Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.08.2017, Page 28

Poets are like rats
Andri Snær Magnason says poets are like rats; even when they
aren’t visible, they are ever present.
Andri Snær Magnason has written chil-
dren’s books, plays, non-fiction, and a
dystopian sci-fi novel; he’s made a full
length documentary and has even put
his efforts into city planning and ar-
chitecture. The list goes on, and so do
the accolades. And it all started a little
over two decades ago when Andri Snær
became a household name in Iceland by
way of poetry, his first love and favorite
genre.
‘Bónus Poetry’ was originally pub-
lished in 1996 and is now finally avail-
able in English. The title is a play on
words: Bónus is the first chain of dis-
count supermarkets in the country, and,
as it happened, actually published the
book itself. So the product, being “dis-
count poetry,” was sold over the counter,
eternally on special offer, and became
the most sold volume of poetry in Icelan-
dic history. It is a witty critique on con-
sumerism, or as Andri Snær proclaims:
“a journey through the allegorical Divine
Comedy, beginning in Paradiso (fruits
& vegetables), leading to Inferno (frozen
meat goods) and concluding in Purga-
torio (cleaning aisle).”
Q: Literary works on consumerism
were not new at the time, but
certainly quite rare compared to
the wave of such fictional and non-
fiction works published after the
turn of the century. In Iceland they
were rarer still. So what made a
then-23-year-old university student
go down this path?
A: First and foremost I was a lover of
poetry. And I wanted to defend it. At
the time, public interest was waning;
books of poetry did not sell and among
critics there was even still a debate on
whether poems should rhyme or not. I
was simply trying to find a way to get
poetry out there and I think the subject
sought me out. As a student of limited
means, and living near a Bónus shop, I
did all my grocery shopping there. And
everything was labelled “Bónus.” There
was Bónus-bread, Bónus-Cola, Bónus-
ham, Bónus-toiletpaper—all of which
people would buy up without giving it
a thought. So I thought to myself, how
would a book of Bónus-poetry look? As
most people know, poets tend to think
of the book cover first, followed by us-
ing it as a compass to write the book.
I had some ideas that I had read out
to my friends, who found them funny.
But it was when I imagined this jour-
ney through ‘The Divine Comedy’ that
I knew I had an artistic concept that I
could see through. That made sense.
What was really perfect—the icing
on the cake of this particular perfor-
mance—was actually meeting with
Jóhannes Jónsson, the CEO of Bónus,
who agreed to publish the book and
at the same time giving the finishing
touch of the artistic ippon.
So the consumer-critique was not
the driving force?
In a way, yes, but it was more compli-
cated. In my mind, the artist’s role is
to break new ground, to give mean-
ing to a new reality, or find meaning
in things that need it or have yet to
be defined. For example, in the dawn
of 20th century in Reykjavík, people
would not have associated Fríkirkju-
vegur with anything romantic, with
love or beauty. It was a street full of
mud and filth next to a pond which
had a foul odor. But then Tómas Guð-
mundsson wrote a poem and suddenly
it had meaning. The lava fields in Ice-
land were nothing more than that un-
til Kjarval saw the beauty in them and
gave them life through his paintings.
To me, I wanted to present the reality
I was experiencing in a supermarket,
the market square of that era, where
people met and gathered nourishment
and other essentials. My grandfather
grew up just below the arctic circle in
the northeast corner of Iceland, liv-
ing on what his seemingly boundless
reality had to offer. The fish from the
water, the butter from the cows, the
meat from the lambs. In our case, that
reality was bound within the confines
of a supermarket. I wanted to give that
experience a new meaning, a new real-
ity. I also thought, at the time, that it
was an interesting contrast, my grand-
father having grown up where nothing
around him had been commercialized.
In my life on the other hand, every-
thing is vacuum packed and commer-
cialized. The one thing left sacred was
poetry. I thought it would be interest-
ing, and probably a bit funny as well, to
complete that circle— to mass produce
poetry for the everyday consumer.
So perhaps you were unknowingly
planting the seeds for works that
were yet to come? In ‘The Story
of the Blue Planet’ there is an
underlying theme of vast injustice
brought about by global capitalism
and in ‘LoveStar’ everything has
been commercialized. Were those
ideas already there?
Well, when I was writing ‘Bónus Po-
etry’ the world was very different from
what it is now, or even became shortly
after. It was, in a sense, the End of His-
tory, as it was so eloquently described
by Fukuyama. There was very little to
complain about. There had been this
environmental scare concerning the
ozone layer, which kind of got fixed
by a joint world effort in not using
freon anymore. The Berlin Wall had
come down, so there was no Cold War
to get you angry. Even in Iceland, we
had a female mayor in Reykjavik and
a female president. So women’s rights
even seemed to be heading in the right
direction. So there is this underlying
tone [about examining the end of his-
28 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2017
Bónus Poetry
Poetry book,
out now
Words:
Björn Teitsson
Photos:
Art Bicnick
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