Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.12.2009, Blaðsíða 46

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 18 — 2009
30
The difference between
poetry and prose?
Poetry sings, prose talks.
Poetry dances, prose walks.
Poetry’s fewer words with more (“deep-
er”) meaning. Poetry’s about form while
prose is about content. Poetry’s the
memory and prose the remembrance.
Poetry’s constructed in lines, whereas
prose is constructed in paragraphs.
Don’t know, but I know it when I see
it!
The amount of clichés about the
difference between poetry and prose is
quite sufficient. Abundant, even. In all
honesty, there’s boatloads and shitloads
of opinions on the matter. There’s so
much of it that when you start acquaint-
ing yourself with the ideas you’d wish
you’d never heard of either one.
The clichés are mostly as true as
they’re untrue. Poetry sings, but it
also talks—the Persian word for “po-
etic body of work” is “kalam”, which
literally means “talk” in Arabic. Poetry
dances, but it also walks. There’s a mil-
lion walking poems, from Wordsworth
to T.S. Eliot to John Ashbery and Frank
O’Hara. Sarah Cullen’s Maps is a series
of visual poems created by a pendulum
device—a box with a swinging pen
inside that wrote the poems while the
poet took walks in Florence.
A lot of conceptual poetry is more
words with less apparent meaning—
some conceptual poems are computer
engines that produce infinite amounts
of texts with no apparent meaning.
Most war poetry or love poetry is more
about content than form and many
so-called proseworks, such as Joyce’s
Ulysses or Stein’s The Making of Amer-
icans, have a lot more to do with form
than content.
Hal Sirowitz’ poetry books Mother
Said and Father Said are the remem-
brance, whereas Proust’s prose master-
piece, À la recherche du temps perdu, is
memory. The most instantly recognisa-
ble feature of poetry, for any layman at
least, is the line-breaking. Poetry tends
to be cut into short lines. The French
poet Jacques Roubaud has called it le
vers libre international—international
free verse, a plague on all your hous-
es—in effect nothing more than lineat-
ed prose and not poetry at all. Of course
you don’t have to read a lot of poetry, or
be acquainted with any radical avant-
garde, to realise that much poetry is not
divided into short lines. Take Ginsberg
or Whitman, Rimbaud or Octavio Paz.
Sometimes they get classified as “prose
poems”, but a lot of the time such a defi-
nition proves seriously lacking.
The American poet James Sherry
once pointed out that a piece of paper
has a definite economic value. Paper is
a commodity that can be sold for profit
in the marketplace. The production cost
is lower than the selling price. Sherry
also noted that when you print a poem
on it, this value is lost. Sherry’s col-
league and friend, Charles Bernstein,
calculated that a print-run of 2000 cop-
ies of a poetry book from Sun & Moon
Press, that sells out in two years, actu-
ally loses money.
This does not go for prose. When
you print prose on a piece of paper, it ac-
tually increases in economic value. Isn’t
that amazing?
Which leads me to the only usable
explanation of the difference between
poetry and prose that I’ve come across
so far (after about a decade of looking):
If the text that you’ve written sells for
less than it cost you to produce it, chanc-
es are you’re not a novelist but a poet.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s third novel, Gæs-
ka (Kindness), has just been published by
Mál & menning.
Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Poetry and Prose
Books | Review
Need to buy a guidebook to Iceland?
You can choose from Lonely Planet,
the Rough Guides, Frommer’s, Insight
Guides, and the Bradt Guides. Don’t
want to pay? The annually updated
Around Iceland is available as a free
PDF download from heimur.is/world,
and there are tons of free travel advice
about Iceland at tripadvisor.com.
But there are still people
who think they can write and sell a
better guidebook, even while lacking
the brand recognition and distribution
channels of the mainstream guides.
Two new books, both by Icelandic au-
thors, have just come out. Both cost
2.490 ISK (2.241 ISK at Bóksala stúden-
ta).
Páll Ásgeir Ásgeirsson is
a guidebook veteran and has written
many books on the Icelandic outdoors.
His 95-page, nicely laid-out The Real
Iceland claims to tell “the truth about
Iceland” and to expose “things not al-
ways revealed or obvious to strangers.” It’s in essay format,
with no listings or opening hours. It’s written for reading
enjoyment rather than reference, and includes a pleasing
though fairly conventional selection of photographs. Despite
the title, the book focuses on Reykjavík.
The English in the book has a translated feel to it. It’s hard
to tell what happened, but I think that the translation was
competently done, just not sent for revision and polishing af-
terwards.
The Real Iceland does try hard to give the inside scoop. It
tells us, for example, that “laws in Iceland are meaningless”
and that those who own a summer house are just “f leeing
from one town to another.” There is much truth in these and
other observations, but sometimes they land with a bit of a
thud. I wished the book had lingered a bit on them, and tried
to unpeel another layer or two of nuance.
Overall, The Real Iceland is a good try and makes for
a quick, innocuous read, but I have a hard time justifying
spending 2490 ISK on it. If you want hard-hitting essays on
modern Iceland, I still recommend Bart Cameron’s Grape-
vine Guide to Iceland, which came out in 2006 and which I’ve
seen remaindered for about 500 ISK.
The cover of Dr. Gunni’s Top 10 Reykjavík and Iceland
made me think it was a slapdash product and the title told me
little. Inside, I saw that the book is all listings, a paragraph for
each one. Then I realised that the whole 180-page book is a
series of top-ten lists: top ten museums in Reykjavík, top ten
swimming pools, top ten sights in the West Fjords, top ten
dates in Icelandic history.
