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I sometimes get the feeling that geography plays a big role in the development of poetic style. I remember how in Sheffield, when we got people from other parts of the country in to perform at Spoken Word Antics, they often seemed like a breath of fresh air…not that it ever felt stale in Sheffield. That was the funny thing; you had a vibrant, diverse scene going on, and then someone would come along from outside and do something that was just self-evidently different from anything anyone in Sheffield would do. And that’s a bit what it was like at Friday’s poetry reading, day three of the Nýhil International Poetry Festival (Fimmta alþjóðlega ljóðahátíð Nýhils). There were ten poets, four of them from abroad, working broadly within what you might call the avant-garde tradition.

Dmitry Golynko, a Russian poet who is published in New York, read mainly in English, with a high-pitched incantatory tone that signalled a constant state of alarm. Even as he read in English his pronunciation (‘w’ as /v/, for example) and the melody of his voice seemed to transform many of the words back into Russian, so that the poems often had a liquid quality to them, melting back and forth between one language and the other. The repeatedly intoned line ‘weep it out’ in one poem sounded to my ears like the Russian ‘vypytaiut’, with its connotations of extortion and interrogation, and I struggled to remind myself that it was English. I can’t comment much on the content, but a lot of it seemed to address Kafkaesque (or Putinesque) state machinations, so this mis-hearing on my part wasn’t completely out of place.

UKON, a Swedish poet, used a lot of repeated sentence structures in his poems. One piece simply consisted of a long list of questions about ‘the father’, each question ending with the answer ‘nothing’.

What had the father bought for a Christmas present?
Nothing.
What did the father do for a living?
Nothing.

The effect of these accumulated negations of paternal responsibility, care, and agency was drastic, yet not entirely bleak, probably because there was an element of caricature implicit in the degree of exaggeration. The total rejection and alienation of the father seemed to reflect as much on the subject of the poem as on the father, suggesting that the inadequacies of the father have been passed on to the next generation. The lack of specification of who the father was and what the speaker’s relation to him was left the poem open, so that it could be interpreted at an intensely personal level or at an institutional level — the role, and implied failure, of fathers in society.

Another poem of UKON’s that impressed me was about age and height, and was largely made up lines of the type, ‘At the age of 8 I was 120cm. Two years later I had grown an incredible 34cm’. It went from birth right through to death at the age of 84, and clearly evoked those marks most families make on some spare wall or doorframe to chart the growing height of their children. All went as expected for the first three decades, with rapid growth through childhood and puberty levelling off. In the 40s the subject shrank slightly due to an illness — a bit earlier than one would expect, but still plausible. But from the 50s onwards the subject’s height departed from all norms, shrinking, then growing, then shrinking again to just half a centimetre, before doubling in size to one centimetre and increasing again by 1000%. In old age the subject’s height became extremely volatile, fluctuating from zero in one year to 34 metres in another.

The way that in late middle age the height took off, rather than shrinking, had a fantastic sense of elation to it, as if the subject had been emancipated from the rigours of aging. Perhaps this represents the emancipation of retirement or the loss of inhibition that some people feel around that age. The volatility during old age, on the other hand, evoked for me the uncertainty and physical insecurity of old age. I felt that height worked in the poem as a metaphor for the ego, or perhaps general confidence and wellbeing. Maybe the slight shrinkage in the 40s was the onset of a mid-life crisis.

In the second half we heard from two Danish poets, Mette Moestrup and Morten Søndergaard. Moestrup read a piece that drew on her time working in a hospital cafeteria when they were issued with skirts that were too short. The poem was all in Danish, but somehow it was very easy to follow, and the occurrence of words like ‘feminist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘communist’ gave non-Danish speakers a pretty good idea of what was going on. I even found myself laughing in places, although though I couldn’t have told you exactly what was being said.

Morten Søndergaard finished the evening with a piece in which he tried to incorporate the ‘noise’ that you get when you open a file on the computer in the wrong programme — that jumble of unintelligible characters, yielding occasionally to strings of recognizable text. I always feel like I am being confronted, and affronted, with something when I see this, like seeing a mess of DNA code with an ear and some body parts floating about in it. Søndergaard’s method of rendering this noise in performance was through using his Kaoss Pad — an effects and sampler box, as far as I can work out — to modulate, distort, and screw around with his voice. This seemed like a pretty good audio equivalent; the noise in a file is language and formatting distorted by a computer, and the noise produced through his Kaoss Pad was also language (his voice) distorted through a computer.

He also performed it perfectly, managing seamless transitions between direct speech and the sampled sections, which nicely balanced being irritating, intriguing, and just a little bit amusing. The effects even provided some relief at the end of the poem, which consists of a large block of text something like this: ‘abbaaabba ggapp gabba baahba…’. He started reading this and my heart sank, —oh no, are we going to have to sit through a whole paragraph of this?! Then, just as I was about to become paralysed with despair, he started comically modifying the sounds he was producing, giving the whole thing a playful twist.

It’s harder to say much about the Icelandic poets because, with the exception of one (Kári Páll Óskarsson, I think), they spoke and read exclusively in Icelandic, and I’ve already gone on enough (in my previous post) about the excitement of listening to and miscomprehending poetry in a language you understand little of. I recognised Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s piece from the Summer Poetry Jam in May. It contains the phrases ‘Mr Brown’, ‘I am not a terrorist’, and ‘viltu pylsu?’ (‘do you want a hot dog?’), which effectively convey the thrust of what I take to be an angry and witty poem. I missed the line about the hot dog this time, but she made up for it with double-bass accompaniment.

