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Poems of 1900s remain relevant
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by Jason Lester
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Henry Parland is not only one of the most influential
figures in Swedish poetry, he’s possibly one of the most mercurial figures of
the 20th century. Born in
In the early 20th century, advances in poetry were entirely
attributed to the High Modernists: Eliot, Pound and William Carlos Williams, who
wrote dense, encyclopedic poems that tried to encompass all of Western civilization
— and some mistranslated Chinese for good measure. In the face of this, Parland
wrote short, almost aphoristic poetry with no high ambition beyond a mundane
fascination with socks and women’s legs. Wry and ambivalent, his voice
perfectly reflects our own modern age of ironic sincerity, in which we strive
for importance and things that matter while trying to not make a big deal of it.
The only thing “difficult” here is the title, the meaning of
which Göransson’s otherwise superb translation needlessly obscures without the
context of the title poem: “The Clearance Sale of Ideals/ — you say it has
already begun/ But I say:/ better cut the prices.” Instead of grabbing onto all
of Western civilization and locking it up in a big storehouse like Pound,
Parland instead resembles a car salesman passing out handbills and free samples
to passers-by, clearing out the glut of poetic ideas instead of building on them.
Parland’s poems have aged in such a way that they seem
neither foreign nor a stuffy sentiment of the past. It is astonishing how he
beats Kurt Cobain by more than 60 years when he proclaims, “Of all words/ the
greatest:/ whatever.”
Yet it would be dishonest to say this pose of “cooling
indifference” fully encapsulates Parland’s character. It is better to think of
him as a skeptic who still tilts his head up towards the sky, as some of his
best poems welcome the way in which the complicated, modern world intrudes upon
a romantic heart, as when he compares the ocean to a woman, “despite oil stains
and drift canisters.”
If Parland belongs to any poetic movement, it would seem to
be Futurism, that heady celebration of all things new and of-the-moment in the
wake of rapidly advancing of technology. Certainly he gives a thought or two to
the “modern woman,” asking, “You who
think about skirts/ when you pass the windows of the department store./ What do
you know/ about the legs/ of the twentieth century?” Yet there is also
acknowledgment of the precarious allure that technology has, as when he writes,
“By day/ the movie theaters sleep/ like crocodiles in the sun/ … At night/ they
open their hungry jaws.”
Some of his poems offer a haiku-like simplicity — “Youth:/
hunger/ or a weariness/ that dances?” — and invoke an Emily Dickinson who is wiser
to the ways of the world. Like
Throughout Parland’s work there is an undercurrent of
distrust of buying into the “adult” future we all eventually confront, and like
many people we later come to idolize, he never lived long enough to betray his
love of life and settle for something easier. He died suddenly at the age of 22
from scarlet fever, leaving behind a nearly finished novel, some essays and
unpublished poems. Consequently, his poems remain a testament to the individual
character inside us that we can never afford to give up, despite the
opportunities to do so at every turn. He reminds us of this in a poem
characteristic of his whimsy and poignancy:
“My lies
Large red balloons
that I buy on the street
and release into the heavens.
Once I bought a balloon
larger and redder than the rest.
It pulled me along.”
5 stars out of 5
Anonymous (February 26, 2008 @ 7:44pm):
this would be great in an art magazine, but a newspaper? what's the news? and isn't it a bit debasing to give poets a star rating?...
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