Poetry’s Intervention and Interaction in a Global and Digital World

Contemporary poetry appears in a diverse range of forms and medial constellations: in spoken word events live on stage, on audio CDs – spoken by the poets themselves or by professional speakers, at times accompanied by music or beats –, in YouTube videos, as entertaining ‘poetry clips,’ as artistic poetry films in art installations in museums, public spaces or the cinema. Finally, there is a wide range of new experimental media poetry that employs kinetic script or natural or manipulated human voices, thus translating visual and sound poetry into the digital realm. These recent developments have drawn attention to the intermedial tradition of poetry, which has long been overlooked. However, new theories are required to analyze today’s multimodal and intermedial forms of poetry. Another factor that has not been considered satisfactorily is the reciprocal entanglement of ‘high art’ and ‘pop culture,’ a significant feature of contemporary poetry. Philological research, which has customarily dealt with printed poems in books, has to integrate methods from disciplines such as media and performance studies, art theory, musicology and linguistics. The talk at the Aalborg conference will discuss the three most pertinent intermedial constellations by presenting exemplary German-speaking works from three topic areas: poetry and performance, poetry and music, and poetry and audiovisual art. CLAUDIA BENTHIEN, HAMBURG UNIVERSITY POETRY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: TOPIC AREAS OF AN INTERMEDIAL APPROACH PETER DAYAN, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH “THE BASIC MATERIAL IS NOT THE WORD BUT THE LETTER”: GLOBAL POETRY AS SCULPTURE, FROM 1916 TO 2018. In January 2018, the artist Nathan Coley installed a large, permanent, and highly visible work in the foyer of Edinburgh University Library (the largest University library building in the UK) which consisted of the words in the title of my paper, in lights. He referred to this work, not as a poem, but as “an illuminated sculpture”. Words are signifying objects within language systems. Letters, on the other hand, can be taken, like sculptures, as physical objects, not trapped within any language. The letter may therefore be taken as more universal than the word, and thus, as an element of poetry, a contestation of the national, inasmuch as national poetries (unlike sculptures) are tied to national languages. It was by precisely such a celebration of the letter, and a refusal of the word within a language, that the Dada movement began the radical contestation of poetic nationalism that was the ancestor of today’s global art. But what if, as poetry became made of letters rather than words, it ceased to be poetry, and became, instead, sculpture? From the graphic art of Tristan Tzara, via the sculpted poetry of Ian Hamilton Findlay, to the illuminated letters of Nathan Coley and Martin Creed, this paper traces what happens as the letters of poetry claim to become global things. KARIN NYKVIST, LUND UNIVERSITY CREATIVE DISTORTION. DESTROYING AND MIMICKING LANGUAGE IN THE SOUND POETRY OF EIRIKUR ÖRN NORD∂AHL How does a language sound to someone who does not speak it? Like noise – but recognisable, human voicenoise, noise that can clearly be identified as language. It is, however, language made strange. The very purpose of language, communication and signification, seems to be missing. But unintelligible language still signifies: it conveys ideas of national and cultural identity, and of a certain geographical space. It also makes the listener acutely aware of the materiality of her own language(s) and its (their) borders. My presentation investigates how Nordic vernaculars are made strange in the poetic work of Icelandic poet, novelist and performance artist Eirikur Örn Nord∂ahl (b. 1978). In his sound-poetic work The Scandinavian Series (2007), Örn Nord∂ahl explores the ideas and sounds of different Scandinavian languages through disturbing and distorting his own vernacular, Icelandic. The series, which is published on the Internet and therefore not situated in geographical space, conjures up a “Scandinavian” soundscape of recognisable but undecipherable language noise that comes across as eerily multilingual: all in all turning listening to the series into an unplaceable yet familiar –thus thoroughly unheimlich – experience. My presentation shows how Örn Nord∂ahl in this work uses creative language play to explore the sonic materiality of language while radically challenging the ideas of monolingualism, communication through speech, the connection of geography and nation to language, and the borders and usages of spoken language. HANS KRISTIAN RUSTAD, OSLO UNIVERSITET THE POLITICS OF POETRY. THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF SCANDINAVIAN POLITICAL POETRY IN THE 21ST CENTURY. RESEARCH PROPOSAL I will present a draft for a grant proposal that will be submitted for the Norwegian Research Council's FriPro program. The grant proposal is titled The politics of poetry. The Form and Function of Scandinavian political poetry in the 21st Century. Here, I (or a "we") claim that we lack systematic studies of the politics of Scandinavia poetry in the 21st century, including research that more extensively describe s and produces knowledge about its diversity of modes and media. We also lack research and knowledge on the social and educational role of Scandinavian poetry. Therefore, the overarching objective of this project is to develop new understandings of the role and function of the politics of poetry in Scandinavia. What is political poetry in the 21st century? What are its forms and media? How does political poetry contribute in engaging readers in political questions in our contemporary society? How can poetry contribute to a greater knowledge on contemporary political situations and national and global crises both in and outside of Scandinavia? The presentation will include the background for a project concerning the politics of Scandinavian poetry in the 21st century and a suggestion on how to approach the question of form and function of the politics of poetry. PETER STEIN LARSEN, AALBORG UNIVERSITY GLOBAL POETRY BETWEEN GENRES, ART FORMS, AND MEDIA. RESEARCH PROPOSAL Poetry research is facing significant challenges in the years to come. By developing interdisciplinary methods to explain Global Poetry in its entire stylistic, intertextual, interartial, intermedial, cultural, social and political context, this project will signify a shift of paradigm for poetry research. In the project, Global Poetry is defined as: 1) Poetry from the global age where boundaries of genres, art forms, media, languages and cultures are breaking, 2) and where there is a correspondence between a local and a global perspective. GLOBALPOETRY is the first major international research project to focus on the expansion in the production, distribution and reception of Global Poetry in the new millennium. The project is ground-breaking in relation to the state-of-the-art by identifying Global Poetry within four fields of tension: Between the traditional notion of the poetic genre and a genredecomposing notion, between literature and other art forms, between the book medium and other media and between poetry and the social and political issues of the global world. The project will investigate how poetry functions in two important ways in the global world. First, poetry has an outstanding ability to change, develop and adapt itself through its interaction with other discourses, genres, art forms, media and cultures. Secondly, compared to other genres, poetry presents a unique way of communicating in a global world by offering an oppositional language and an alternative way of thinking. Therefore, Global Poetry is able to find innovative ways for challenging global problems, including the climate crisis, social inequality and ethnic and sexual stigma. The aim is: a) to provide an innovative coherent framework for understanding Global Poetry b) to use theory not previously used in poetry research, to develop interdisciplinary methods, c) and to investigate the literary-historical, arthistorical, social and political implications of Global Poetry. UNNI LANGÅS, UNIVERSITETET I AGDER