The Skewed Angle

By : Thomas Bredsdorff

Tom Kristensen was killed by rhyme. Undeservedly so. He could rhyme like an angel, with smacks and smiles. It was the times that were against him and against rhymes. The mere fact that poets did not use rhyme was a sign that they were modern, even Modernist. Rhyme was a kind of cheap trick that was left to writers of verse written for particular occasions.
   And Tom Kristensen, who continued to use rhyme long after the changed signals of Modernism, actually became more and more of a poet for special occasions. It started with the brilliant and amoral Fribytterdrømme (Dreams of a Freebooter: Poems, 1920) right after the First World War, as beautiful as bullet-riddled railway stations. It ended with the obligatory homage to Professor Vilhelm Andersen, along with an account of "Thoughts at the funeral of J. L. Lybecker."
   The collected poems of Tom Kristensen demonstrate how distorted this picture is. He wasn’t first wild, then well-behaved. He was a glorious blend of both, from first to last. He could write with dazzling caprice even at an advanced age, as in a little poem about a wheelbarrow: "Shall we bother, God no, we won’t." And the wretched poem for the old man’s funeral was actually written in Kristensen’s early youth, in 1923.
   The particular occasion, however, is never what determines the quality. Some of Kristensen’s poems that are most worthy of preserving were inspired by a sudden death. "It is Knud who is dead," written for Knud Rasmussen. And the poem for Kristensen’s opposite, Gustaf Munch-Petersen, who gave his life for his beliefs in the Spanish Civil War and had his action immortalized with the help of the best verses of the older Tom Kristensen. Here the others, and especially Kristensen himself, would wander onward through "a mire of art" and "a dust heap of words," "while you rest, shot down, shot down. / your life’s most reckless poem."
   "The Flowering Brawl" is a display of what life can look like when it becomes nothing but images, intensely colorful and sharply contoured, freed from amoral ulterior motives. But it is a tour de force that is atypical.
   Because Tom Kristensen is not a poet of imagery, but of point of view. His best poetry does not arise when he catches sight of surprising similarities of connections. It emerges in the same way as good prose: when he has found the proper point of view from which to speak. Kristensen is not a metaphor-poet, he is a verse-narrator. A prose writer who possessed the grace of rhyme.
   You might call it role-poetry except that the role was most often the same. A frightened man threatened by everything, from an executioner in China to centaurs to endless women in Berlin. "The Execution" is the classic example of how Kristensen’s artistic means of expression reaches its zenith when he has found the surprising angle from which to report his impressions: here the condemned man himself, who, just before his turn comes, sees with razor-sharpness the beetle meandering toward the executioner’s foot. In "Night in Berlin 1921," the angle is equally unerring, with a shrewd use of sounds to create the scene.
   It can also be hilarious, as in the splendid poem about the house on the corner of Nyhavn, which still stands there today. The Cunard-corner, as Kristensen calls it, because the crooked, timbered house reminds him of a steamboat. Here prostitutes and sailors stroll past the role-player, who finally discovers his own image mirrored in the windowpane: a little boy wearing a sailor’s collar.

Extract from Politiken 30. March 1997

Translated by Tiina Nunally