In honor of my friend, Viking Maiden, for today’s National Poetry Month
entry, we’ll go to Denmark. I did not know Inger Christensen (1935-2009) before
now, but I really like her stuff. She didn’t view poetry as “truth” but as “a
game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game
with us.”
Word.
One of her major works, Alfabet,
combines the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence, which deserves major props,
and it’s very much in the “game” arena.
I’m giving you “From April: IV”, which has very striking—grotesque,
even—imagery.
Already
on the street
with
our money clutched
in
our hands,
and
the world is a white laundry,
where
we are boiled and wrung
and
dried and ironed,
and
smoothed down
and
forsaken
we
sweep
back
in
children’s dreams
of
chains and jail
and
the heartfelt sigh
of
liberation
and
in the spark trails
of
feelings
the
fire eater
the
cigarette swallower
come
to
light
and
we pay
and
distance ourselves
with
laughter.
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