(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
BOOK / POETRY
- Listen to this: There is the sun (…)
- It's the nicest day. That's what NRK says.
- Yes, but in the book. For a crackling light, it covers the whole sky.
- That's the one in City Hall.
- No, in the Aula.
- I was at the Chamber Festival. Before I met you. It was difficult to get just one ticket. They sold two and two tickets. Everything is sort of arranged to be two.
- So hot it suddenly became. Maybe it can even make plants grow. / – Come on, we'll sit down.
1. The sun. We sit on the balcony in Oslo. It's July. I read aloud from Somewhere out there I'm happy. I read slowly. Not as slow as the poems are written. Haha, it should have taken off. She's probably writing slowly, she's there Groth. Well, some of her lyrics appear oral, like the rambling rock songs of Håkan Hellström or Pedro Carmona-Alvarez. But like the spontaneity directed, Groth, like the 00 century's indie rockers, is hyper-aware of his means. Her pun is an example:
Become faces / Become insects / Become breathing creatures, writes Groth. Her toy is contagious. I'll join. Become new words! Become a language! Become a Creator! Make yourself, as a writer, to God! Groth creates opportunities. Muscle memories are with her. There is a dry sea, ie the air. As with Munch, there is light. There is darkness. Get light! Get dark!
Become an alphabet and baobab tree. Become cedar and river and join
Join
back to the first poem in the book. Groth writes:
Become faces / Become insects / Become breathing creatures / Become colors that twist in the skin / Become skin scrapes and feet floating in a dirty river / Become the song's weight in the water / Become the head sinking into the body / Become all ways to walk / Become the matter of the dream / Become mushroom threads that hold it all together / Become quiet shouting mouth / That's it now!
2. Murals. There is something Ali Smithsk about Groth's play with language. The Scottish author Smith turns and turns in the language. In the novel How to be both the word play contributes to a dualism and ambivalence. There are themes in the book again:
- Which one came first? she asks her 16-year-old daughter. Smith's novel characters are on holiday in Italy, and have seen frescoes. As in Groth's book, art is talked about here: under the finished mural, the conservators find drawings. The drawings are somewhat similar to the finished work. But just a little. Daughter George replies that the drawing came before the painting. "But the first thing we see," the mother points out, "and often the only thing we see is the surface. Doesn't that mean that the painting comes first? "Understand: Does the drawing exist if it has not been seen by anyone?
The exhibition The modern eye has been submitted to A place out there (…). It's all about looks. gaze is materialized in lenses. In the exhibition: the camera lenses. The lens of the eye spot sends signals to nerve fibers that send signals to the brain's rods, for decoding. The look was problematized by Simone de Beauvoir: The man's gaze defines the woman. Whoever is physically superior looks down on someone. The hierarchy between the sexes is becoming naturalized, the French author claimed. The modern eye opened in France – at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Over a million people have – seen – the exhibitions in Paris, London and Frankfurt. Some of these may get a special look at Norway afterwards. They got to see Munch's experiments with photography, film and theater. Munch studied his models. Camilla Groth's poem stares back at Munch. A place out there (…) becomes a mirror for the paintings. The reflection, the thought room, fills the gallery space. The gallery is the physical space for the book. The physical action: Some sit in front of pictures. They watch and talk. And then come the ranks of thought / poetry cycles / another language / their own world. It repeats itself through five pictures, in five cycles of poetry, and ends in a letter.
3. Dries well. A white man stands next to a black man in this picture. Both of them with their backs to, somehow resigned, staring at a drowned boy. Munch is apparently living somewhat damp in the time the painting is being created. Munch writes: The influence of alcohol brought the cleavage of the mind or the soul to the extreme – until the two states as two interconnected birds slid to one another and threatened with disintegration or the tearing of the chain – during the violent cleavage of these two states of mind more and more a great inner tension – a struggle – a terrible battle in the cage of the soul.
What kind of submissions are these pictures? It is a presentation from the top shelf. Like Lars Petter Sveen who chose the Bible as the basis for the novel Children of God. Agnar Lirhus and Ulf Karl Olof Nilsson and Ida Börjel chose Inger Christensens Alphabet from 1981. Lirhus and Nilsson created climate commentary works. Works on species that are threatened with extinction due to climate problems. The anemones exist, writes Lirhus, on the first page of What was she saying? This too is an illustrated book. The "adult picture book" gets an extra dimension when the pictures have been in a physical room. Someone has been in the room together. Two glances reflect the same painting. The eyes meet, like words. Words turn into paintings again, in the second part of the book. The words become a material from which Groth creates visual art. Between text and text is the empty space. It could be about Munch looking for his mother in everything he saw as an adult. Formal relationship Groth himself to concrete poetry. The tradition may have begun with Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay laid Garden of concrete poetry. In this "garden" in Inverness, stones become words, words into images. Finlay also worked on the paper. He shaped text into visual expressions. In Norway, Jan Erik Vold was an early concrete poet. Groth is conscious of this. She doesn't just play to play. Groth creates language, creates movement. The toy becomes bigger than itself. The book is a room. If not a garden in Inverness, then a sensible exhibition space between berms. Between two mirrors, on the other hand, there is infinity:
Munch studied his models. Camilla Groth's poem stares back at Munch. A place out there (…) becomes a mirror for the paintings.
