Poet in the Cockpit

In his new collection of poems Trashpilot (Trash Pilot), Peter Laugesen keeps up the textual flow from his earlier publications. He has published 33 volumes of poetry since his debut in 1967. A characteristic of all Laugesen’s writings is that

By : Jørgen Johansen

With Peter Laugesen (b. 1942) as Trash Pilot in the cockpit, the course is set straight towards its goal. The motto that is placed at the front of his new collection of poems goes resolutely to work. It is the French author Gustave Flaubert who is quoted: “I have always preferred to live in an ivory tower. But a deluge of trash hammers at the walls, making them crumble.” Enormous leaps of tone and mixed forms are an organic part of Peter Laugesen’s poetic project, and the title of his new book, Trash Pilot, precisely illustrates the undermining of poetry’s more soaring tendencies that constantly takes place. High and low meet, and rubbish and refuse pop up sharply in the writing. The howlingly elementary is a part of the writer’s domain, but at the same time the references to music, paintings and books are a natural aspect of the flowing text. The list of collaborators on Trash Pilot is as long as the credits at the end of a Hollywood movie, and the roles range from artists such as Velasquez, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, through a large number of writers like Novalis, Pound, Colette and Jack Kerouac to musicians like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and neither Richard Widmark nor Johnny Reimer (Danish pop singers) are forgotten. Peter Laugesen delivers a very direct commentary on his own project as a poet in a poem approximately halfway through the book: [digt] I am not the kind of writer I admired when I was young but neither were they. Rimbaud ran away from a responsibility he didn’t even know was there. Kerouac was a blubbering mother’s boy. Artaud was raving mad. Céline was a racist. Pound was a fascist. They weren’t what they were any of them and Emily Dickinson was a frightened old maid from the provinces. It’s the myth we love we hate the one who demolishes it. Jorn beat his wife and Debord was a drunken bum. I write no one’s biography certainly not my own. I write about all the things that make the world big and beautiful and that is no one’s business. No one’s. We talk about how wonderful it is to understand one another and the world and nature and society and the stock market, and it doesn’t matter a shit. I am trying to find a way to write history. It can only be done as a continuous flow. It cannot be split up into high points. It cannot be sampled in greatest hits. It cannot be sorted into what is poetry and what is not poetry. If there is poetry it is everything. There is only one work. [digt slut] Peter Laugesen does not exactly invite the reader to a sorting of the individual elements in his polyphonic writing. The textual flow is a world picture, and the flying poet lands his linguistic aircraft now here, now there. ‘Now I fly somewhere else/ and higher than before in other ways,’ it says, very characteristically, at the beginning of one poem, and the angles of vision alternate swiftly. One moment the poet is watching a hedgehog eagerly eating in the middle of the lawn, in order then to assert that everything is not hopeless after all, and the next moment he makes the ‘coarsely blunted world’ hit the reader in the eye ‘like a car running over a snail’. The poet addresses his daughter, takes his dog for a walk, listens to music, remembers bits of the past, travels about and is at home. ‘Poets are melancholic birds’ says one line, setting one of the tones of the book, but the poet is also inordinately fond of satirical diatribes, jeering assaults and grimacing attitudes. Without scruple, Peter Laugesen plays now aging Jeronimus, now linguistic hooligan. The images fly through the air, the multiplicity is world-reflectingly chaotic. Haiku-terse glimpses of nature collide hard with views down into sewers and dustbins. Everyday objects, TV reality and surreal visions run together in the textual flow: The world is off its rocker It has lost half its teeth But it has eyes as blue as painted cows And one falls on one’s nose right into it stumbling always in ways and places one has never dreamed of And it could not have been other There could never have happened anything other So many sounds where images fly Such strange animals and such pretty flowers hovering above polished counters in swampy bars in confused situations There’s a need for it all on old man river Take a look! A flight with Peter Laugesen is a dizzying affair. Something happens when his writing lands on the paper. [sidste digt for sig selv] The years plunge one by one second by second like feedback down into a shaft between before and after Reach me a hand of dots and dashes Reach me a hand before the last second is peeled off my bones which I have hired in the fancy dress shop Reach me a hand before the paint flakes to nothing

Translated by David McDuff