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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July 20, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
Hot-shot Chinese businessman, millionaire poet and patron-of-the-arts Huang Nubo, recently decided to start a fund to promote the cultural relations between Iceland and China, inventively named “The China Iceland Cultural Fund”. Reminiscent of pure Icelandic small-town nepotism, one of the main catalysts for Huang Nubo’s interest in Icelandic culture was [...]
July 8, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
It’s a poetic mouthful – a hard-to-perform sound poem in its own right – “pwoermd”. When you Google it the machine asks if you meant “powermad” and you’re half inclined to say “yes I am what are you gonna do about it?” beautyfault (Karri Kokko) fjshjng (Geof Huth) breathrough (Christopher [...]
June 29, 2010 in News
Dear friends. Tomorrow morning I fly to Roskilde festival to perform at ‘Ordets Område’ – the literature part of this famous rock festival. I’ll be performing as a part of a team on friday at 16.30 – playing around with the analogue text remixer RE ACT OR – and on [...]
June 23, 2010 in Uncategorized
The Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, the Cybook Opus, the Sony Reader, the iLiad – and now: Megan Fox’s right flank. We’ve come to accept the fact that books are no longer just pages tied together. Just as we graduated from scrolls and tablets, we’re now in the process of [...]
June 7, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
A reader recently asked, by way of my editor, that I share a few words on the Icelandic poetry community. My first response was a long-winded, athletic “boooooooring” while I rolled my eyes and pretended to gag. For a while I was very outspoken in my criticism of Icelandic poetry. [...]
May 23, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
A few words about the surprising qualities of sucking really hard Recently I read on the news that a man, one Kenny Strasser, had successively duped the producers of numerous TV-programs into putting him on the air on the premise that he was a master in the art of the [...]
May 10, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
– a self-righteous rant One of the greatest conservative projects in poetry is called New Formalism. In short it supports the return to rhymed metrical verse and classical themes. It’s a let’s-write-like-Keats kinda movement originally associated with the yuppie culture of the 1980’s, with that perverted type of pseudo-sophistication that [...]
April 15, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
I regularly read poetry to Aram, my infant son. He doesn’t “get it”, of course – no matter how I try to explain that he’s really not supposed to understand it – but rather “sense it”. But he seems to like the rhythms of it anyways (and/or his father’s theatrical [...]
April 5, 2010 in News, The New Illiterati
All is mostly work these days. That is to say, work that pays money. Which means less time for worthless occupations secretly intended to destroy capitalism (through the dickish laziness of poetry). Tomorrow I go to Warzaw, Poland, to meet with Political Critique, along with my comrades in Nýhil. We [...]
March 25, 2010 in Articles, The Grapevine
The Icelandic charity organization Fjölskylduhjálp (Family Aid) helps hundreds of families a month. Fjölskylduhjálp, like its sister organizations Hjálparstofnun Kirkjunnar (The Icelandic Church Aid) and Mæðrastyrksnefnd (Mother’s Support Committee) supplies the needy with food and at times other necessities, like clothing or diapers. For the poor of Iceland, these are [...]
