Editorial: 1 December 2011

In this issue of PIW, we feature the German poet Barbara Köhler, whose experimental writing probes the limits and possibilities of language in expressing human experience. “She searches, she plays, she shakes language up until it gives up all the combinations connecting words, she taps on each word to see what it is saying and what it is hiding, bends sentences and recombines the parts,” write Mischa Mangel and Heiko Strunk in their introduction to the poet. Her interrogation of and play with the German language are captured in the excellent translations into English published here – translations which also convey the rhythm, rhyme and pace of the originals, several of which are accompanied by audio recordings of the poet reading. These recordings are an excellent way of immersing yourself in Köhler’s linguistic space, a rich world of bro/ken words, order and disorder, repetition, fragmented yet fluid syntax, wordplay – all of which seem to skirt the borders of silence in their exploration of the relationship between the ‘I’ and the other.

We are also pleased to announce the launch of a Norway domain on PIW. We have published a few Norwegian poets in the past on this website – most recently Øyvind Rimbereid, who was a guest to our Rotterdam festival in 2011 – but we now have an official PIW Norway editor, Liesbeth Huijer, who will bring us regular publications of Norwegian poetry. To mark the beginning of her editorship, she has chosen ten poems from our archive that touch on Norway in some way – from its fjords to its knitwear, from its language to its landscape. Read her archive tour, ‘Photos from Norway’, here.

The three Norwegian poets joining our pages today include Cecilie Løveid, whose work, like Barbara Köhler’s – though through a different type of experimentalism – also considers the relationships between the ‘I’ of the poem and others. Løveid uses family relationship terms to explore this in poems such as ‘Her Photo in Politiken’ and ‘Entangled’, which opens “You were not my father./ I was not your daughter./ You were not my boyfriend.// I was not his girlfriend./ He was not the father of my child./ He was not my son.” Simple declarative statements of this kind and judicious use of repetition are also used elsewhere in her work to create mysterious and, at times, disquieting narratives that are tinged with the surreal.

We also feature a selection of poems from Ingrid Storholmen’s recent collection Til kjærlighetens pris (In Praise of Love). These are beautiful, pared-down pieces that quietly celebrate, lament and interrogate love. Their fragmented syntax and use of white spaces envelop silence into her work – her lines “how still we become/ when we talk” chime with Barbara Köhler’s depiction of “speech/ the stillness, space” between two people.

Our final poet is Rune Christiansen, whose stunning prose poems often capture a moment a moment in time, juxtaposing it with a thought or another image – sometimes even a physical image: photographs and postcards crop up in his poems as Christiansen turns his eye on family, memory and the writing of poetry itself – “But what if this poem were to end like this” he asks in ‘I Have Always Been Here Before’. The Norwegian weather also seems to have seeped into his work. Images of rain or snow percolate through the selection of poems here, and an evocative, pleasingly melancholic mood settles gently on the reader as they savour lines such as “The two boys shivering in the rain will soon themselves turn into rain.” We look forward to more poetic delights from Norway in the years to come.