4. Mirror in mirror. Munch came to Dr. Jacobsen's nerve sanatorium in Copenhagen and got better. At least for a while. He won the competition for decorating the University Hall. In 2013, the work The Sun was voted our most beautiful stamp. The stamp is the image of an image. At Groth it's not just this kind of duality. There are more than two bottoms, more than two reflections. Here is reflection in reflection in reflection:
In a muscle memory I grab the babushka doll on the dresser / lift it up in the air / before it hits the floor I reach over everything I've done / done, tasted, seen, heard / Hallelujah so far! / There is a lightning fast snail / There is a dry sea, ie the air / I hope at the bottom of each day, singing multi-voiced / In all versions of myself: / Father, I can not get up my coconut // Will he understand that we mean something else?
Dad's paintings have been submitted to Michael Ende's book Mirror in the mirror. One labyrinth. The book is illustrated by 18 of Edgar Endes paintings. They should have inspired the surreal short prose. Ende writes about his book in a letter: Where does that happen in the book? [...] Does not every reader bring their own experiences to the reading process? Isn't every book a mirror that mirrors the reader – whether he knows it or not? And isn't every reader a mirror in which the book is reflected?
The same can be said for other art forms. Groth reads Munch's paintings. She brings her own experiences. As I read Groth, I read my own experiences into her poems. You sit with my reflections in your hand and read your experiences into it. What is reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror? This must have been the question over which Michael Ende's texts varied. He gave no clear answer to that. It often ends up with questions about the infinity. What comes after infinity? And then you start "endless" philosophies and nachspiel conversations about God, life, death. But Hey! It also sounds like a conversation about Somewhere out there I'm happy. Here they are all together. The sun, moon, light, darkness, life, death. And God – in the form of the artist and as a religious figure. The artist is the creator. The artist is the sun.
5. Moon, Puberty The lunar column is in Groth's book. As a moon pillar, and as a phallus symbol. Rather, let's talk about Mrs. Livingstone being buried in a Baobab tree and still a place in the wood. Let's talk about the shadows. They emerge from space and nature, from the sides and from behind, and enter into humans. People are overwhelmed by these shadows, in Munch's pictures. Groth regains control. As Munch ties body to shadow, Groth's body lets go into nature; en hip spider hip […] Am I so airy? Groth takes people back to nature. But she also takes people out of nature: Deep in the face a world as uninhabited as the moon. Unlikely people are taken to earth. It may be Groth's version of naturalism. A mysterious naturalism.
Picking, picking, picking / and attaching them to what looks like a bathing cap / Should we bathe, I should ask […] // I can't talk to the docks anymore / about what's going on with me / You've grown too big for me now / was the last doll said
As Munch ties body to shadow, Groth's body lets go into nature; a hip of spider web [...] Am I so airy?
Letter. – I'm afraid it will be too much for me. That book is just a submission. A justification for writing something else. Literary criticism is too much responsibility.
- It's better to rewrite it. Than it's not rewritten.
- Reading will only be about the reader. Or okay. Experience. Reading is a mirror of my life.
Literary critic and facilitator Cathrine Strøm calls for visions for the criticism. Visions are a surplus phenomenon. Being a visionary is an opportunity in developing countries. You talk about artistic golden ages. Many are linked to economics and politics. The Danish was from the late 1800s, the Russian from 1830, the French Belle Epoque from 1895, and so on.
Scandinavian contemporary poetry is world class. Take Danish Theis Örntoft, Amalie Smith, Olga Ravn, Swedish Ida Börjel, Ida Säll. Norwegian Camilla Groth, Kristin Berget, Endre Ruset, Steinar Opstad are examples of poets that make Norway bigger. The good Norwegian literature can be the best ambassador for Norway of our time. Munch exhibition The modern eye might as well have been. L'art pour l'art has effects beyond itself. Edvard wrote: It will no longer be painted interiors and people who read and women who knit. / It must be living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. Edvard wasn't so quiet then. Quiet as a chair, Groth writes of Edvard, before she gets him to speak, through her poems. Chairs are not quiet. Not if they are in the University Hall, in front of the Sun. Or outside, on a balcony, with Somewhere out there (…) in the lap.
