The World Sung from a Knoll in Brabrand

- on Laugesen's When Angles Burp Jazz

By : Anne Borup

In 1999 Peter Laugesen was nominated for the European Aristeion-prize for his collection of poems Når engle bøvser jazz (When Angles Burp Jazz). The following article is from the nomination report.

The union of the local and the global in a multicultural linguistic universe encompassing the whole world is typical of Peter Laugesen’s poetry. "Verden sunget fra en knold i Brabrand" ("The world sung from a knoll in Brabrand") runs one line in and about one of the poems in Når engle bøvser jazz. The description applies to the poem, the volume of poems and Laugesen’s poetry as a whole.

Brabrand is a small town situated on hilly terrain on the outskirts of the city of Århus on the east coast of Jutland. The poet (b. 1942) lives here and each year publishes at least one volume of poems. Når engle bøvser jazz is number 42 and with its 284 pages the biggest so far. But - and this is the point - even from an outlying knoll in the provinces of tiny Denmark, the whole world is at the poet’s disposal. For instance, the poem we are referring to derives its title from the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski. It starts in a Danish December landscape producing a mood of "Baltic melancholy", and it contains quotations in French, Italian, English and Finnish. Laugesen’s first volumes of poems were entitled Landskab (Landscape) and Skrift (Writing). Nature impressions and writing as action are two omnipresent themes in the poems. The impulse for the individual poem is often, as here, a concrete experience of nature which directly leads into reflections on language, nature and art. In the long poems the form is usually governed by the spontaneous rhythms of the material, i.e. the rhythm of the language spoken. The rhythmical motor in this poem is found in the repeated variations on the theme and the mantra "to be". Repetition and enumeration give rise to the rocking rhythm that impels the language forward to quite minor shifts in meaning, see for instance the notion of nature as "an eternal changeable pattern". Other, almost untranslatable, rhythms are a result of alliterations, lists and plays on words such as "The fold lets out the fold lets in the fold folds fools". Like other poems by Laugesen, the union in language of thought and body, i.e. the existence at the same time of reflection and linguistic sensitivity, leads to expressive formulations or paradoxical turns of phrase such as the end of this poem: "To be mantra of the umbilical cords and mumblechoir on splatterscenes. / The sky is grey. Vertical as a wall".

SAARIKOSKI

Wet and dazzling Christmasday with brown black and yellow
and pale green fields.
The sun sets with its baltic melancholy and without any
other story to be told.
To be a field in December to be a lake lapping black
over worn steps of stone and rocking an eternal changeable pattern
of small pieces of reed in a border along the bank.
To be moors and mountains and steppes and woods and rain and wind
and birds and dogs and dreams and hopes and years all gone.
To be a book writing in private like a door to the place
where it writes.
To be those tricks you know those reasons you have and the opposite forces.
To be as old as it as me as the writing as the language
as the art as the poem and that is god damned old.
And to converse you’ve never learned you talk with your self
you chase angles through the Christmasroom and they all look like Francis Ponge.
You can go with your bugle in the night and toot alone. You can be
vampire with an oakstake through the heart. You can bobble blood
over another landscape, just a draft.
To be New York, Paris and Chateaubriand: "Sur les monts
de la Caledonie, le dernier barde qu’on ait ouï dans ces
deserts me chanta les poemes dont un heros consolait jadis
sa vieillesse. L’ancienne et riante Italie m’offrit la foule
de ces chef-d’oeuvres."
Le cose di casa. Fiamma amica. The very last of the Mohicans
drinking firewater in downtown Montreal at six in the morning
where the houses stand on toes with jetlag and tones of bones.
The world sung from a knoll in Brabrand, flatbush Tombstone.
Not know not see who.
The fold lets out the fold lets in the fold folds fools.
Whiskey wrote sun over Lowell and time through Gloucester to all
the restless twitching all the dead and living.
Stuttering beast twitching man. New teeth.
To be moors and mountains and steppes and trunks and rain and pieces
of reed in a dream and hopes over worn steps of stone and dogs and birds and field in December.
To be mantra of the umbilical cords and mumblechoir on splatterscenes.
Taivas on harmaa. Pystysuora kuin seinä.

(The sky is grey. Vertical as a wall)

(pp. 281-282, translated by Anne Borup)

The well-known roles of the poet as outsider, clown, fool, scald and bard are taken up again in the last poem in the collection. Here, with a hidden quotation from the Beatles, the poet considers calling his next book "The fool on the hill". The melancholy element in Laugesen’s poetry thus never turns into monotonous sadness, but is given depth and resonance through a widespread use of humour and self-irony.

