With Deer's Inhumanity

There's a very interesting review of Aase Berg's "With Deer" (tr. Johannes Goransson) on Coldfront.

The reviewer claims that Berg is "channeling a voice that is not quite human" and in so doing exposes us as "intellectual animals," while generating in us "something ancient about the human intellect."

For me this is why With Deer is so attractive. The voice of the poems is scarcely human. It is animal. It is creature. But the poetry's completely under control. So, you have this rare and strange combination of Art that is very controlled (masterful and in this respect uniquely "human") while at the same time wild and dangerous-- filled with the shadows and lights of keen animal "consciousness.

A kind of wild-child. Or an insane person. Someone always on edge. Always on the edge.

Reading With Deer I get the feeling that the voice/force of the poem could at any point just cut my head off. Gut me. But just as much I have the feeling that the voice could harm itself. That I'm always about to walk in on a suicide: A pale body in a pale bathtub in a pale room (or in the middle of a field strewn through with flowers and/or bodies.)

I admire and sometimes delight in the artistic personality of With Deer (the strange language, images, constructions, juxtapositions) but I relish being in the presence of such a dangerous life-force personality (or "animality" or "creature-ality.")

It's rare for these two things to come together. An artist completely in control of a voice that's so high-strung, that's so completely in its own nerves and blood-- about to kill or self-kill at any moment.

The voice, feel and "personality" of Sylvia Plath's artistically accomplished poetry is the only comparison that comes right now to mind.




This sort of poetry, for all its greatness, isn't for everyone. Most people, instead, want this from their poets:

Aase Berg-- With Deer

At his blog In Search of Duende Phil Hopkins look closely at "Still," the first poem in Johannes Goransson's translation of Aase Berg's "With Deer."

Overall Phil's first impressions of "With Deer" is that as a whole it's "powerfully original and cohesive" (and, for whatever it's worth, I agree)

Then Phil gives a casual but insightful reading of "Still."

Here's the full text of this poem

-----------Still-------------
His fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily's black vein. Still the love beast breathes. Still he suckles the fox sore on my weak wrist. In the distance the wind is slowly dying: the night of nights is coming. But still the fetus lily rests untouched. And still his fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily's black vein.


And here's an excerpt from Phil's notes:

"Then the wind is slowly dying - an unfortunate cliche here. But I think writers are not supposed to care about the occasional lazy phrase anymore. Doesn't make sense to me, especially in a short poem. The night of nights is coming; this line sets the tone for the book. What she's created here is an atmosphere of the wounded, the half-healing, the natural world taking over and yet falling apart."

Aase Berg would, though, advocate going further than "occasional lazy phrase."
(Or at least she would have.)

Here are Aase's own words:

"I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection."

from "It's Not Acceptable To Be A Fatso" (first published in the journal 90Tal, number 3, 1999)

To read all of Phil's blog post on this go here

"Fuck Off," etc: 12 Quotes from AWP

1)A nice and crazy woman bought a copy of my book.
Told Geoff Bouvier he was brilliant.
Told me to "fuck off."
Said she was "tired of sucking Paul Muldoon's dick."

(not sure in which order these 4 things happened.)

2) "No one's doing what I'm doing. I'm the most passionate writer here."

3) "If you buy a copy of it I'll draw you a boat."

4) "We're headquartered in Boston. Have offices in Chicago and New York. But we kick ass everywhere."

5) "Reading Holy Land's like getting punched. Reading With Deer's like getting knifed and then pissed on."

6) "She wrote it during an 8-week Ecstasy binge."

7) Reb Livingston (one of the most quotable people I've met):

"I need to coat my throat."

8) "I just wanted to say hello and tell you thanks for doing such a great job with my poems."

9) "Finger or thumb?" (kind of like "Tea or Coffee?")

10) "I'm way too important to talk to you. O, did I say that out loud (followed by a loud burst of fitful cackling laughter)."

11) "He wasn't as much of a prick as I thought he'd be." (Samson Starkweather regarding a well known--a very well known--poet)

Action, Yes

the new Action, Yes is on-line now

this is what Johannes has to say about it on Exoskeleton:

"It is very big. Some figures and frameworks will be familiar (but hopefully not too familiar) to readers of this blog.

