Princess of Language
Pia Juul is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel. These works constitute a series of moves that have placed her foremost in the field of interest within the realm of sensuality as it is encompassed by the Danish language. The reader experiences that rare event of being enlarged by the jumps and tilts of the text. The individual poem may be small, measured in number of words, yet something occurs which both ascends the summit of the moment and settles at its base.
    Pia Juul is a princess. She has written these three collections of poems, so she is a poet - as she was already with her first volume. Hardly more than a teenager at the time. The subject was: growing older, that is to say growing up. About being a child, living in one´s own world of adventure and longing, about the dance of shadows and the bewildering behavior of kin, an eeriness silhouetted across the inner sky of a child.
    The motif or subject matter is everything from the past "that moves on from there / into her adult life/ and forever." These include harsh experiences, the mind´s accumulations of precarious observations, gentle memories, webs spun from moments of being. Having been a child in a circle of people, animals, wind and weather. The landscape is out-of-doors, dark and light change places quickly. In Denmark we call it wind.
    She is wise, very wise. You can see it just by looking at her. She moves down small town streets and city boulevards with that graceful mixture of joy and indifference which is the symptom of youthful wisdom.

The point of view is the poem´s
Pia Juul can dream, she can dance into her dream. Indeed, her foremost characteristic is precisely her elegant line, the voice of the poem and the dense texture of the text - its ability so easily to connect the splendors and horrors of the outer world with an inner sphere glittering with the stars of her dreams. The purpose of each poem is clear. It connects levels of an almost private myth with a multiple "I", which may be you or me, but which most probably is a girl in the provinces a couple of dark decades ago during her childhood. The point of view is the poem´s. From within or without or most likely from both points simultaneously. It´s hidden in the syntax. The images are simple, perhaps, but the poem is like jazz, like rhythm, so complex and open that you surrender and throw yourself in like a coin: you give to it whatever you may have.
    If you want to see a woman´s thoughts transformed into emotions, or a woman´s dreams dramatically portrayed as reality, the reality of the senses, of the all-embracing totality of all impelling eroticism: the happy globe, then turn your attentive eyes to the poetry of Pia Juul. For what does erotic mean? In her universe it is a concept comprehending the whole condition of life.
    Her adulthood is so filled with childhood, the hard hours of her days so full of the marvellous, her childhood memories so full of adult insights, her story so full of the streets´ mobile lights that it calls forth neither giggles nor grimaces when she stakes her life against the real. On the contrary: it sparkles, it shines in all almost bluish tone of crystal and precious stones.
    In this way poetry articulates itself as a natural loss of what is named and touched by words. Yet and in this lies the very inexplicable essence of art - in the blue aspect of loss, in the sliding and cracking surface, it is here that for the recipient the empiness of fullness is revealed. Now only paradox remains, for we find ourselves on a sea of knowing and un-knowing, which none has navigated by words but only by glimpses of a smile.

The young lady of poetry
Pia Juul is not above writing a letter to the editor about day-care centers, even though she has probably done it only once. A good letter, if we may presume to evaluate the opinions of others. All this is the everyday of the commonplace, the opportunities open to everyone and life´s a little shocking after all. But Pia Juul is also a restlessly gathering and assembling artist, who is neither an instruct of biology nor a messenger of compassion. Not necessarily but willingly.
    She is the young lady of poetry in the land of Denmark.
    The rustic, the country winds and tempest are her left or right cheek, the turn of her car toward the madness she meets. What remains is stability. The language. But a remainder precisely. Notice that nothing is completed, nothing healed, nothing cast, until in another world. And it is this other world which is that of the skill, the lip, the clothes, the heartbeat. And then we are back were we started.
    Pia Juul is binding. Her statements do not topple over. And in the logic of the poem nothing is logical. The stakes are high. Life is like that. What unfolds turns out to contain so much green sadness, so many ants´ legs, so great a weather of winged creatures that anybody would swoon. It may look acrid when death enters the landscape like the way reason grasps the incomprehensible, yet sweet is the touch of the antenna from within the language when the reader, sailing perhaps on a ferry, is transported from triviality to breakthrough. That is to say, from shopping-bag and kitchen window to a turbulent, transforming transcendence of the deadlock.
    Pia Juul is something more than mere poetry expressed through the human or, more banal even, a human being expressed through poetry. She is present in her poetry like already wild reality. It is quite useless to approach with extreme caution, for in her case the brand she leaves is so apparent that others can but tremble warily. Pink is what´s private. Rose is the innocent moment of seduction and of life. But blustering blue is that generous commitment which bears the name of poetry.

Socialization and exploration
The first two collections of poetry were written in one and the same breath. Here the poet touches down precisely in the living childhood, the first infatuation, girlfriends, dreams. A psychic landscape where upon layer of the marvellous breaks in: from picture books, story-telling, reading aloud. But first and foremost from the very power of the imagination: fabulation among the shadows, in the farmyard, by the door, in the parlor.
    It´s all in the rhythm, in the sliding sentences, in the short breath of the poem. As in all good poetry it´s so very difficult to determine what it is that moves. Clearly, the poems emerge from the process of socialization, from woman´s growth into citizen, from partnership in love. Yet in the linguistic expression of each individual poem, in the putting of words on paper, a greater knowledge of something fragile is conveyed, a delicate event of memory that is like the weather.
    The world is erotic, every moment is sensed a part of sensation, continually in the grip of the senses. In the eyes of the opposite sex, the body approaching, situations arising front the sheet of day, that great white transparent screen that off to one side forms the backdrop for the brains spelling: formulation.
    And every word is a sign in a code: the ticking epistle to the world. The passage of time in humankind, caught as it is in flesh and blood, in the accidental geographical location of parents, witches and Cinderellas. Of the lover´s tenderness and intimate absence. Considered as art the poems are unique. They are subtle, spontaneous and sensitive. Each human life contains numerous small hiding-places, holes for stardust, and the first hint of anxiety. The expanse of early landscape, its slantering rain and sleet are imparted as something which in words becomes more than psychic reality.
    The third collection of poems is even more of an exploration of a given sequence, an uncovering of love´s innermost essence in selected episodes. Hate and animal hostility, are given rein to, each eats of the other out of lust and of necessity, contacts are magnetic, equivocal, and sustained by all inevitability which is very moving. These poems are truly dramatic, but also crystal clear and simple in their diction. Towards the end the poems almost begin to approach prose.
    These three collections have been followed by a novel, a prose exploration of the fate of certain individuals during an unspecified war on the threshold of apocalypse. There are dreamlike, steps and dialogues of ice-cold love. In the midst of a literal count-down of annihilation. A strange tale from a nation that exits. In fiction.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 3 1992

Translated by Birgit Stephensen