In my piece on Henrik Nordbrandt I mentioned the Swedish writer Gunnar Ekelof as one reference point. Pia Tafdrup has also spoken out in favour of Gunnar Ekelof’s work. She comes in from a completely different direction. Much of her poetic sensibility is based on the feminist critiques and theories of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous; her body-centred explorations of the here and now utilise the rhythms and languages of desire.
For Pia Tafdrup writing the body is very much that of the ‘Écriture feminine’ of Helene Cixous, and of Elaine Showalter who writes, “… the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text.”. Écriture feminine places “experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclic writing that evades the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.”
The book Spring Tide, translated by Ann Born, Tafdrup describes as just one aspect of her writing: Spring Tide and White Fever constitute two parts, while The Bridge of Sounds became a third quantity, which could not have been thought of without the preceding ones. Seen like this the three works are related to one another as thesis-antitheses-synthesis… A continuous, dynamic praxis.’ (Walking Over the Water. 1991).
It has been noted by some that Tafdrup set out from the beginning to be one of the top Danish writers; something like W H Auden’s career plan in English. And yet she has not been so beholden to the Danish canon. Her earlier works have been controversial, foregrounding the body, sensual experience, women’s perspectives. Her travelling companion in this was Marianne Larsen, whose writing, “analyse(s) sexual repression, class struggles and imperialism…”. Pia Tafdrup’s previous book, The Innermost Zone, 1983 “sets out to explore unknown regions of the body and mind…” that is, unknown in literature. Pia Tafdrup’s assault on the canon has always been from a radical perspective. Her concerns echo Rosemarie Tong’s comment on Helene Cixous: “(Helene – sic) Cixous urged women to… the unthinkable/unthought… in words”.
Pia Tafdrup’s two major volumes are Spring Tide (1985) and Queen’s Gate (2001). There is detectable a move from “short lines… mounting impatient rhythm… ‘(Horace Engdahl) to “a many-voiced, multi-layered…” (Bloodaxe) style. In between we have the Arkpoem (1994); a very different experiment in form, it opens:
I was writing this long and labyrinthine poem in which I opened up
and at the same time stepped into that openness, stillness, with a white voice
as word after word drank from its stream, and the further the poem extended
the more difficult it became, its syntax gradually transforming underway…
Her structure here is the cyclic exploration of self and the world as outlined by Elaine Showalter in her writings on feminist theory.
In 1991 she published Walking Over the Water. Outline of a Poetics. (part-translated by David MacDuff), a long series of meditations examining and elaborating upon her working methods. A key part of her strategy for major recognition. At every point it can seen her intent has been to situate the feminist perspective within the Danish canon.
The great appeal of Spring Tide lies in its sensuous, breathless lines: “…to write the syntax of desire…to a great degree demonstrate it…” (The Syntax of Desire, author’s foreword). The book is based around the first recognition, enjoyment, waning, and loss of desire “in all its manifestations…”:
Spring Tide
I lie down
bare myself
I’ll be your animal
for a moment
with senses stretched out
between neck and heel
spring tide
……………………………………………………..
Spring Tide is a book honed on public performance. The incantatory effect, the feel of transgression, the building rhythmic force of these lines all must have been electrifying.
In the structure of this poem, its paralleling of clauses, we have something of kin with perhaps, a rhapsodic, biblical style.
It is not all pleasure and sunshine, however. As Horace Engdahl comments: “Her poetry has a shadow side… the prevailing season… is actually winter, the harsh, windy Danish winter with its endless wet snow.” And it is. The reader does not notice at first, but predominantly it is very much desire in warm places.
This darker side makes itself more known in the later book of aphoristic four-liners The Thousandborn:
Don’t look for poetry’s black box,
it hasn’t recorded any answers,
………………………………………………………………..
It is perhaps she is indeed “demonstrating …all its manifestations..”, even the desire for the dark, the cold, that is a part of all our make-ups.
Queens Gate (translated by David MacDuff) at times achieves a great elegance of line and phrase:
Clear is the water, blue as in a flame,
like a sky that floats,
………………………………………………………
from The Shining River)
and
Here an undercurrent gathers,
here is a well with water
……………………………………………………….
and the creatures still cry.
from The Acacia Valley
There is the kind of almost classical reticence here, and a tone that the Scottish Gaelic writers often achieved.
As can be seen, the two poems are water-based in their imagery; the whole book with its nine sections gestates a mythology of origins:
– From water you have come.
The Shining River
The “white voice” of the ‘Ark’ poem echoes the ‘white ink’ of Écriture feminine.
michael9murray 