‘Speak’ rather than ‘Spiel’
I have recently discovered the work of the poet, Pia Tafdrup. If you haven’t met her thoughts before try to think of her as an interpretation machine for philosophers who often ‘spiel’. Rather than attempting to impress via her ability to take deep concepts and articulate them, she takes big ideas and lets them ‘speak’ to you directly – from the heart as well as the mind.
Here are some quotes taken from a recent interview (Poetry Review -Spring -2010) that I have found inspiring whilst writing and composing recently;
My poems aim for beauty, well aware that beauty doesn’t exist in isolation; beauty only manifests itself in brief glimpses or enters into a relationship with the chaotic, the fragmented, the disharmonious, etc, which of course are all part of everyday life.
“My” angel (When an Angel Breaks Her Silence – 1981) – is punctured, it is a whole, it represents disappointments, disillusion etc. When a child is brought up with fairy-tales, reality is unpredictable and shocking.
I also found the following passages extremely inspiring in the way in which they describe the motivational muse that comes to an artist when in full creative flow;
I had no plan… I didn’t doubt, I wrote from urgent necessity – and still write for the same reason. The rhythm was just there are well as the theme
I didn’t want to write about something: the poem’s form should at the same time show the content. For example, a poem that expresses desire must demonstrate it in the choice of the words, or course, and all the way into the sentence construction. The body must interpose itself as form and the poem develop a syntax of desire.
I find that poetry has a unique linguistic possibility to be what is being spoken about – a poem that depicts snow must have a completely different, muffled construction…
Poetry’s density of meaning is not a desire to block out interpretation, but an attempt to open, in concise and pregnant expressions, the manifold quality of thought and imagination. Poems don’t just do research. They also construct a universe, an aesthetic world of images. The good poem should be both music and sensuousness – and at the same time carry forth an idea’
And we must end with a poem. Here’s one from The Dreamt Tree;
Whistling
The greenness, the drops on the forest floor
after the rain, the drops in moss and maidenhair,
the tall grass, the wet summer,
where the bird has a nest and the fox a lair.
It whistles in the trees, whistles in my head,
it sparkles, rushes, cold, hot, cold,
the drops tight in the leaf, it gleams, flashes,
when I touch the wetness, I shake the branches,
spread the shine, the wild glitter
that pours out of me too, heavy with light.
I open my mouth, stick out my tongue,
feel the wet, the star-coloured,
it whistles in the trees, whistles in my head,
the high summer, the wild grass,
your rain-wet taste, your raw fragrant rain,
I sink to the ground in the dark blazing greenness,
in a wedge birds rise high above the trees.
See more of her work at: http://www.tafdrup.com/en/books
Light,
David.