A miracle working icon: the poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf
by Steven Fowler
[ poetry - july 10 ]
The action is thus - an icon is painted before us, in words. What was once a shank of wood is carved by the paintbrush. The gender is indistinct. The eyes are crossed, the fingers are red, worn from manual labour. The dress is blue and white, but thin and veiled, an occidental interpretation of a harem's veil. We begin to think the eyes are crossed because the icon is blind. Then it is before us in all its glory, a statue, ostensibly, but far more than this, a religious novum in the most reverent, personal, eschewed fashion. It is personal, beautiful, a shedding of the need of language within language. The viewer, still preoccupied with their own slight feeling of voyeurism, made to suspect themselves of indulgence, perhaps even passionate perversity, the kind that could be excused to their own self but not to others looking on, believes the painting is done, the icon in its redress is resplendent and truly completed. It is cautious and yet absolute in it's originality, a harking back without nostalgia, driven into being by a new way of speaking, of carving, the faintest hints of modernist courage lost around the eyes, the limited stock of surrealism perhaps around the toes, eeking out beneath the robes. What is being witnessed is poetry, that is the icon has been summoned to escape, and indeed a path has been opened. Then, perhaps to the viewer's shock or satisfaction, the true work begins. Inch by inch, fold by fold, the poet begins to disrobe the icon and gives us a naked saint, so that we may see and not be able to follow.
The greatest of the Swedish modernists, the most secular of mystics, Gunnar Ekelöf is one of the very finest of modern European poets. Born into a gentrified family in 1907, in Stockholm, he was one of the last to follow the ecstatic revolution in Scandinavian literature, after the likes of Ibsen, Hamsun, Garborg and Strindberg. The outpouring of reflective, burdened personal emotion, of self analysis, of the destructive power of civilised discourse marks out the poetry, prose and theatre of this turn of the century milieu, and as though living the works of those who had come before him, Ekelöf was indelibly marked by his father's death from syphilis induced insanity while he was a child. His mother, a member of the petty nobility, was indifferent to her son and as had happened with Arthur Schopenhauer, this emotional isolation surrounded by the literal means of wealth produced a superlative gift for the imagination and the expressive in the young poet. Like Schopenhauer too, this became directed toward the Oriental, the Eastern mode, in the turning away from Christianity and European parochialism.
After brief periods studying in London and Uppsala, Ekelöf became a student of music in Paris and became familiar with the work of the Surrealists. He forever maintained their influence on him was limited, that their methodologies were prescriptive and crude. At times the spectre of modernism, surrealism and the avant garde revolutions in poetry during the early years of the twentieth century are by the confutations of their given status utterly out of reach of the contemporary poet. They are often a mode of poetry that cannot be repeated without churlishness, an influence that must in it's action be disavowed. Ekelöf superseded these limitations because he removed the need for analysis and posturing. He wrote always to his own sounding out, without peer in Sweden and utterly dislocated from his French forebears. He remains one of the few poets able to look eye to eye with these movements and appear affected but not indebted. Though a translator of Robert Desnos into Swedish in later years, perhaps it is his remarkable translations of Rimbaud and Lautréamont that reveal where his true debt lay to the canon of French poetry.
His first collection 'Late on the Earth' (1932), was not received with any particular fanfare. His described it's writing as suicidal, a process of poetry amidst emotional upheaval, and indeed his use of cryptic linguistic constructions, etymological tracings, repetitions seem to hark to the best of European experimental movements and yet almost by design, seem utterly impersonal, impenetrable to the reader. They are Ekelöf's noises while drowning. He describes the period:
"I literally used to walk around with a revolver in my pocket. Illegally, for that matter. In my general despair I did everything possible to remain in my dream-world - or to be quickly removed from it."
As his work began to transform, as he aged, returned to Stockholm, his esoteric embracing of the poetic medium began to become tempered by more direct images in his work. In consequence, and without design, his poetry became more to hand, though the high experimentation left it's trace in his remarkable use of typography and the relentlessness of his images. By the time of Ferry Song (1941) and Non Serviam (1945) his oscillation between obtuse mysticism and deeply personal intellectualism had won him great acclaim.
Like the Polish poet Tadeusz Rosewicz, Ekelöf became concerned in the post-war era with the limitations of extended poetric expression and the meaninglessness of excess. During the 50s and early 60s his collections Opus Incertum (1959) and A Night in Otocac (1961) revealed his preoccupation with a form of anti-aestheticism. Almost an overturning of his own means, the work is slim, sharp and resolute. Though losing weight it retains Ekelöf's ability to carve images of deep specificity, of trance like experience, of disbelief, and where the work of Rosewicz is a mirror which shames its inhabitants, Ekelöf's spare poetry rather embraces too intimately, becomes almost too poignant for the reader.
In his final years Ekelöf's lifetime preoccupation with the East took over his work. He professed to have been possessed while writing, overcome, sitting in the cafés of Istanbul. His truly remarkable Byzantine trilogy of Diwan, Fatumeh and Vägvisare (1965-1967) recalls the poetic device utilised so potently by Constantine Cavafy. Neither poet truly resides in the place of their poetry, removed, as it were, into antiquity. Their calling back is never nostalgic. It is vehicle all the more adroit because it speaks of their time, of a form of timeless isolation, of a profound suspicion toward professed progress. In a letter Ekelöf wrote.
Why have I become interested in the Byzantine, the Greek life? Because Byzantine life, traditionally and according to deep-rooted custom, is like the political life in our cities and states. I am intensely interested in it because I hate it. I hate what is Greek. I hate what is Byzantine.
It is in his final works we see the very centre of his oeuvre. Ekelöf has no desire to create some inclusive cross cultural synthesis in his poetry. He traces no historical path, no philosophical dialectic. Rather poetry is a carving process, an eroding. His work discards, it peels away layer after layer of distanciation, of cultural sediment, of simplicity, of expressive cowardice. This process is obscene, it is personal, exposed. All the more obvious to Ekelöf that this be the only way to reach the truly human, that which is universal to us all. Those that walk this path discover they are alone but watched in their solitude by others, and this is the only comfort available to them. Better this than the placebo of religion or intellectual anaemia.
In the very last poem of his very last collection, published posthumously, collated from the work he wrote while suffering painful final days of life, he penned the line 'I rest my case on nothingness,' and in so doing, appropriately, concluded his own sophistication. Part of Ekelöf's mystical belief lay in numerological theories, that the world of perception, of subjective experience, was underpinned by the balance of opposites given archetype in odd and even numbers, a reconvening of the coincidentia oppositorum. Life is an odd number, death an even. He died of cancer of the throat in 1968 and his ashes were spread over the grounds of the ancient city of Sardis.
