Tuesday 5 May 2009

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk - 2

[9-12]

A man once said to me at an exhibition, where we were looking at paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: 'Your body is so classical. As I look at these pictures, I can recognize it everywhere.' What he meant by this inverted declaration of love was: these studies of the body contain all human beings - or at least a half of mankind, all women. An artistic representation of the body is more than the individual body, it's an expression of the body's essence.

The poem must likewise be more than the writing subject. It is the movement inwards that leads past the subjective and towards the universal, like Jung's ideas about the collective unconscious. There exists an expectation of the general place that poetry must reach, but at the same time the poem exists by virtue of its specific character. If it doesn't smell of skin, what use is it?

*

There can never be talk of art unless the private material is worked over and even the darkest events or most shocking experiences transformed into light. The poem has no value of its own until I leave it. It must be possible for it to be read independently of my individuality, which means that I must not be present as a private person. The partial must not oppress the universal. The poem only becomes real to the reader when it is possible for the reader to enter into a relationship with it.

The fact that I must never lock the poem does not mean that it is only valid if it has breadth: it's better to reach a few people and affect them deeply than to reach many only superficially. Universality and breadth are two categories that are qualitatively different.

*

Inspiration is an invasion of forces that reach far beyond what is generally known, both physically and mentally. I have seen violent, almost superhuman energies manifest themselves in people shortly before they died. Although those people were ill and drained of strength, they were suddenly able to perform huge physical tasks such as the moving of objects that are normally immovable. In its own way, inspiration is likewise an overwhelming physical transformation. It can also have certain points of equivalence with the most searing love, with sorrow or fear, but unlike these instances, the energy is channelled into something else.

Whether the forces that break forth arise from within or from outside cannot be ascertained. Sometimes the possession lasts a few seconds, at other times it's a question of long intervals. Something wants out, but why through me? And why do I want this something out? Sometimes what I try to summon fails to turn up. Instead something unexpected arrives. The process always contains an element of the miraculous. I am not an instrument for something, but the place where this something can grow. In that state I may have the experience of the poems writing me.

In the moment of inspiration I don't only see further and more clearly than usual, but also differently and LIGHT-awake. This state exposes the microscopically small extent of what is normally seen and perceived. But to open the mind in the dimension that is part of inspiration is something that can only be done for a short space of time.


Over the Water I Walk - 1

1 comment:

Eric Dickens said...

What Tafdrup says is food for thought.Especially when she says:

"There can never be talk of art unless the private material is worked over and even the darkest events or most shocking experiences transformed into light."

And goes on to reason that "the partial should not oppress the universal".

That seems to be the problem in much contemporary poetry that you see in, for instance, the newspapers. It is too tediously confessional. It is really saying "here I, the poet, am", instead of extracting essences.