The layout is rather busy and distracting. But when I
started reading my opinions brightened. There is one great
mystery to this book: not only is the writing good, the Eng-
lish is very good. Nowhere do we learn who is responsible for
this—a translator, a proofreader, or perhaps Dr. Gunni him-
self? Dr. Gunni, by the way, is not a doctor. He’s an Icelandic
media personality, among other things a music journalist,
and frequent contributor to this very magazine.
The top-ten lists turn out to be fun to read, partly because
you can disagree with them. I very much disagree with Dr.
Gunni’s choice of the top ten Icelandic DVDs (Cold Fever?
Come on!) and I found his choice of books doubtful too. But
mostly I liked his opinions. There are a few ads, but just a few.
The book tries to be a real guidebook, with accommodations
and restaurant advice, and maps of Reykjavík and Iceland
on the inside covers. It covers the countryside pretty well. It
gives websites, addresses, prices and opening hours. There’s
a helpful index.
Not just tourists, but also people who live here will enjoy
browsing this book. I came away convinced that the top-ten
format can actually work if handled well. - ian WaTSon
The Real iceland
Páll Ásgeir Ásgeirsson
Forlagið (2009) – 2.490 ISK
Top 10 Reykjavík and iceland
Dr. Gunni
Sögur (2009) – 2.490 ISK
opinion | Art
So, post-modernism is dead. Its
terminal illness began near the
start of a new century, on Sep-
tember 11th, 2001. Postmodernism
is hard to define but one knows it when one
sees it. The Oxford defines it as a “distrust of
theories and ideologies,” whereas Webster
says that when it comes to literature it is
“ironic self-reference and absurdity.”
Now, a healthy distrust in ideologies might
seem like sensible option after having seen
both communism and capitalism followed
through to their ironic and absurd extremes.
The problem, however, is that when it comes
down to it, we all need something to believe
in, some sort of world view to give this whole
mess meaning. The need for a world view
is almost as fundamental as the need to eat
or fuck, and is what defines us a species.
Without it, disaster follows.
In the 1920s and 30s, distrust of ideolo-
gies was rife in Weimar Germany. After the
country’s collapse in World War I, no one
believed in anything anymore. Apart from a
certain ex-soldier, who blamed it all on the
Jews. When no thoughtful alternatives are
offered, angry nonsense takes over. In the
past decades, we have seen a bit of history
repeating. Ever since Vietnam or thereabouts,
a defeat for Western military and ideological
supremacy as thorough in the long run as
Germany’s collapse in World War I, people
started turning to religion again in a big
way. It was the easy solution. The educated
classes turned to a more complex, but equally
nonsensical, solution.
The War on Thought
In Post-Modernism, everything was open to
doubt, and to interpretation. There was no
way to be sure of anything anymore, even lan-
guage itself was distrusted. Into this intellec-
tual power vacuum, a new ideology moved in.
This was the free market, and its ideologues
seemed so sure of what they were saying that
people couldn’t help but go along. Small won-
der then that in the age of Post-modernism,
a character such as George W. Bush, free of
intellectual doubt, ruled the world.
Not everyone fell for it. Feminists never
really cared much for post-modernism. They
were dealing with real problems and real
solutions. The same was true of other
“minorities” the world over who did not have
the luxury of believing that nothing really
mattered. But in the big picture, free market
missionaries easily rode roughshod over
self-doubting intellectuals, who offered little
resistance.
Much like Hitler did with Germany, Bush
tried to revive American (and by association
Western) military might. He failed just as
miserably, but the question future generations
will ask themselves is this:
Why was he allowed to try?
Whatever vestiges there remained of
Post-modernism surely disappeared with last
year’s economic collapse. 9/11 might have
reminded us that there was an outside world,
but on October 6th, we really felt it. The eco-
nomic collapse was noticed by everyone. Art
could no longer afford to lose itself in itself
when the outside world intruded so violently.
During the boom, art had its own niche.
Artists were given grants by the banks. The
consensus was that the grants would not
influence the artists’ works. Nor did anyone
assume that artists, working on behalf of the
banks, would influence how the banks were
perceived.
The artists’ job was simply to deal with art
itself, and leave the rest of society be. Others
protested, but why worry about what artists
have to say when their job is simply to be
decorative, or, as the phrase had it, “cute.”
Artists, like most Icelanders, like nothing
more than to be left alone to plough their own
garden. Of course, according to the tenants
of Post-modernism, everything was self-
referential and there was no way to explain
the outside world anyway, so what did it all
matter?
i’m not Here
But there is nowhere to run to. The film I’m
Not There, based on the life of Bob Dylan,
illustrates this point beautifully. The character,
tired of conflict, abandons political anthems
and leaves the world to become a country
singer up in the mountains. But his rural bliss
is intruded upon when the big corporations
start building dams in the highlands, and he
must battle with them again. If you don’t fight
them now, you will only have to fight them
later, and on worse terms.
My own such moment came when, trying
to leave the rampant marketplace of the city,
I went to visit Halldór Laxness’ museum at
Gljúfrasteinn in the summer of 2008. They
handed me an iPod with the logo of a bank on
it and I realised that either the banks would
collapse, or Icelandic culture would.
The banks, and the whole manic boom,
took control of many artists, who sold their
image and credibility to advertisers, and thus
enabled companies to reach people who
might never have fallen for pure salesman-
ship, but who believed in the arts. With the
help of constant advertising and success
stories from abroad, Iceland became a nation
of cheerleaders who spurned the banks on to
ever greater excess.
To understand anything, you must
understand everything. This, of course, is very
hard to achieve. Nevertheless, it is the only
intellectual goal really worth achieving.
(to be continued...)
- ValUR GUnnaRSSon
Chaos, and the Future of Art in the 21st Century
Two New Guidebooks To Iceland
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