Poetry and the Deep

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award

Göran Sonnevi
Oceanen (The Ocean)
Bonniers 2005

By Ralf Andtbacka

Göran Sonnevi's Oceanen, which was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2006, justifies its name like few other collections of poetry, not just by its impressive length (over 400 pages) but to an even greater extent by the scope of its thematic and poetic content. Dante is a recurring reference; sure enough, there is in Sonnevi's poetry a reflection of The Divine Comedy's pretensions to universality, to the extent that something like that is possible in our fragmented, objectified and information-saturated era.

Reading it, my associations go to the American poet John Ashbery's most comprehensive work, the long poem Flow Chart, from the year 1991. There too one gets a feeling of sinking down into a mass of text that simply by its volume functions as an effective representation of the passage of time, the ramifications of thought and the existential movement that is dogged by the certainty of personal extinction.

But while Ashbery's text seems to grow out of a fundamental scepticism towards our attempts at establishing meaning - Ashbery's writing strategies are often described as a parody of the struggle for understanding - Sonnevi clings to the dialectic exchange between proposition and counter-proposition that gives rise to new syntheses in thought and conscience's titanic struggle with the unanswerable questions of existence.

Joints without stops
In the text, the unfinished and open aspects of this struggle are indicated by the fact that sentences are run together without a full stop. Instead, Sonnevi uses spacing that acts as caesurae in the text and at the same time becomes an essential part of its rhythm and breathing: "The caesurae are opened like portals      It happens at every point," he explains in a metapoetically relevant passage. Larger units are joined together by means of plus-signs, in a constant addition or process of creation. The comparison readily presents itself to liken the text to an organic process or a constant changing within something that is perhaps irreducible: "The Ocean is at every moment new      The Ocean remains", as the last line of the collection puts it.

What is missing in Ashbery's works but is evident in Sonnevi's, is an ethical exhortation, a particular tone of sincerity that controls the tone, as a safeguard against both trivialisation and certainty of faith. As a reader, one is forced to relate to this expression of a poetic and intellectual temperament. One can sometimes find it overpowering, in a rather problematic way, through the enormously ambitious use of naming, even for things that are supposedly beyond the limits of language. The text surges between the poles of thought, between microcosm and macrocosm, nothing and everything, a grain of sand and infinity - and between doubt and doubting the doubt.

At some stage, I feel that I just can't read the word "infinity" one more time. The typical thing about Sonnevi's text is that it also anticipates this reaction, even shares it: I must stop using that word, the poetic first-person declares frustratedly at one point. And in this way, space is created for continued dialogue.

Communication and self-criticism
One can only admire Sonnevi's ability to combine the most varied subjects and levels in a poetry that bears an unusually clear signature. Personal reflections, memories that pop up, and concrete observations are layered masterfully with socio-political summaries, scientific observations and abstract concepts. Anyone who doesn't know, for example, what "Gödel numbering", "Cantor dust" and "stochastic form" are is given the incentive to find out, but the poetry communicates even without having to work out all the technical terms. Sometimes they acquire meaning simply through repetition: ideas, patterns and tendencies recur, but in varied form, like the theme in a fugue. And music is never far away in Sonnevi's poetry, not even in the most prose-like passages.

Globalisation, the terrorist acts of September 11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are covered in the text's now, and become subjects for penetrative analyses. Sonnevi self-critically examines his relationship to the leftist movement of the 60s and the misjudgements it was guilty of, at the same time as he attempts to acquire a perspective on today's socio-economic and world-political development. The USA's power-political ambitions are summed up in the term "the Empire", a dissociation as clear as anything, but the poetry's bite is also directed against simplifications and blind-spots in those who want to stand for the alternative.

Sometimes, Sonnevi seems to come perilously close to resignation when faced with the state of the world, which is coupled with a rebellious individualism:

Göran T looks at me, asks: will you manage your impossible task
- I don't know, I reply
And he says: - I knew yo would say that! You're always so cautious! But I really don't know

I don't know what this is
I shall not know
The change goes deeper

"How I move further out, over the deep
There is / no way set out in advance, no method", say the following lines. This of course is something quite different from resignation, it's a confirmation of the primary task of the poem: to continue questioning.

Ralf Andtbacka (born 1963) is a poet and lives in Vasa, Finland. He has worked as a teacher of languages and philosophy, been involved in various literary festivals, and translated poetry from English and Finnish.

Translated by Roy Hodson