Hallais! I never have such strong literary FOMO as when I am at the literature festival in Lillehammer. No matter how early you get up or how late you go to bed, you only make it to a small percentage of all the events that the Nordics’ largest book festival dishes up. In any case, I am now full of new thoughts and new knowledge, and return home as a slightly different person than when I came to Lillehammer. This year I have been particularly concerned with poems, and in particular with the question of why we are more afraid of poems than of sharks and jellyfish. That riddle becomes a common thread in today’s letter. You will also have the opportunity to try yourself on Norway’s most difficult literature quiz. I have a trauma about poem analysis from a literary studies intermediate. We were supposed to analyze a poem by Olav H. Hauge, but I got stuck on this line: “Augo stood like a sly hare.” So what did that mean? I couldn’t find “klaka” in my Norwegian Nynorsk dictionary, and felt I was stuck in a difficult crossword. Even after getting help and finding out that klaka means ‘frozen’, I haven’t exactly waded in frozen hares in my life. So what was this line supposed to tell me? I, who otherwise love to interpret text, felt a great powerlessness, and just had to give up the analysis. It’s still a defeat 20 years later, I know. If one is to judge by the guests in the podcast Brenner shares poems, feelings of powerlessness towards poetry are fairly widespread. It seems that poetry analysis in school has given Norwegians a real poetry phobia. New poetry collections sell next to nothing in Norway compared to novels. Photo: Siss Vik / news Perhaps we are beginning to see poetry as a complicated equation with one correct answer, which we will never find out anyway. On the other hand, when Hans Olav carefully chooses a poem to share with his guests, they find it meaningful and enriching to talk about poems. So we’re missing out on something nice with this stupid poem anxiety of ours. But I think something is about to happen. In recent years, we have seen some poets breaking the lyrical barrier, perhaps particularly among young people. Danish Yahya Hassan is one of them. Readers loved his poems so much that they tattooed them on their bodies. Brynjulf Jung Tjønn is currently having success in Norway with “Kvit Norsk Mann”. It is the first collection of poems to win the Ungdommen’s critic award, and Tjønn has hardly been home for a weekend since it came out. The requests for author visits will never end. In the United States, poet Ocean Vuong is a literary star. He came to the United States as a child with his mother and grandmother, refugees from Vietnam. He first learned to read English at the age of 11. Recently, Vuong received the prestigious MacArthur grant, popularly called the “genius grant”, for his ability to renew American language and poetry. At the festival in Lillehammer, Vuong walked around with an entourage of four people who protect him from ongoing fans and journalists. What do these three authors have in common? They write poems about outsiders and about identity, and they do so in direct language, with striking images. Brynjulf Jung Tjønn told me with a certain self-irony that students often encounter his book with inveterate scepticism. Not only is it a collection of poems, it is available in Nynorsk! Rojal glans was part of being chosen as the best book by Norwegian upper secondary students Photo: Terje Pedersen / NTB But when he meets the students and talks to them about the poems, things quickly turn around. Brynjulf’s book is about growing up in Norway as a foreign adoptee from Korea. He finds that the students recognize themselves, and engage personally in the poems even if they do not share his life story. After school visits, girls with hijab suddenly want to take a selfie with him. Brynjulf himself is surprised by the success of this poetry collection. But he experiences time and time again that young people today are particularly concerned with outsiders, with racism and with identity, which is what this book is about. Then they almost forget that it is poetry they are reading, when it hits them so at home. (Feel free to read the fine justification from Ungdommen’s critic prize, written by high school students who participated in the jury.) Why are we not as afraid of song lyrics? Over 100,000 audiences at Karpe’s ten concerts and probably half of them knew their lyrics by heart Photo: Kim Erlandsen / news P3 At one of Karpe’s 10 concerts in Oslo Spektrum, I experienced that young and old knew the rap group’s lyrics by heart. It’s a bit of a mystery to me that we like to learn song and rap lyrics by heart and think about what they mean, but to such a small extent poems. Rap and poetry really are first cousins. I sought out journalist and author Yohan Shanmugaratnam in the square in Lillehammer, because he is a bridge between all the people I have mentioned here. In the foreword to Vuong’s recent poetry collection “Time is a mother”, Yohan writes: “I am not exaggerating if I say that Ocean Vuong is the reason I started reading poetry.” A former poet hater has therefore started reading poetry because Vuong’s lyrics struck him so strongly. Yohan has also spoken about “White Norwegian man” in the Bokklubben Bastard podcast. Yohan feels that there is something “unfiltered” about the poems of both Vuong and Tjønn. Not in the sense that it is written down spontaneously, but that they are reminiscent of song lyrics. That the authors stand behind their words, and that there is a personal emotional punch to them. Yohan Shanmugaratnam himself has written a book about Karpe and a book for his children about living between cultures. He suddenly became very famous when he wrote a comment in Klassekampen where he interpreted the Karpe song “Baraf/Fairuz”. The text went viral and made grown people cry. What happens when our parents die, and their culture with them, was the main question in the commentary that pointed to an unspoken feeling in a generation of cross-cultural Norwegians. From left: Chirag, Yohan, Magdi Photo: Michael Ray Vera Cruz Angeles Shanmugaratnam read parts of his text on Dagsrevyen, and it was also integrated into the show in Spektrum. The carp boys themselves were taken to bed. – Magdi said to me: “What you have written are facts. But it is also poetry.” Where had the journalist Yohan learned to write so poetically? Yes, he was actually inspired by Ocean Vuong, he says. Reading poetry not only helps us write better. It makes us see the world anew and