10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 8 :: PAUL CUNNINGHAM on AASE BERG
Week two of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Kate Hedeen and focuses on poetry in translation. Read her curatorial statement here.
Aase Berg is my single greatest poetic influence. Many friends and fans of my work know this. Before Rimbaud or Baudelaire, I came across Berg’s prose poems. I discovered Johannes Göransson’s translations of Aase Berg at 17. One of her books of poetry in particular changed my life forever: Hos Rådjur (With Deer), published by Black Ocean. Her Swedish neologisms, which Göransson has written about extensively, gave me permission to take risks with language. There is no other book like it. And no bookshelf should be without it. With Deer was also the first bilingual poetry book I ever owned. I quickly became fascinated by the closeness between Swedish and English:
Dörten öppnades, han kom hem. / The door opened, he came home.
Aside from Berg’s profound influence on my own poetry (and in lieu of a Swedish Rosetta Stone), I began trying to teach myself Swedish by using the bilingual edition of With Deer to create my own set of language rules. I managed to map a system of similarities. I found well-known Disney cartoons (i.e. The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty) with Swedish subtitles on YouTube. While it would be years before I’d make Swedish friends and learn I had been pronouncing so many words incorrectly, I had always felt very confident in my writing and reading skills.
I eventually found a short essay of Berg’s published in an online literary journal called Double Room. Berg’s thoughts on the prose poem became my scripture. I came to know the prose poem as a dynamic device of anti-logic, a way to combat suffocating masculine literary traditions. Suddenly, not everything had to be about plot, I could break away from pattern, I could look to Berg’s surreal neologisms and create new language:
The prose poem has an enormous potential to be suggestive in its own way. It can function as an unmetaphorical, hard, objective image. It’s a completely different way of proceeding, a pipeline into the way the brain works when one stops filtering things through consciousness. The prose poem doesn’t need a meaning, a message; it speaks a dream language, a language that wants to slip through language and use it, that wants to make the words into body in a total concretion. I don’t think dreams mean anything; they just are. There’s no reason to translate them into logic.
A member of Swedish Surrealistgruppen i Stockholm (the Surrealist Group in Stockholm), Berg was also my first exposure to theories of surrealism. I read her thoughts on dreams and consciousness long before Breton’s. In many ways, Berg — a woman poet — always functioned as an invaluable lens I used for applying to masculine poetic texts. I learned so much from her poems and her essays. That said, while Charles Henri Ford (who I adore) made us very aware of Breton’s homophobia, I am not suggesting we should not read Breton. On the contrary. We should read Breton. People are constantly telling me what I should and should not read. I recognize Breton’s homophobia, but I still value Breton. Multiple things can be true at once — no matter what social media says.
At 21, I read another life-changing text: Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” I came out the same year, shortly after finishing that essay. I quickly began thinking about queer ecologies and Berg’s strong influence on my work. Considering Berg’s approach to bodies and landscape, I wondered if I could use a foreign language like Swedish to queer my English-language poems. That’s when I found out about “hen,” a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish. My “Henetics Poetics” poems were born and published in an issue of the now-defunct Toad Suck Review:
PRONOUN
hen third-person singular, masculine, nominative
case (accusative hen or henom, possessive
hens)
(neologism) A personal pronoun of unspecified
gender; alternative to hon (“she”) or han (“he”).
a desire to be hen-feathered
hen-worn
lilla hens boa-roaming
across the farm
my hen sighs like a forest
sleeves, my hen
loops I wear with prongs, pangs
my pained hen, my malnutritioned
henline, my hemline
my rags of hen
What is our meaning,
my lilla hen?
Knowing Berg lived on a farm in Sweden, I brought up the subject of animals in my 2017 Fanzine interview with her. From the presence of the horse in With Deer to the Trojan horses of Hackers, I asked her about her fascination with the animal. She replied,
You have to grow into the horse’s body to be able to ride. It’s like dancing, or sex. But the horse is also a symbol of the oppressed. It’s oppressed in itself — the humans control the horses completely — we control their reproduction, their food, their space. And the horse is always protesting in some ways — destroying the fence, running away, sometimes refusing to do what you ask them to do.
As an increasingly ecologically motivated poet-translator, this is something I’m still working on today. What is the horse in the next poem? What is the symbol or image in question? How do I grow into it? How do I translate its protest into my poems? How do my poems protest? Do they protest successfully?
TRIBUTE TO AASE BERG:
GRIEVEGOAT
In the dream I own a quiet farm, but the farm and its animals suffer from days. There is a quiet city, too. On a city sidewalk, I swear I see myself on my side. Earthworms burning up in the sun. Where have the old bodies of the city gone? I wake up. Now, the city is quiet with quiet nursing homes and quiet money. Money is so, so quiet. Everything in bandages is quiet now. I left the silent city to buy a quiet farm. I bought the farm to raise a goat. An award-winning goat, a blue-ribbon goat. For some reason, I wanted to raise a goat that only a city could love. I feed this goat everything I have because this goat suffers from days and I have nothing but days to give. My goat eats grass until the field is gone, until nothing grows. My goat thrives on nothing. It will take everything from me. I feed it different objects. Plastic, glass, rotten berries. It takes wine corks from my hand, it takes everything from me. My goat plugs me up with everything, but it feels like nothing’s there. I eat everything a goat can eat, yet I cannot believe this is true. I must be its beloved enemy, I must not be myself, I must have a stomach for it.
Paul Cunningham is the author of the The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism2 Press, 2020) and his latest chapbook is The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020). He is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019) and two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). He is a managing editor of Action Books, co-editor of Radioactive Cloud, and co-curator of the Yumfactory Reading Series. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. @p_cunning