It includes two "automanias" by Swedish poet/performer/novelist Sara Tuss Efrik.

It includes several pieces addressing "the gurlesque", including texts by Lara Glenum, Dodie Bellamy and Aaron Kunin.

It includes work by Tina Darragh and P.Inman, whose work Mark and I have talked about on this blog.

It includes poems by James Pate as well as his essay on Clayton Eshleman.

It includes two poems by Clayton Eshleman, including one dedicated to Laura Solorzano (who is about to give a reading here on the Notre Dame campus).

And a whole bunch more,including work by such participants of this blog as Angela Genusa, Christian Peet, Ron Klassnik and Evan Willner."


I'll add that the Lara Glenum essay in it centers round the Aase Berg Guinea Pig poems....

Johannes Göransson Interview: Ecstasy of Dismemberment

The following posts contain an email interview I recently conducted with Johannes Göransson regarding his translation of Aase Berg's "With Deer" which releases from Black Ocean in the Spring of 2009. (possibly available at AWP).

"With Deer" is violent, persistent--and it is beautiful.

Here's a relatively mild sentence from one of its early poems ("In the Guinea Pig Cave"):

There lay the guinea pigs and they ached all over and their legs stuck straight up like beetles and they looked depraved and were blue under their eyes as from months of debauchery.


Here are Bios that Johannes supplied me.

Johannes Goransson is the author of three books - Dear Ra, Pilot and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place - and the translator of five books - "With Deer" by Aase Berg (forthcoming shortly), "Collobert Orbital" by Johan Jonsson(coming soon), "Gingerbread Monuments" by Victor Johansson (poems) and Klara Kallstrom (photographs), "Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg", "Ideals Clearance" by Henry Parland. He is also the co-editor of Action Books (www.actionbooks.org) and the online journal Action, Yes www.actionyes.org).


Swedish poet Aase Berg's first book, With Deer, was published in 1996. Since then she has published Dark Matter, Transfer Fat, Uppland and Loss. She is considered one of the most influential and unique poets in Sweden, and her poetry has been translated into English and various European languages. She also works as a translator and has translated several young adult books into Swedish.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 1

RK: For those not familiar with Aase Berg's work: why Aase Berg?

JG: In her first two books you get a powerful, cinematic experience (in the second book, Dark Matter, this is really pushed to the limit). It's an experience of what Steven Shaviro, writing about the movies in his brilliant, Deleuzian book *The Cinematic Body*, has called "visual fascination": "Visual fascination is a passive, irresistible compulsion, and not an assertion of the active mastery of the gaze." And elswewhere: "visual fascination as a restless, shattering mobility." It's a poetry that explodes the control, the mastery, that rational gaze that is idealized in much of art (especially poetry); it's the antithesis of the pervasive idea that if our art should provide us with enough distance so that we can somehow approach it logically, an approach which comes out of the naive fallacy that art is part of an illusion we must free ourselves from.

That pervasive insistence on freeing ourselves from the illusions is ultimately based on a utopian idea of a kind of primeval communism, in which we are not alienated and interact honestly. A load of crap. And always xenophobic: the foreign, foreignizing, strange is suspect. Another thing that is great about Berg's work is the way the Swedish language is seemingly constantly breaking down and being reshaped into a kind of foreign language. It is both Swedish and foreign. (What Deleuze and Guattari would call "minor literature.") Strange neologisms and permutations proliferate.

Also, I should say that my cinematic analogy is not arbitrary. Aase started out as a member of the wild and unruly Surrealist Group of Stockholm, and one of the major original influences on Surrealism was Andre Breton and Jacques Vache sneaking in and out of movies, an experience that left Breton "charged." Further, film – especially B-movies, horror movies, zombie flicks - are a big influence on Berg. In her second book, Dark Matter, she is more explicit about this (she addresses her lover as "leatherface" from Texas Chainsaw Massacre). I think more than the violence and hallucination, what she gets from these B-movies is the powerful combination of estranging cheapness and visceral power, confusion and bodily reaction.

