Going thru a day using only natural light--the 'thinking' of Inger Christensen
Two 'essays' about, though not limited to, poetry by the late poet Inger Christensen in the new Poetry mag (September, 2018) proves again that prose about poetry is infinitely more interesting than poetry about poetry.
Christensen's essays are linked by their subject matter, but coyly, each written as if the poet is doing her writing as she's doing her thinking. Each essay is more or less unparaphrasable, in the way a poem is unparaphrasable, so that extracting from one or the other would seem like committing a crime, though how else can I present the material?
The first, "The Dream of a City", romps around notions of dream and cliche, community and the poets' choice of responsive subject matter with a certain meditative curiousity that poses more questions than answers. Christensen quotes other poets--"Why write about horses when we know most farmers have tractors?"--then leaps up to her own words--"why write about nature at all, when most people live in cities?"on her way to relocating from the countryside to Copenhagen. "I want to feel that I live in the mass society I really do live in." (Bold type is mine). She favors anonymity, disowns the shock doctrine that holds that literature may only be produced from 'inflated crises and conflict situations," and unassumedly challenges writers to literally dream of the city they wish to live in. "What is it, actually, that we're taking part in?" The invitation of Christensen's big question is for writers, thinkers, poets to dream, "despite everything, of a more human way of expressing what we are now living."
The second essay, "Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart", proceeds from the ancient Chinese poet Lu Chi's Ars Poetica: "In a single meter of silk, the infinite universe exists." Parts of speech are examined--the noun , the verb, the adverb, the adjective, even the preposition--and held up to the light, as seen through Lu Chi's poetic line, to think about what each does and does not do. It turns out that each chases a shadow, which in turn the writer chases:..."we're thinking that it's up to us to organize the words into sentences and oppositions before everything can be put in order. Nothing could be more inaccurate. The order we're trying to organize our way into already exists." There is a distinct difference, Christensen appears to be saying, between the logic of poetry making and poetry's actual purpose as language, as ineffable as it may be. "Language can't be separated from the world without separating the world from itself." And, as reprinted in large type on the back cover of Poetry, usually a space reserved for a banality extracted from a poem published in the the current issue, "The language of poetry is infinite, but the language of logic is only apparently infinite."
Christensen's essay on Lu Chi, spun from an actual and metaphoric reliance on silk, awakened an image in my mind first presented by the poet Paul Celan that, for some ineffable reason, I've never forgotten though I read it at least twenty years ago, a line of poetry--of autumn and silk and nothingness. Why have I remembered that line? What is it about those words that stuck with me? I'll never know, nor do I really want to. And what actual object was made of autumn and silk and nothingness in Celan's poem? I don't remember.
Christensen's writing is writing you will roam around in for a long time, and not come to the end of: it's world-class musing; the surfaces have only been skimmed here. It's not necessarily necessary to be a poet or even a writer to be glad to be taken in by the way she thinks, but it is necessary to be interested.
(Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, and playright. Her essays in Poetry are from a forthcoming book, The Condition of Secrecy, to be published by New Directions in November, 2018.)
Broadway Tunnel, walking west to east, San Francisco, CA., 2016. Photo by the author.