copenhagen2007: May 2007 Archives

A brief trip to Malmö today to visit a friend gave me the chance to take a bunch of pictures of that city's (in)famous geese.

Other highlights were the Calatrava-design Turning Torso tower:

And the great new City Library:

Today the Danish students' association had a visit from the poet and critic Mette Moestrup, who gave a presentation on the contemporary American poet Juliana Spahr, formerly of U. Hawaii and now at Mills College in Oakland. Moestrup has been involved with Spahr in previous projects, including translating an article of hers into Danish for publication in Den Blå Port, as well as an event that brought American poets to Copenhagen. Spahr's latest poetic work, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which is probably best placed in the "Hawaiian poetry about 9/11" genre, was what Moestrup read from and discussed with us today.

Reaction from the students focused on the issues of engagement versus passivity that seemed to emerge in Spahr's poetry -- the work makes constant reference to media overload and a stream of disturbing images on the TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, while remaining strangely silent about political participation in the democratic process. One gets the sense the geographic isolation of Hawaii contributes to the sense of disconnectedness that Spahr's poetic narrator feels, though of course paradoxically the poems are all about being connected to events in the larger world. Hawaii's dual role as island escape and naval military base is also interesting to Spahr, though not really in any kind of complex or new way that I can divine.

The other striking thing about the poems is their creation of a kind of ersatz second-person-plural pronoun, normally morphologically undistinguished in English, in "yous". The group was about to ascribe this affectation to a cutesy way of referring to the poet's collection of multiple parrots, when somebody in the group pointed out that it was probably more a reflection her polyamorous lifestyle. Somehow I liked the poems more with the image of parrots in my head.

All in all Mette Moestrup made a stronger impression on me than the poems that she brought to share with us, as it's refreshing and inspiring to see authors from smaller European countries stay up-to-date and current with other authors in the world. There certainly isn't a counter-example of this kind of engagement that I can think of in the USA, with the possible exception of those authors whose mastery of Spanish allows them to engage with Latin American artists.

Niels Frank, formerly the head of the Danish Author School, has just compiled all his essays on Modernism into a volume called Alt andet er løgn (Everything Else is a Lie). The title, a reference to a letter from Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, means "Everything Else is a Lie." Frank's project is to try and rescue Danish Modernism (with a capital M) from the shadow of Swedish and other European Modernisms, against which it seems to pale. Johannes V. Jensen and Villy Sørensen are, naturally, the key authors here. He gave a talk at Literaturhaus with Pia Tafdrup and Erik Skyum-Nielsen tonight.

Niels Frank is a fan -- a real big fan -- of the American poet Frank O'Hara, and he read aloud a poem by O'Hara that he had translated. I can now safely say that I know more about "The Day Lady Died" in Danish than I do in English.

Lars Bukhdahl, writing in Weekendavisen, gave the book a generally good review, though he did flay Frank for not offering more of his own analysis and engagement with the texts, in place of merely citing American criticism. In addition, he thought Frank should have made mention of young, living Danish authors, such as Jeppe Brixvold (author of the new novel Forbrydelse og fremgang) and Lone Hørslev, whose connection with the Forfatterskole should have placed them on Frank's radar.

Brixvold himself was in the audience, though his own main point of critique was that Frank's jump between 1950s and '60s High Modernism and contemporary American "language poetry" wasn't a bit of a stretch -- that there seemed to be a chunk missing that would link the two together.

The day after the Syttende Mai parade in Oslo, we set off for Nordmarka, the forest north of the capital. There's a special mountain railway that takes you up the incline, where you can stop along the way at Frognerseteren, a Viking retreat like only the late 19th century could produce:

Of course, that's not the only place to go in Nordmarka: options abound.

Though we had some light rain that day, the views over the terrain were pretty stunning:

We also stopped at Tryvannstua, a remote cabin offering waffles with the added bonus of stuffed moose. On the walls were examples of rosemaling, a kind of Norwegian folk art:

We finally arrived at Studenterhytta, which rewarded us with a cozy cabin, complete with an early Norwegian cell phone:

We took a different route back home the next day, passing through more lovely terrain:

The rest of the photos from Nordmarka are here.

All the Scan|Design Fellows travelled to Oslo in time to see the Norwegian Constitution Day parade on May 17.

Last weekend I went to the free Teitur/Ane Brun concert at the National Art Museum, which was kept open past midnight to accommodate all of the fans of the Faroese singer and his sidekick for the evening from Norway. So many fans, in fact, that the closest shot I could get of them both was this:

The museum thoughtfully put out ashtrays for all the fans who chose to smoke in the art museum. Just another way that Denmark is different from... anywhere else on earth.

After the concert was over, I wandered through the galleries together with some students from Hungary and Bulgaria. Check out the 19th-century hanging patterns for the artwork:

A jogger runs past the façade of Indre By:

Manic swans and other birds converge on a person with breadcrumbs to my left: