Jon Auring Grimm, PhD Candidate, Aarhus University

“The Musicality of Nature and Cosmic Ornamentation: Poetic knowledge and ecological imagination in Inger Christensen“

The entire web of relationships among all existing phenomena that constitutes our world must lead to an increasingly refined understanding that our cultural forms, all human-made expressions, including the diverse forms of poetry, can indeed be regarded as entities in themselves, but above all are forms of nature.

Inger Christensen

We are the desire of the cosmos to view itself. So simple, yet so radical, is the insight permeating the textual corpus of the acclaimed Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935-2009). Christensen regard nature as a process that encompasses everything, and humans are just a way in which nature unfolds, one of the many diverse and exceptional ways it composes itself. In other words, nature is understood as a continuous and dynamic process, an amorphous and indeterminate place of becoming.

Christensen posits music as the quintessential “fundamental condition” of nature and the traces of this immanent activity Christensen recognizes in the visual ornaments of nature. The ornament represents the manifestation of inner activity, serving as “a sign of cosmic activity [that] indicates the path out of chaos. The ornament emulates the movements of water, air, fire, and earth”. The poet is capable of articulating and replicating the patterns, or movements of the ornament. This implies that the poem can assume the same composition as the ornament, not as a result of comparison or mimesis, but as an ongoing unfolding process. This is more aptly described as a poetic becoming, wherein the poet, in alignment with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, engages with and enters “into a composition” of the ornament, not through mimesis, but by connecting with the motif and velocity of the ornament. Just as heliotropes track the sun across the sky and the eye is shaped in the dynamic image of the sun, so too can the poet become plant, heart, sun, and cosmos, but also city, labyrinth, fragment, and disorientation.

Language is considered an “extension of nature’s creative forces, and a rupture”, but herein […], lies the tension that makes abyss and bridge appear and grow simultaneously, as reconcilable, and irreconcilable dimensions,” writes Christensen. Language allows both abyss and bridge to emerge simultaneously; it is in this sense that poetry can be a way to develop sensitive forms of perception, new ecological sensibilities, and alternative ways of understanding and approaching questions about nature. In other words, via poetry we can cultivate our ecological imagination.

In my presentation I will introduce the poetry and thought world of Inger Christensen. I will treat her, not only as a poet, but as a highly original thinker of ecology and poetic knowledge.