I did wonder whether, in the international spirit of the Festival, all poets ought to be required to perform at least one poem in a language other than their own. Most of the visiting poets read in three languages — their own, Icelandic, and English — and I was struck by how comfortable they seemed be with their poems in translation. Maybe that is something that poets in non-English languages have to live with a lot more — seeing their poems alive in different languages, and not thinking of translations as second best, but as another manifestation of the poem, another part of its life. It’s all part of the process of letting go, which happens the moment you publish or perform your work, but even more so when you let someone else render it into a different language for you.

At last, some live poetry! The Nýhil International Poetry Festival is upon us, and yesterday was night one, the open mic/michelle. I hadn’t been to any live poetry events since May, and last night I realised how much I’ve been missing it.

I read about the event on the Nýhil blogspot, and worked out that it was one poem each (in spite of being an ‘international’ festival, there’s been very little information available in English about it), but hadn’t realised that you were also supposed to read one poem by someone else too. So when it came to my turn, just like on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, I decided to text a friend, and was able to read out this haiku by Matt Clegg, direct from Sheffield:

A lone cobweb hangs
from the campsite tap — supports
one obese droplet.

I think it’s from ‘Trig Points’, which you can listen to on the Spoken Word Antics Sound Archive.

I also read ‘Shelter’, a poem of mine about a woman in a strange land who can’t speak the language trying to find her way. It reminded me of how I feel myself here sometimes, although the big difference is I can always open my mouth and speak English, which the woman in the poem can’t.

The running order was anarchic in logic – people just got up to read when they felt like it – but not in style; maybe a certain ease comes from people choosing their own moment…although I did occasionally notice those with less self-awareness prevailing over those with more.

Some I could understand, some I couldn’t; there was an English translation, which we were assured was nothing like the original, a rather un-hip rap (the kind where the words are forced into a rhythm, rather than written with rhythm in them), a poem from the milk carton, one neurotic piece that reminded me of the landlady from hell we narrowly escaped committing to a few months ago, and an interminable tract of social theory (the spectator, media, hegemony…Baudrillard perhaps?) that had us all feeling much enlightened once it was finally over.

All those words, all those people with things to say; one glorious, eclectic jumble of articulation and, on my part, much miscomprehension (but serendipitously so). Here is a rough approximation of what’s going on in my head when I’m listening to poetry in Icelandic:

‘Hvað sem ég er, í bílinum, reyking í geymsla…smoking in the cellar, or is that an invoice, something about a car, and what is it that I am?’

As you can see, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there is something wonderful about the combination of images and words, the fragmented thoughts, and unexpected collisions. I’m often not very good at paying close attention to what I’m listening to anyway. If I’m really enjoying a piece of music or poetry, it’s often because it’s stimulating my thoughts; my mind may be somewhere completely different, though still working in parallel to the performance and in some way guided by its structure, its shifts and moods. Listening to something you can only fractionally understand could be seen as a liberating aesthetic experience, because it frees you from any obligation to pay close attention, while a residual structure comprised of tone of voice, rhythm, sound texture, intonation, and so on – everything that is left when you take away the words – keeps you connected.

Last night was the Winter Lights Festival in Reykjavík, with the museums open till late and all kinds of things going on in cafes, galleries, libraries, and so on. I went to see the Icelandic Sound-Poem Choir in a back room of the Museum of Modern Art…or at least that’s how it was billed. I found the address, Laugavegur 26, and there was Skífan (a big music store), an optician’s, a Swedish brasserie, but no museum, until I noticed the sign ‘nýttlist safn’ (something like that anyway) pointing down a back alley. It looked more like an art college, or maybe a storage room, than an actual museum, with stuff heaped up in piles all over the place and nothing visibly on display. There did appear to be a museum shop at the entrance though, so I’m not really sure what it was.

The room was packed with people, and we were all perched on tiny folding chairs, our big winter coats rubbing against one another and holding us all securely in place, like tadpoles in a pond. It was a real choir, about twenty people, and this alone was impressive enough; how often do you come across people doing sound poetry, let alone a whole choir full of them! The first piece began with the gentle collective inhalation and exhalation of breath, building up a soothing rhythm that was reminiscent both of the body and of the sea. This then formed the backdrop to a poem read by a swarthy male poet – he could just about have been a fisherman himself (maybe I’m romanticising a bit) – who had to peer closely at his notes to remember what he was about to say. I don’t know what he was saying (my Icelandic’s not that good yet – I can just about work out what cashiers are saying when they tell me the price), but it didn’t seem to matter.

Later on the choir was joined by scratchy sounds from a double-bassist, a woman playing a theramine-like instrument that made a wailing soprano sound, two girls with bird whistles, an opera singer, and a conductor who occasionally picked up a megaphone and sounded like a German commander spitting out orders in a second world-war film. There was a lot of movement, including three performers parading about in a kind of pantomime-horse formation; but what struck me most was when the choir was split into two sets of rows stomping mechanically back and forth across the stage – it reminded me of the movement of the enemy units in 1980s computer games like Space Invaders, slowly but relentlessly making their advance.

Overall it was pretty chaotic and over-the-top in a way that definitely reminded me of the recording I have of Kurt Schwitters’s Ur Sonata. The Ur Sonata at times makes you smile because it sounds like a parody of operatic style; the Icelandic Sound-Poem Choir had me smiling because it felt – not like a parody – but like a circus: it was fun, exuberant, mad. At the same time, however, it did feel a bit artless, and the circus seems like a dead-end place to take sound poetry to me. It highlights the novelty, but next time I go to see them (and I will go) I will be looking for some subtlety too.