think differently about it. Just look at the title of Ocean Vuong’s debut book: “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” A clear starry sky is almost poetic in itself. But when Ocean Vuong looks at the same sky, he sees a night sky with bullet holes. Exit wounds after gunshots are often jagged, star-shaped. So who shot a hole in the night sky? Ocean Vuong performed poems in Lillehammer church Photo: Knut Anders Finnset / news With a grandfather who was an American soldier and a grandmother who was Vietnamese, Ocean Vuong would not have existed if the Vietnam War had not happened. An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. Yikes. As a child of the Vietnam War, with a mother and grandmother traumatized by the war, Ocean sees traces of war and violence where peacetime children see beautiful night skies. The image is both beautiful and painful at the same time, typical of Vuong’s lyrics. The next time you look up at the starry sky, you might see it through his eyes. This year’s new festival friends You have to remember to throw a little party into the festival, and for me it’s a kick to talk about literature with completely new people. In my investigation of poetry’s fear and loathing, of course I had to visit Poesibilen’s rolling poetry bookshop. Bookmaker, poet and firebrand Ted M. Granlund welcomes people in the pleasantly furnished caravan, and it should be possible to get out of there without a collection of poems in your back pocket. There I met by chance Torill Steiene, who has started writing courses in retirement and learned to write poems. Then Freya entered, a 19-year-old girl who is half English and half Vossajente. She overheard our conversation and exclaimed: I like poetry! Then we started, NEW FRIENDS: In Ted Granlund’s poetry caravan, I became friends with Freya and Torill, who both love poetry and write poems themselves. Freya said she has been part of a group that sits on the streets in London and writes spontaneous poems on a typewriter at the request of passers-by. Now she wanted to get to know Norwegian poetry. Ted ended up giving away three poetry books for free, while Torill treated her to a copy of the previously mentioned “White Norwegian Man”. Intoxicated by the sense of community in the caravan, I accepted Ted’s invitation to come to his workshop on Løten and learn to sew my own book, and of course you will be able to join in on that when it happens. Writing poems was fun For some, writing poems is also a struggle they take on behalf of a people. I understood that when I went to the program The Battle for Survival, where we met representatives of indigenous people. Although they came from such different places as New Zealand, Ecuador and Greenland, they have in common that major climate changes and modernity threaten their people’s livelihood and culture. Their languages have been banned, and little represented in published literature. COMMON EXPERIENCES. From left: Helena Gualinga, environmental activist from the Kichwa Sarayaku people in Ecuador, Tayi Tibble, Maori poet from New Zealand, Pivinnguaq Mørch, Inuit poet from Greenland and speaker Hilde Sandvik Photo: Knut Anders Finnset / news One of those on stage was Pivinnguaq from Greenland Mørch, recently nominated for the Nordic Council’s literature prize. He writes poems, short stories and children’s books, and is one of the new voices who put Greenlandic experiences into words – both internally in Greenlandic and externally in translations into Danish. Mørch grew up in the second northernmost town in Greenland, Upernavik. 10,000 people live there, who speak a completely different dialect than the majority. When Mørch publishes his books in Greenlandic, the potential market is not the biggest, you might say. In general, it takes a bit to think about the idea that you can become a writer when you are from North Greenland. The society there is very traditional, and book learning is less valued than good fishing techniques. But Pivinnguaq grew up with two parents who were fond of reading and writing. – Dad was never as happy as when he was declaiming his own poems, even if I didn’t understand any of them then, the 30-year-old said from the stage. When he had become a writer himself, he cleaned out his father’s bookshelf. A notebook fell out. The handwritten sheets were his father’s poems. You have to give this out, said the son. But the father didn’t want to talk about it. – It was considered unmasculine to write in our traditional Greenlandic society, said Pivinnguaq. He himself was teased for being a femi when he was preoccupied with books and reading. It turned out that his father had actually tried to publish his poems. They had been rejected because they painted too dark a picture of Greenlandic life. Young Mørch finally persuaded his father to publish a book together, with both of their texts. And the father could finally be proud of his poems. The Greenland ice sheet is melting at a frightening rate, but the poems of father and son Mørch are doing their part to keep alive a language and a cultural heritage that is threatened from several sides. Can you pass Norway’s most difficult literature quiz? The annual quiz at the literature festival is a highlight for many. There, some of Norway’s most well-read people meet for fierce competition. Hans Olav Brenner and I had the pleasure of creating and leading it again this year, and the commitment is so electric that it translates to the Richter scale. news’s own Marta Norheim is on a team named after the Dag Solstad novel “16.07.41” and has been with it for almost as long as I can remember. 16.07.41 in swing. We see Knut Nærum, Marta Norheim, Tom Egil Hverven, a bit of Alfred Fidjestøl and not Kari Marstein, but she is definitely there. Photo: Knut Anders Finnset / news They are really good, and win so often that most people see it as impossible to beat them. Among others on that team is editor-in-chief Kari Marstein. But this year they had to see themselves beaten by the brand new team Prydbusk, where little sister and writer Trude Marstein was in! The Marstein sisters both say that this competition is not important for their relationship. All the rest of us just think it’s okay. Here is a selection of questions from some of the categories we served at the festival. Do you have full score? Send a screenshot of your result to [email protected]. The first ten get Bokbrevet’s brand new bookmark. Good luck! Sis
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Book letter # 16 why are we afraid of poems – Siss Vik’s book letter
