My first encounter with the poetry of Inger Christensen occurred in 2011, two years after her death at age 74. New Directions had just then published a single volume collecting Christensen’s first two books, Light (1962) and Grass (1963), along with Letter in April (1979), all translated by Susanna Neid. Her rendition of Christensen’s fourth collection, alfabet (1981), received the PEN/American-Scandinavian Translation Prize in 1982 – but the translation did not appear until New Directions issued it in 2001. In 2004, the press brought out Christensen’s fifth and final book, Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, which had appeared in Denmark in 1991 – and in 2006, Christensen’s third collection, It (1969).
Transience
The stone on the beach evaporates.
The lake is gone in the sun.
Animals’ desert skeletons
concealed in eternal sand.
Things wander,
die in each other,
sail like thoughts
in the soul of space.
Caravans of living sand.
Is this a threat?
Where is my heart?
Caught in the stone.
Concealed in a lake.
Beating deep
inside a humped camel
lying and groaning
and dying in sand.
“Transience,” from Christensen’s first book, starkly represents the poet’s lifelong obsessions, as spelled out by Neid: “boundaries between self and other, between human beings and the world; our longing and struggle for connection beyond boundaries; the roles of language and writing as mediators of that connection; the distances between words and the phenomena that they stand for.”
Born in 1935 on the eastern coast of Denmark, Christensen taught school until deciding to devote her energy to writing in 1964. But she had studied medicine and continued to cultivate a broad interest in the sciences, especially quantum mechanics and linguistic theory. Her early poetry, lyrical and compact, evolved into “systemic poetry” in which structure provides an armature for imagination. Her alfabet is based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, and her Butterfly Valley comprises a sonnet sequence. But even when her work’s form was pre-determined, Christensen animated it with humane lyricism, probing gestures, and meditative leaps that set her apart from the tonelessly droll practitioners of Oulipian experiments. In an early essay she writes, ”We dream, despite everything, of a more human way of expressing what we now are living.”
Neid now gives us a selection of Christensen’s lively essays in The Condition of Secrecy. There are 18 of them, the first dated 1966, the last 1990. In “The Regulating Effect of Chance” (1994), she writes, “I think we should try to live with a reduction of meaning. To get rid of the idea that there is any meaning beyond what we’ve always been able to recognize, to reflect, and to stimulate – an ability stemming from our existence as precisely that part of meaning that’s able to see its own meaning – no more, no less.” In this passage, one hears the convergence of two desires: the first, to resist the given so as to be free to create significance – then, to recognize the substance of what is actually there and felt. The two tendencies agitate each other into art – in Christensen’s case, into five collections over five decades. She also produced three novels, several plays and two children’s books.
In “The Regulating Effect of Chance,” Christensen encourages poets to yield to “the orderly workings of chance.” This may sound like quaint counsel since poets today are likely to trade in abrupt segues, decentered speech, skittery or audacious attitudes, and the urgent response to political turbulence. But perhaps one reason why familiar claims such as “this is a poet unafraid to take risks” may seem vapory or exhausted is that riskiness can be broadly dispatched into hardened mannerisms, signatures of affiliation offering reassurance. The occupational hazard of the poet is stepping into hardening cement while imagining one’s footprints on the Walk of Fame.
Every once in a while, it is a tonic to hear revitalizing encouragements and to revive our heritage as amateurs trying to find the other side of the world. This inducement is Christensen’s charm and service as she points to “this condition of absent presence, which can be either long- or short-lived, that writers fear from the outset, because they’re both afraid to attain it and afraid not to attain it …probably also exactly this condition that writers hope, deep in their hearts, to elicit and nurture, whatever the cost and whatever other reasons there may be for writing.” But Christensen isn’t peddling haloed self-fulfillment. There is a cost for the attempt at “absent presence”: “Ironically enough, when this condition does arrive, the struggle is rewarded in an unexpected and far from gentle way. As things unfold, it becomes abundantly clear that it’s no longer the writer arriving, it’s chance per se … In this way, chance underscores emptiness.” It also became abundantly clear to me that this and several other essays in The Condition of Secrecy would be profitable to teach from in a workshop setting.
Quoting her favorite poets and thinkers, Christensen writes both discursively and efficiently. At one point, she cites Novalis’ mention of a story about the Swiss alchemist and astrologer Paracelsus (1493-1541). Troubled by the inertia of the human mind, Paracelsus imagined that a solvent called Menstruum Universale had been poured over the senses of humans, dissolving their desires and thoughts. But at rare moments the slightest of presentiments solidify. Christensen emphasizes how loss gives birth to art since what we make rises out of “something diffuse, indistinct … formless, random” entailing “a feeling of loss that, with each attempt to transform it to plenitude, only deepens.” To escape these difficulties (ie., to cheat), the poet begins not with chance but necessity, the need and its object already worked over before the writing starts. She urges our abandon so that “as the text is being written, it comes to seem more and more necessary … while the finished text, laid out in final form, will appear random … it could just as easily have been different” – and thus loyal to its hazy, mysterious origins.
Novalis also provides the central notion for the title essay. Christensen writes:
“Maybe poetry can’t tell any truths at all. But it can be true, because the reality that accompanies the words is true. This secret-filled correlation between language and reality is how poetry becomes insight. A mysterious miracle that may well be the condition of secrecy that Novalis speaks of when he says, ‘The outer world is the inner world, raised to a condition of secrecy’ … It’s difficult to find our way into this condition of secrecy [where] the poet stands at the center of a universe that has no center. In order to raise the inner world to the outer, we have to start in the outer, start in all that’s visible, everything that throughout our whole lives, in corresponding forms of visibility, has been preserved and forgotten in our inner world.” Her preference — and sole alternative — is for the morphology of the amorphous.
In the final third of The Condition of Secrecy, Christensen heightens the social and political aspects of her creative thinking. Born in 1935, she was a child during World War II and continued to regard Europe as a location of conflict and turmoil. “Oppression is a bargain that most people accept because it’s their only safe hiding place,” she writes. In 1981 she writes, “So fear has become a strangely useless feeling, discarded and purposeless, and over these chaotic fragments of a fear that once had a social purpose, sorrow has spread. The future is dead and buried, and the work of transforming ourselves from mourners into survivors, or at least to people capable of surviving, has barely begun.” [Right: Christensen in 2008]
In our poetry, here in America, where we are trying to find a social utility for our fears while maintaining a relationship with the lasting enigmas of existence, we can turn to Inger Christensen’s poetry and prose for guidance. But she will insist that we resist the facile, the easy poems about difficult things. The connections between us are renewed when there is tenderness for the substances of the world and patience for the trying work of expression. The rest may be merely op-ed. From her prose poem “Meeting”:
“I fear the impersonal between us, things we cast off without tolerating or bearing, things whose stories we no longer try to remember, and roads that go round and round without anticipation …”
[Published by New Directions on November 27, 2018. 138 pages, $16.95 paperback]