It is related to the quote from Dodie Bellamy that I posted on my blog a while back: about the influence on gay pornography on her work. I think it's a similar dynamic of alienation and viscerality. The body is central in both poets, but it's not the body as "the authentic" or "true" but the body as both alienated and visceral. To provide another American point of comparison: We can say that Plath's (and Plath was of course a huge movie buff) speaker in "Lady Lazarus" subjects herself to the gaze of the peanut-crunching crowd, dreaming of destroying the gaze; Aase's poems fulfills the dream (eating men like air), blowing up the gaze, opening the bee box. We are enswarmed.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 2

RK: In the Action Books catalog description of Remainland (a selection of Aase Berg's first 4 book, translated by you also) "With Deer" is described as a "wrecked fairy-tale-scape." I don't think Black Ocean has come up with a book description for their website and/or a Press Release yet, so in order to give us a bit more sense of the book, its nature and scope, could you in a brief paragraph or two tell us a bit more than "wrecked fairy-tale-scape" (which by the way is a very good 2 word characterization)?

JG: I think the reason we put "fairy-tale-scape" into the description was because a lot of this book take place in a kind of "scape" of fairytales and folktales: in the woods, with animals etc. In his introduction to Remainland, Swedish critic Daniel Sjolin argues that the book detourns the motif of the lost girl in the woods (here the girl gets rabies). Of course in an American context of cleaned-up Disney versions of fairytales, that might not make any sense. But in Sweden the fairytales tend to be very violent and grotesque. The gnome slaughters the barn, the naked woman is made of tree bark, young people always drown or get lost in the woods.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 3

RK: "With Deer" is, to put it mildly, strong. How was the book received in the author's native Sweden when it released there 11 years ago? What did people, poets and critics have to say about it--good, bad and indifferent (and by indifferent I have in mind the sort of critics who early-on dismissed Neruda's rich and dense language, imagery and play of tropes by labeling it "tomato sauce")?

JG: Throughout her public career, Berg has received a lot of praise as well as a lot of critique. Many people love the powerful, dynamic poetry, but a lot of people find it decadent. I should say that decadence and left-wing politics make up a kind of axis around which a lot of Swedish culture rotates. To my mind, almost all of the interesting Swedish art is decadent, and most of the boring stuff is earnest, responsible and left-wing (see my previous answer for people yearning to reach beyond the alienation of language). "With Deer" was her first book and my impression is that it was popular but considered a kind of oddity. Her second book, Dark Matter, was more popular still, somethign of a cult classic. And then her third book, Transfer Fat, suddenly seems to have made her into one of the absolutely most important poets in Sweden. Her most recent book, Loss, probably received the best reception of any of her work. It was reviewed in pretty much all the daily papers and a lot of critics argued that her motherhood trilogy (Transfer Fat, Uppland and Loss) is a major work in the history of Swedish literature. So over the past 11 years she has gone from weirdo to an important writer in literary history. I think a lot of that has to do with a shift in generations among the critics. I know that Bengt Emil Johnson, the old concretist poet from the 60s, has long been her supporter, but I've noticed that a lot of the other reviewers are younger writers now, writers who started writing in the 1990s. And her influence on younger poets is very evident. I should also note that poetry is much more popular in Sweden than it is in the US. Berg's books sell out their printings of a couple thousand copies even though she's writing in a country of 8-9 million people.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 4

RK: A few places on line, including Action Books' website, have excerpts from Berg's essay "It's not acceptable to be a fatso" (first published in the journal 90Tal, number 3, 1999). Here she writes that she values the "aggressive, baroque and esoteric" and that she laments that "the fleshy, screamy and overdone...are so taboo in our culture." I remember, also, you using (in an email to me a long way back) the term "fat surrealism." Berg's surrealism seems to me to be the "fat" sort. Care to talk about Berg's particular sort of surrealism and surrealism in general? Where she stands, in this regard, to her contemporaries and predecessors? I wouldn't mind hearing you comparing her "fat" surrealism to Simic's "soft" (Silliman's term), but as you wish.