Peter Laugesen belongs to a generation of Danish poets and artists who made their first appearance in the mid-60s. They do not constitute a school, an -ism or any specific stylistic approach. Common to the generation is primarily an interest in the new elements in international art and literature, especially the American aesthetics of the 50s and 60s: the tradition of happenings, pop art, action painting, improvisation jazz and beat poetry. Today, Laugesen is one of the most distinguished exponents of the Danish internationally oriented experiments deriving from the 60s. Another common feature in this generation is the confrontation with the modernist notion of the work’s autonomous status and the artist’s creative originality. Not that these artists want to copy or repeat tradition. On the contrary. They very consciously indeed maintain a relationship to artistic tradition as pattern and material, though based on the view that all art is built on loans from the past. Against a background of skill and craftsmanship and a reflected consciousness of tradition, both the old, well-establish forms and familiar but un-noticed things from everyday life are incorporated to form startlingly new settings and combinations. It is a different kind of originality based on recycling and dialogue. We find aesthetic communities stretching across geographical boundaries, chronological horizons and artistic genres. Several poems in Når engle bøvser jazz suggest such premises, roots and relationships, for instance a family tree such as this: "Son of existentialists/ little brother of beatniks/ big brother of hippies/ father of punks/ grandfather of rappers [...]". Another text tells of the budding poet’s literary interests at the beginning of the 60s: "What did I read? I read Suzuki, Debord, Artaud. Dylan/ Thomas was sound and Kerouac flow. Finnegans Wake the/ artificial primal forest. It was my first camp in the wilderness/ of the future".

Japanese haiku and zen philosophies, French situationism, surrealism and dada, American spontaneous writing, musical forms, Celtic polylinguistics, word innovation and language style. These were the starting point, and Laugesen has been faithful to it since. But new elements have been added on the way. This is clearly seen in Når engle bøvser jazz. The poet has been visiting Ireland, Italy and the USA. From Italy he has brought back a renewed interest in an old acquaintance, Pound’s Cantos, and dialogues between Pound, Dante and Shakespeare, one result of which is a sequence of poems written in blank verse. On the way he has called in Vienna. Here he discovers a literary relationship with the Austrian poets Friederike Mayröcker and Ernst Jandl and the German Arno Schmidt. Obviously, this must lead to polyphonic, multilingual nonsense and dialogue texts in which Joyce, i.e. Finnegans Wake, plays a dummy hand. The visit to the USA, taking him among other places to Lowell and Gloucester, Kerouac’s and Olson’s home towns, means a fresh encounter with beat poetry. The title of the volume is adapted from a quotation in a book on Kerouac. Several poems comment on the deaths of Ginsberg and Burroughs in the same year are commented.

It is possible, with Pound, to call the book "a ragbag". Or with the Hanover dadaist Kurt Schwitters to see it as a literary "Merz Bau". A labyrinthine network with no centre, in which new and used material, high and low, is whirled on the collage principle. Another formal pattern could be the Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Basho. His travel diaries from the last half of the 17th century consist of prose descriptions of nature and accounts of the poet’s various immediate minor activities. In the midst of these the haiku poems are strung like beads on a link. In Laugesen we find both the long texts - diary poems, loosely formulated prose improvisations and wildly raving nonsense poems - and various kinds of short poems. They go right down to the lowest limits for a poem’s potential in imagist snapshots of 1-2 lines; there are genuine 17-syllable haikus, eight in all, and short sensuous expressive or surreal image poems.

Peter Laugesen’s oeuvre consists of a constantly disconnected and unpredictable flow of texts in which no form is excluded beforehand. The key words are energy, dynamism and constant change. The energy is found in the linguistic rhythms arising in the field of tension between melancholy and humour, in the gliding transitions between triviality and elevation, or else it dances like a spark in the densely compressed short poem and in the caustically formulated paradoxes. This is a poetry that takes its point of departure in what is close to hand and what is simple, and from this it goes on to open up to what cannot be said: "He found the words/ on the way/ home to what/ was no more".

On the threshold of the millennium, Danish poetry is undergoing a very fruitful and productive period characterised by great diversity. Both experienced and well-established poets and beginners have produced important works in the 90s. And Peter Laugesen has published one major work after another: the trilogy Nattur (Nightwalk) (1989), Indian Joe’s Water Bowl (1990) and Kulttur (Cult-ture) (1990) as well as the collections entitled Milesten (Milestones) (1991), 29 digte (29 poems) (1991), Plettede Plusfours (Stained Plusfours) (1993), Deadlines (Deadlines) (1994), Kragetæer (Scribblings) (1995), Konstrueret situation (Constructed Situation) (1996) and Pjaltetider (Rag-Times) (1997).Among a younger generation of poets, critics and literary scholars there is great enthusiasm for Laugesen’s work, and he is often talked of as "the poets’ poet". Perhaps because his oeuvre has the quality of being a truly Danish and European - or Euro-American - work. As an artistic example of inspiration deriving from the multicultural environment, his work is illuminates both the local and the global, which in several ways corresponds to dominant tendencies in late modernism. In Laugesen’s own generation, the late symbolist Henrik Nordbrandt, the cybernetics poet Klaus Høeck and the somewhat older Inger Christensen have all attracted attention with translations into several European languages. Especially Inger Christensen has become a familiar name. Laugesen’s work must be seen as a major work in contemporary European poetry and will undoubtedly continue to be known by a later age. Meanwhile, it deserves to be discovered by contemporary readers outside Denmark.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones