9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 11 :: TIFF DRESSEN on INGER CHRISTENSEN and ALPHABET*
*ALPHABET translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
About ten years ago I was part of a poetry reading group in the San Francisco Bay Area where a fellow poet (and I wish I could remember who!) suggested that we dive into Inger Christensen’s book, alphabet.
Indeed, I dove into that book-length poem and one might say I’ve yet to re-emerge to the surface. I know that sounds dramatic, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever had such an experience with any other poet or book of poems before. And I’ll do my best to try and articulate why I’ve had such a long-term relationship with Christensen and alphabet.
At the heart, alphabet emerges from a mathematical series called the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc. in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. Or in the case of Christensen’s poem, the number of lines of each section of the poem are the sum of the lines from the two previous sections. In this way, the poem progresses like the prodigious branching of maple or oak trees. In fact, the Fibonacci sequence appears not infrequently in nature, such as in the arrangement of leaves on a stem or of a pine cone’s bracts, or in the flowering of an artichoke. The effect this poem (and its progression) has on my simple brain is one of awe, the spell I’ve fallen under — that she was able to create such a prodigious space in which to contain and address a world and its inhabitants.
The poem begins quietly with one modest, simple line:
“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”
As if the apricot trees are the first thing to be named in her Genesis. Throughout the poem, Christensen returns to those apricot trees, the fruits (dried up or ripening), the making of the apricot jam; apricot trees are the poem’s refrain, the thing you can count on, the thing your life depends on when elsewhere there is destruction:
“cobalt bombs exist
wrapped in their cloaks
of cobalt-60 isotopes
whose half-life
ensures the most
harmful effects
there’s no more to
say; we ensure that
the harm is as great
as it can be….”
Inger Christensen was a celebrated Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor living and writing with the ghost of Chernobyl and, although alphabet was published five years before Chernobyl, it reads as though the poet knew the disaster was imminent:
“…but before they vanish, before we
vanish, one evening we sit at the table with
a little bread, a few fish without cankers, and water
cleverly turned into water…”
I’d like to return for a moment to the capaciousness of alphabet, where beauty and ugliness coexist, go hand-in-hand:
“wheat in the wheatfields exists, the head-spinning
horizontal knowledge of wheatfields, half-lives,
famine and honey; and deepest in the heart,
the roots of the hazel, the hazel that stands
on the hillslope of the heart, tough and hardy,
an accumulated weekday of Angelic orders;
high-speed, hyacinthic in its decay, life,
on earth as it is in heaven”
And elsewhere:
“the cruel experiments
that the Teller group
performed on
Eniwetok where
the waves of the
Pacific raged in fury,
or any of all
the experiments that
the Sakharov group
performed on
Novaya Zemlya where
the waves of the Arctic
Ocean raged in fury…”
This expansive world of alphabet allowed my young poet self to explore the many points of entry, the generous openings it offered. I became captivated and enamored by a particular set of images in section 9 (the 55-line section where I stopped counting):
“Icarus wrapped in the melting wax
wings exists, Icarus pale as a corpse
in street clothes, Icarus deepest down where
doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
the dreamers, their hair with detached
tufts of cancer, the skin of the dolls tacked together
with pins, the dryrot of riddles; and smiles,
Icarus-children white as lambs
in greylight, indeed they will exist, in-
deed we will exist, with oxygen on its crucifix,
as rime we will exist, as wind,
as the iris of the rainbow in the iceplant’s gleaming
growths, the dry tundra grasses, as small beings
we will exist, small as pollen bits in peat,
as virus bits in bones, as water-thyme perhaps,…”
Perhaps I’d been spending too much time in the Aegean (though it was the Ionian Sea that claimed Icarus), but I was fascinated by these Icarus-children. I felt some imperative to take off from there and explore these mysterious beings. Who are they? Who are we? What was their psychological and spiritual inheritance? What is the difference between inheritance and experience? It may have been the first time I’d truly felt in conversation with another writer.
Or, at the very least, the first time I’d ever responded to one in any meaningful way. The poem ended up being called “Because Icarus-children,” and if Christensen had been alive (she died in early 2009), I would have sent it to her — in gratitude for her work. The poem is far too long to quote in full and I feel hesitant to quote any of it here, but for the sake of a conversation that truly matters to me, I’ll end with an excerpt:
“Because we believe in the whole helio
centric gaze in the sky as house
of the dreamer
Because of the Ionian sea and
the Ionian scar we ask the absent
body to be restored to the present heart
because we are children
of clouds and distributed memory
machines
because of our eternal workings
the first glimpsed wings heart ovary brain
we have consumed many lifetimes”
Tiff Dressen lives in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco. Songs from the Astral Bestiary, a (slender) full-length collection of poetry, emerged from lyric& Press in 2014. In 2019, they played the role of Earl of Kent in the Milkwood Theater’s production of King Lear. In their spare time, they enjoy urban flâneuring, chasing their cats in the backyard, and setting type and printing at the SF Center for the Book.