JG: To begin with, Aase joined the Surrealist Group of Stockholm when she was around 20, and she kind of grew up with that group as her major artistic influence. She was 30 when With Deer was published, so she spent many years engaged in activities with this group before publishing, or even writing, the book. The group is a quite notorious group in Surrealist circles: very extreme, very motivated, very dynamic at times. This isn't Surrealism as a few literary devices- the way someone like Simic has used it (if you ask Simic he'll tell you that he doesn't like Surrealism, though it was an important influence on his work) - and not avant-garde as a literary or artistic or
academic mode, but a group for whom art is not autonomous objects but a process of oppositionality. So Berg's artistic learning took the shape of vandalisms, trances, protest, happenings and the like. It's a really interesting group; not a mere re-creation of Breton's ideas from the 1920s, but also influenced by Situationism, Foucault and contemporary thinking. However, Berg left the group in the mid-90s at the time she started publishing her poems, in part I think because she didn't subscribe to their increasingly militant views.

In Berg's manifestos and essays there's a very interesting emphasis on the body - what Masson called "physical idea of the revolution" or what Bataille called "the bloody farce". There is more focus on the administered body than the unconscious/ego dynamic. In part it's important to view this in the context of the Swedish welfare state, which is a culture based in large part on an obsession with the healthy body. One of the first things the Social Democrats did when they were voted into charge was to make sure everybody got healthy -that everyone knew how to exercise, how to practice healthy sex, how to take virile camping trips etc. How to make them "hard" bodies – not surreal, strange, foreign, leaky, repulsive etc - in other words. But
it should also be seen as part of the obsession of our global capitalism culture - ideal body images, Vogue Magazine articles on the best sexual positions, dieting etc. These two often join in Aase's work: sex ed and tanning beds are on the same page in a lot of ways.

With your "Soft Surrealism" comment, you may be referring to Joyelle's and my manifesto "Find Us With the Lemurs," in which we espouse a "soft surrealism" in opposition to Ron Silliman's rationalist/macho "hardness". We took the central motto from a manifesto Aase wrote with Matthias Forshage (still one of the driving forces of the Surrealist Group) in the 1990s, a manifesto in which they suggested that they were not advocating the old heroic revolution that takes over the city, a revolution which will never come (and would be terrible if it did!), but a revolution of infestation, of submitting oneself to attacks by lemurs. I like that I idea of the artistic experience.

I think part of the statement "soft surrealism" that I don't like is the assumption that there is a true, "hard" surrealism. Surrealismstarted out as Dadaism, started out as shell-shocked soldiers babbling to Breton during WWI, started out in movie theaters, started out with trances and mediumistic exercises, started out with a fascination withcrime and pulp fiction, started out before it started out with Rimbaud, de Sade, Lautremont. A few years in, we might argue that Surrealism became "harder," as it sought to align itself with more traditional leftism. But even during the era of the second manifesto and WWII, I think Surrealism was rather soft, splitting off into other groups (such as the Documents group with Bataille) and translating into many languages and cultures.

Joyelle and I used the term "soft Surrealism" rather as a response to the macho rationalism of Ron's statements. And this goes back to my earlier statement about the naivete of the anti-alienation ideas. Ron is very much a rationalist. Distrusts the visceral and the confusing. His way of dealing with this is to split the world into hardness and softeness, the serious and the frivolous, the illusory and the true. A very binary, reductive worldview. And I would add, that this is no separate from his pervasive distrust of the foreign, the translated (even the British poetry!). I am in favor of the strange, the stranger, the foreigner, the homosexual, the wimp etc.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 5

RK: Translation's always a difficult, tricky and delicate matter. A piece of any language of any complexity simply can't be "brought across" exactly as it is in the original. Since you've translated other writers as well as later-career Aase Berg can you tell us what was particularly and uniquely difficult about translating "With Deer?" What sorts of tough decisions did you encounter and what sorts of compromises did you have to make? And because of such compromises what hasn't come across in the English as much and/or as well as you'd like?

JG: On translation: A lot of people in the US have problems with translations. They're scared that they're not getting the original. But you're never getting the original. No ultimate reading is available. A lot of folks have trouble with translated poems because they sound strange. Of course they do, they are foreign. This foreigness is key I think, because it reveals the artificiality of all language and literature.

Part of what makes Aase's poetry great is the way she makes the Swedish seems foreign, she "minoritizes" it to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology. The most obvious example she does this is by doing strange neologisms which make the reader aware of how weird the regular compounds words are: marsvin = guinea pigs = (night)mare pigs; nackrosen = water lily but also nude rose (with all of its fetal associations).

