GEMINILOGGBOOKOBERDADAISTICUS
Jarlo Martel-monto, what a bizarre poet.
The literature I grew up reading was mainly science fiction. Then, by the time when I had actually borrowed and read each and every SF book available on the two nearest libraries, my literary interest got caught by dadaism, absurdism, and all kinds of experimental poetry. For years I would find conventional story-telling tedious. This was in the late 1980's and early 1990's, a period when experimental writing was largely viewed as an embarrasing historical misstep. Only two decades earlier, formalist literary experiments were not uncommon and got published by some of the largest and most prestigious publishers, so a few titles from this golden era were still available, collecting dust in the libraries.
Swedish literature and art in the 1960's was blessed with the presence of Öyvind Fahlström, a highly influential and innovative character who wrote a manifesto of concrete poetry, Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben (which is a phrase in the Swedish translation of Winnie the Pooh, being his attempt to spell "Happy Birthday"). Fahlström's manifesto and poetry had a great impact on a generation of composers active at Fylkingen and EMS, the advanced and foresighted electronic music studio in Stockholm. The group, which included Bengt Emil Johnson, Sten Hanson, Åke Hodell, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, and Ilmar Laaban, would become known as pioneers of the text-sound movement. They all wrote experimental texts and made sound works, often combined with visual poetry. Bengt Emil Johnson's Sex essäer om Bror Barsk (Six Essays on Bror Barsk) is a stunning example of a typewriter poem where isolated words and phrases can sometimes be discerned, but often the chaotic heaps of letters just congeal into graphical images.
Erik Beckman wrote experimental novels, and I would consider his Inlandsbanan a masterpiece. It is confusing yet logical and consistent in its arbitrary replacement of words and expressions. Jarl Hammarberg wrote concrete poetry and sometimes collaborated with his more famous wife Sonja Åkesson. By most standards, his is not good poetry or something one would expect to stand the test of time. Considered in formal terms, it does not have the stringency of an Ernst Jandl or a Gerhard Rühm. Fragments of some story or situation often shine through the word salad. The texts are often monotonous in their insistent repetition with seemingly haphazard variations, broken by the occasional profanity or misspelled word. Yet, for some reason, his writing retains a certain freshness, maybe because it stands out as so different from other concrete poetry. It is naïve and silly, never elegant or superficially aesthetisised, sometimes balancing on the verge of the comprehensibly signifying only to break up its traces of meaning. Jarl Hammarberg was also an esperantist (which is why he sometimes wrote under the signature Jarlo Martel-monto), a peace activist, and he agitated for living in collectives. Those were of course rather common options for a radical leftist at that time, while leftists actually still were radical.
I recall reading a few of Hammarberg's books around 1990, and later at some point I found one at some used book store called Brev från Jarl (Letters from Jarl). Letters is a remarkable endeavour, trying to address the reader, including those who are not "poetry experts" with explanations of how he wrote the texts and suggestions of how to best read them (slowly, aloud). The tone is distinctly anti-intellectual, or at least free from any snobbishness, and remarkably colloquial in contrast to some of the abstract poems. He also quotes several readers' responses to his writing, most of them hostile, puzzled, or critical, and a few more positive ones. Very likely many of the responses come from critics or readers who react to the fact that "such rubbish" had been published in their newspaper. Publishing poems side by side with their exegesis is usually not a very good idea. Aleister Crowley did so in The Book of Lies. Hammarberg's explanations, however, do not divulge any concealed "meaning" if there even is one, they comment on the writing process and motivation, or provide insights into his life.
In a famous episode, during Hammarberg's début exhibition as an artist in 1965, he had put a sign on the entrance to the gallery that said (in translation): REFUSE TO KILL. REFUSE MILITARY SERVICE. For this peaceful statement he had to pay a fine. He had also hung a large handwritten poster in the gallery with some kind of artist statement, a text that ended with a question: "Is there a girl who is interested in me? Yes, I'd like to have a girlfriend." Sonja Åkesson was there, and they would later get married.
The political context and attitude common to the experimental poetry of the neo-avantgarde (let's say, a distrust in communicative language after having seen it abused in the service of wartime propaganda) is layed out in this long article about sound art in Austria, France, and Sweden:
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Finally, thanks to my readers who chime in with valuable feedback. I've updated some of my latest posts.
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