The Poet of the Year

Peter Laugesen received The Danish Academys Great Prize 1992.

By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

When, in November 1992, the Danish Academy holds its great annual celebration the grandest token of Danish literary distinction, known as the Academy Prize, will be awarded to the poet Peter Laugesen, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday.
   Meanwhile, Laugesen will scarcely be receiving the prize in recognition of specific individual works, although there will be no difficulty in pointing to various really excellent volumes of poetry among the more than thirty he has published. What the Academy is seeking to reward is a process rather than a result. The prize this time is being given not for a corpus of work distributed over various genres, styles or motifs, but simply for a vast oeuvre meticulously created: the actual artistic procedure that Laugesen has developed since the publication in 1967 of Landskab (Landscape) - in one of the many underground publishing houses of that time. Two years later he made appearance "above ground", but still with the same artistic authority, combined with an unassuming respect for the poetical craft itself. Since then his books have continued to appear in a gentle stream - poetry each time, and every time unmistankenly stamped with delight and an unruffled sureness of touch. Like few other Danish poets, Laugesen has managed to establish his own standard. His work will hardly ever be "popular" but thanks to its directness and its succinctness it will be able to fire anyone with a sense for concentrated poetic expression. Indeed, over the years his books have gained enormous respect among his colleagues, especially the younger ones, simply because a tangible and honest attitude to the very act of poetic creation is unfolded in every one of them.

Children and Love
Re-formulating a quotation from Jack Kerouac, Peter Laugesen has characterised his own work as "a long, endlessly long poem of one line. A line that never stops. For rhythm in poetry - and all true writing is poetry - is in the body that is writing, not in its ego alone, but in the body as such." So for Laugesen it is not a matter of creating art or producing texts that fulfil some demand nude on that particular genre. Instead he aims at keeping his text "within what is concrete or tangible, that is to say language and words, sounds and letters". In the first half of this process - from the end of the 1960s to about 1980 - this outlook resulted in two kinds of books. On the one hand there were the slender concentrated collections of poems created on the basis of a more or less delimited formal and thematic concept. On the other hand a number of large-scale, veritable cascades of words in which texts of widely different types poured out in one confusion, as though the medium, the book, simply constituted a chance delimitation of an essentially endless song.
   Later, in the 1980s Laugesen´s books became more modest, at least as far as their external measurements were concerned. On the other hand, they grew in height and depth, thanks to an earnestness that was all their own. And whereas his message could previously degenerate into a kind of desperate anarchosurrealism, he has throughout the 1980s first and foremost used his poetry as a concrete and thus totally unsentimental defence of the one thing he ultimately believes he can have confidence in: children and love, nature and the everyday.

When the language sings
Laugesen´s poetry is admittedly a long way from a traditional poetical ideal of harmony and perfection. The pure, beautiful, total poem has never been his cup of tea. The value of a work for him depends on whether what he writes takes hold, i.e. makes the language sing.
For Laugesen is aware of the fundamental circumstances, in the words of the Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup, is constantly on the verge of saying nothing. Far too much of what we say and write - and this applies to literature, too - consists properly speaking of the empty repetition of expressions that were fossilised long ago. If poetry is to conquer the death that is thus inherent in language, the poet must rely on his senses and be faithful to his own ear.
   On the basis of dds fundamental attitude Laugesen refuses to produce "poems" in the sense of charmingly rounded wholes. But his attitude usually makes his texts clear in design and pure in tone.

There are no great things
to write of. Why stand up, why
learn to walk and speak.
There is nothing to say
and nowhere to go.
There it always starts
with the living bodywriggling and babbling
like a miracle.
There are no great things
to write of. The little ones are big enough.

A theory of poetry
That poem - the last line of which can refer to the object of poetry as well as to the poet´s children - is in the volume entitled Barnetro (Child Faith), published in 1985. Two complementary cycles of poems from recent years deserve special attention in Laugesens´s production: Nattur og Kulttur (Nature and Culture Night Walk and Cult Walk) from 1989-90, and Milesten (Milestones) from 1991. To these can be added the little and quite unpretentious "29 digte" (29 poems) from 1991. Here you will find the following outline of a personal theory of poetry:

The poem is not just a game
with letters, nor is it
just a game with words, concepts,
feelings and thoughts. It is
the language
between knowledge and forgetting, responsibility
and freedom. The heart of history.
The poem is the idea as action.

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

Translated by W. Glyn Jones