People in Sweden always say: Oh, how could you possibly translate Aase Berg, it's impossible. The reason for this is all the intense wordplay and such, but that's precisely what I love about translating Aase Berg. It asks me to rethink English entirely. It refuses to be merely transferred from one language to the next but insists on transforming the English in the process. It is very demanding and very rewarding.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 6

RK: You mentioned "visual fascination" earlier and that the poetry in this book "explodes the control, the mastery, that rational gaze that is idealized in much of Art." The book is certainly an onslaught, being swarmed again and again by Lemurs. But one might say that what keeps it (the book, the experience of it) from being completely blown apart, what allows it to maintain "integrity," is that the heroes of the book (in spite of the relentless assault against their bodies, mostly their bodies, and selves) continue to strive-- "you and I, with your soft wax skin and our love." And the book ends on a upbeat note: "Now it is time for the cutting to slowly start to heal." So, one could say that the onslaught, the persistent horror, is just style, style in abundance, overabundance even, and that the substance or gravity--the real heft--of the book comes from its tiny soft-white core. Or is the end of the book a mistake? A cop-out? Or an author's lie? A fake-illusion? Can it really be the beginning of healing? Your thoughts, please.

JG: I suppose you can read the ending of the book as optimistic. However, in difference to the typically arched poem, I would say there is not a conflict resolved in epiphany. Much of western poetry over the past few hundred years follow that paradigm: the broken becomes whole, or - to reference Joyelle's and my "Manifesto of the Disabled Text" – goes from disabled to "healed". Instead here we have damage after damage after damage. There isn't really progress or even narrative; mostly it' s a matter of addition: this happens and this happens etc. There's not causality.

That very last line, while not ironic, sounds insufficient to me, overwhelmed by the melee that precedes it. There is also no stable core, no sense that "this is reality" or "this is the way the worldworks"; therefore it's hard to say what is optimistic and pessimistic. And if there is no ultimate stability, there can be no healing (which means returning to an original balance). It's also important to note that it's the "logging" (the dismemberment) that is going to heal, suggesting that it may be more about getting ready for another "drubbing" than becoming a "healed" individual.

I don't think it's a sad or depressing book; rather, it's an ecstatic book. It's the ecstasy of dismemberment (of body, text, language). The "characters" tend to be frail but ecstatic. They're also not really characters, they don't have any interiorities. They are not any more important than any other object in the book. The "logging" or "drubbing" space of the poem is not brought beneath the rule of characters with interiorities. It's the space, I suppose, more than the characters that is ecstatic

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 7

RK: You referenced Sylvia Plath earlier. The poetry of her husband, Ted Hughes, especially his early and mid-career poetry, came to my mind as I read "With Deer." His poems are also filled with animals. Many of them ARE animals. Also, his language is grotesque--bent, twisted--and often shares with Berg a made-on-the-spot feel. But with Hughes I think you would say that there is a much greater element of the illusion of the control. That Hughes continues, through what are only just projections, to be a relatively cautious and conservative observer. Whereas, as you say in reading Berg, like moviegoers, we are enswarmed. Why do think so many of us, then, are so ready to be masochists? Are we bored? Are we fat and lazy in the shade? Are we, like you and me, (those who enjoy "With Deer" or similar poetry) just more sophisticated connoisseurs of a more sophisticated and literary version of the B-Movies you mentioned earlier? (The danger of shattering poetry is its very own shattering.) And if the time is ripe for lovers of poetry to be masochists then isn't there a clear and present danger (ha ha) for B-Poetry to flower, awash with gore and blood? (I haven't asked a question about Ted Hughes but if you'd like to comment on him and Berg that would be great. Or not.)


JG: Hughes believed in all kinds of Jungian stuff, that's a big difference, it has a higher meaning, an idealism behind it.

Yes, there's a danger of flowers blossoming in blood and gore. Anarchic pleasure.

And I guess we're just masochists.... The masochistic view of art acknowledges that we are not "rational" being; it relinquishes that "gaze of mastery." We cannot think our way out of our ideological house.

