For three euros you can be the proud owner of 30 sound poems (which comes to a whooping ten cents a piece), written, composed and performed by me, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl. For four euros more you can get a physical CD (home-burned with a nice cover) – including delivery costs. The CD features a series [...]
Booby, Be Quiet! is a collection of essays and columns about poetry, literature and literary politics(the title is a very learnéd reference to Auden’s translation of the Eddas). The essays and columns have been published in various places in the last five years – around half of the book consists of material written for The [...]
Dear friends. Next saturday I will be participating in the Zebra Poetry Film Festival schedule at the Gothenburg book fair. The Zebra crew will play some of last year’s films, including my Höpöhöpö Böks, and me and Maria Silkeberg (who also has a film in the program) will be reading some poems. But the Gothenburg [...]
With the hostile takeover of triviality in popular media and popular art, perhaps poets have forgotten about fun, about charm, about joy, about attitude, about intensity, about popular iconoclasm, about naughty words, about the beautiful horniness — and driven anything that might attract an audience looking for something other than (supposed) supreme intelligence out of [...]
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February 8, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
Most poetry’s pretty fucked up. It tries hard to be hard. Not only hard to understand, but also hard to touch – hard to feel. Sentiment isn’t really welcome in poetry anymore, it’s been outlawed. Sentiment is bad for poetry. It eats up the poetry and excretes it as pure [...]
January 10, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
Poetry is a culture heavily impregnated with the idolisation of poets. Popular knowledge of poetry stops where the anecdotes about poets end and the poetry begins. We remember Rimbaud as the original rockstar, vomiting all over the Paris culture elite. We remember Ginsberg as the mad fairy who blew people [...]
December 6, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine
The difference between poetry and prose? Poetry sings, prose talks. Poetry dances, prose walks. Poetry’s fewer words with more (“deeper”) meaning. Poetry’s about form while prose is about content. Poetry’s the memory and prose the remembrance. Poetry’s constructed in lines, whereas prose is constructed in paragraphs. Don’t know, but I [...]
November 9, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine
I recently saw a norwegian sketch on Youtube about the invention of the book. A medieval man has just gotten his first book and can’t seem to get it to work, so he has to ask for help. A help desk employee shows up to guide him through this new [...]
October 10, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine, The New Illiterati
Are you tired of writing your own damn poems? Does it feel like you’d rather plunge through the fiery gates of hell rather than come up with one more metaphor/ simile/ aphorism to explain the human condition? There’s so much poetry in the world already! So much language! Why make [...]
September 28, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine
They say human beings use language to make sense of their surroundings. We frame, categorize and systematize the objects around us with the help of nouns and verbs and adjectives. The sky is blue. The horse gallops swiftly. The sentence is a ridiculous rhetorical filler. We do this to understand [...]
September 12, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine, The New Illiterati
Lo, the oogly woogly wiggly toes of my puffinous pinkster!
Lo, the perpetual whirlpool of his gung ho rainbows!
Lo, the sabre-dancing jiggifunk of his eyeyeyeyeyes!
Behold his umpteen-breasted olympic warrior, mother-of-it-all, and recognize!
August 29, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine
Three hundred and fifty thousand, seven hundred and fourteen verses. Twenty lines per verse, and every line rhymes with the following one. That’s how long Andrei Gheorghe’s poem is. It’s almost four times longer than the Mahabharata of ancient India. Forty times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined [...]
August 23, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine, The New Illiterati
‘Twas the eve of Nýhils 2nd international poetry festival, late autumn 2006. I was the manager for the second year in a row. For some reason I can’t remember we didn’t have any microphones. The Norwegian poet, Gunnar Wærness, had misunderstood his flight-information and missed his flight. The Swedish poets [...]
August 14, 2009 in Articles, The Grapevine, The New Illiterati
Imagine a poem so robust and resourceful that it could survive humanity. Imagine that the Americans finally go completely bonkers and rip the globe apart with liberational glee, the nuclear dust finally settles and all that’s left of mankind is poetry. The mark of craftsmanship has always been durability. A [...]
