You find yourself longing

By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

One of the most distinctive voices in present day Danish poetry is that of Pia Juul (b. 1962). In the demotic tone of her poems, always bordering on song, but also showing unwavering trust in everyday speech, snatches of fairy tales, myths, old songs, legends and children´s rhymes are blended with strong personal statements, in particular on the mysteries of love. Her preferred mode is expressive, passionate, but there is also room for reflection and irony, for intimation and open questions.
The tone is intimate, warm, but at the same time fierce and harsh. The style is plain, full of surprises and hints of forgotten and hidden layers in the reader. She is able to remind us of experiences that hurt, and arouse the kind of feelings which make us merely hope for many more weeks and years for everything we have not yet seen: tomorrow, just one more chance…
    Characteristic of the poems in I said, I say, indeed, for the entire lyrical authorship, is a girlish freshness of tone, sprung, one might think, from a wish in the poet to speak as simply and clearly as at all possible, but also born of an untamed determination to include practically everything, unretouched and unreduced. In this new book we soon feel that an adult person is speaking, one for whom a great deal has been hard, but some things, fortunately, easier. One with the courage to look straight at sorrow and express things as they are. From this, if you like, mature position the poet writes out the poems from the blank beginning (white jacket, no titles, no list of contents) by arriving at the language with wonderment and placing a question mark after the customary name of every given thing, and then later taking charge of the language and using it right out to the corners.
    In her poems Pia Juul appears as outspoken, audacious, unadorned, if you can so describe a poet who there is every reason to believe hones and polishes until the poems sound elegant. For instance, note the movement in the following –literally speaking – piss-excellent poem:

It´s a waste
of good urine
to flush it down
the drain
Think of everything
it could be tested for
sugar and acid
peculiar diseases
pregnancy
And what about those
I could have peed on
a stream so
corrosively sour
it stained
and marked the silk
and the reputation
and the honour
they thought was theirs
for keeps
That´s a waste of urine

This is how Pia Juul writes in the middle of the book, where she permits herself to sneer right out at the edge of language. Prior to this are texts about getting a name and taking possession of language. Further on poems about reading other´s writing await the reader, including the letters of a deceased colleague, until the collection fades out by cautiously stammering its way to some of what could not be expressed to start with.
    Thus we share in the growth of a paradoxical courage to face life linked with a surplus of language carried by an assured although often trembling poet´s voice. The title of the book, I said, I say, may be understood as a stammering stutter and thereby points to alienation from language; but it can also be read as an assertion of the voice, of the here and now of the poem. ´I say that I said... now I don´t say it any more, now I say – something different!´ This personal theme is transformed and becomes universal by the amplitude of Pia Juul. We can immediately enter into her I´s, you´s and we´s. Rather than defending her text she says, between the lines: ´Will you – or shall I?´ And thus helps the person who reads to stand up and walk.
    It is easy, when taking possession of her poems, to long for summer, but also for the fairy tales and verses of childhood, which we enjoyed without wondering how much of it all we had understood.

You find yourself longing
for the time when boys were
boys; when real girls were
also boys
and Puck no longer a woodland troll
Where the fox was called fox
and the dog was dog
and the town a town
and a great deal of us
not yet born at all

Naturally a poem like this depicts a hopeless verbal utopia. The fox is no longer only a fox, but for each one of us has absorbed images and ideas, and that the dog will be dog once more is either a tautology or even nostalgia. Nevertheless it must be said to be a noble quality in lyric poetry if it gives us back a feisty desire (and perhaps the courage) to call everything by its right name.

This article first appeared ind Danish Literary Magazine 16, 1999

Translated by Anne Born