I would also say that the goal of poetry like this is not traditional lyric notion of poetry, which is not only to bring the speaker back whole at the end - in Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian terminology the real without the traumatic kernel of the Real, coffee without caffeine, laxatives that taste like chocolate, virtual reality, damage that doesn't damage - but also to do so within a "contemplative space". As Walter Benjamin points out in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Dada and Surrealism sought to "shock" or "distract" the reader out of that contemplative space. Often that "shock" is misread as the Hollywood shocking of giant sharks and such. But it's more of an electrical shock that charges you up and exhausts you. Breton said he felt "charged" from going to the movies with Jacques Vache. And I think Aase's poetry in many ways is a more extreme version of this kind of electric shock: to damage the reader out of his or her numbness. To charge us back to electricity. The "healing" can't start until after the fox-drubbing. The "healing" might be comparable to the exhaustion people reported after coming out of the movie theaters in the 1910s.

The paradox of the way I'm putting this is that the "aliveness" is the compulsive pleasure of jouissance that comes from the death-drive. To go back to Plath, her speaker is scared of opening the bee box because she senses the horrible pleasure of the contents, which is death.

Josh Corey has repeatedly argued on his blog that my poetry and the writings of various poets I like (Lara Glenum, Ariana Reines and others) display a lack of form that he finds himself longing wistfully for; he yearns for a more simple, direct art (like hurling feces at the windows of authority, I think he wrote). I wrote to him that what he is longing for is an idea of the unconscious: that there is all this violent sensation in his own unconscious that he has responsibly tamed with his formal training. But it is an extreme love of form that sends us out of the suburbs and into Dorothy Valens bedroom (to invoke David Lynch's "Blue Velvet"); there is an extreme formalism in Frank's recitation of 50s songs and his ether-breathing-machine. The jouissance comes out of a compulsive form. It is not freedom and artlessness Josh tries to restrain, it is obsessive form, death drive, jouissance.

Likewise there is a lot of talk about the ethical value of bringing people to poetry. Right now I fear that poetry is an instrument of restraining jouissance, of teaching people how to not be carried away, how to be less "artistic" not more. A bunch of Utopian thinking, really. And there can be no utopia if we want to be dead-alive. Modernist architecture is beautiful, but I feel like if I lived in a Modernist building I would have to stand perfectly still and have someone else come in to cut my hair. To shave it off. And to shave off my pubic hair. I would never die. I would always be a dead child.

The other counterpoint to this masochistic enjoyment in art is the 1960s idea of empowering the reader/spectator, of activating the audience. For example Fluxus art or any number of versions of happenings (though some of these were unabashedly masochistic and Artaud-influenced, Oyvind Fahlstrom is an interesting mash-up of the two). In writing, a bunch of texts that come in random order – the reader has to make the decision, has to arrange the chapters etc. (Also known ans choose your own adventure). In a twist similar to the one Zizek mentions about the the passion for the real turning into the spectacle of the real, this kind of art which aimed to activate the reader and be democratic becomes the most controlling: it wants not only to overwhelm the reader/audience, but to control its jouissance, to even control its physical movements (to force them to be "active" to turn the page, to join in the theater etc). Also, whenever I get invited to participate in these kinds of events I feel very awkward and self-conscious. Very manipulated. I prefer to sit back in the dark.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: 3 for the Road

..


Questions for the Road:



RK: Tea or Coffee?

JG: Coffee with caffeine. Without it I can't deal.


RK: Palm trees or thorn trees?

JG: I like palm trees. I'm not sure what thorn trees are but it sounds very Christian. I most of all love evergreens. Especially near the beach.


RK: Cum, shit, spit or blood?

JG: This questions offends my refined sensibilities.


(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Coming Soon

This Blog will soon feature an interview with Johannnes Göransson regarding his translation of Aase Berg's "With Deer" which will release in early 2009 from Black Ocean.

Aase Berg is one of Sweden's foremost poets and, in my opinion, she's the source of some of the most exciting poetry written by any one alive in any language.

Johannes is a poet, critic, theorist, translator, teacher,
husband and father,-- and he has a great blog you should
check out if you're not already familiar with it

"With Deer" is shocking, horrifying, dynamic, powerful, etc, etc, etc and in one word: Wonderful.....

Ever since I read a handful of Berg's first-book poems on Conduit I've been waiting for the release, in English, of the entire collection.

So, look for the interview soon... and after that, the book itself !!,...