Language broke when I did – and concrete minimalism became my way to try and process and communicate this experience.
My minimalist concrete poetry resides in a concentrated, highly magnified landscape, where the fundamental traits that define and make up language begin to disintegrate and fall away. This condensed yet fractured expression was the only form that could hold and communicate my persistent, always recurring, feminist themes – often centered on, and emanating from, a deep sense of inadequacy, shame, and fear. Complex feelings all intimately tied to a defining experience I had as a young girl when first encountering and trying to fully grasp the consequences of living in a patriarchal society. An intensely disruptive experience leaving me with a vast inner room of forced muteness, which I later came to find could be communicated only through a thoroughly restricted, yet also fractured, poetry.
This forced muteness often finds its way to expression in my poems through the form of absence. The page meant for communication is left largely empty and the words that do appear are broken or incomplete. It is here, in this silence and deficiency of language, I feel mine and Johannes S. H. Bjerg’s poetry meet – both poetics being expressions of a wordless state imbued with silence.
Bjerg’s asemic writing communicating tentatively and delicately, almost reluctantly, as if from a paradoxical wish to also preserve, and not break, the holy, ever present silence from which the poem arises. This making the source of Bjerg’s asemic poems a peaceful and pure silence, all the while my minimalist poetry arises from an inner omnipresent speechlessness.
Seen in this way, Bjerg’s’ asemic writing might be said to be coming from before the all-altering experience of entering into human existence. The poems springing from the impossibility of language to fully encompass and communicate the human experience leaving the asemic writer to invent a new language, in a careful attempt to speak truthfully.
One could say that our poetries face each other as if from opposite sides of a membrane: Johannes’ writing from an indefinite wordless space and mine from a mute closed up place where language is insufficient and treacherous. In both places words remain lacking. And it is in this very inadequacy of language that our poems meet in this collection, EYESORE, a kind of shared breaking of silence.
Johannes S. H. Bjerg is a Danish writer and artist. He works hard at not overdoing it. www.megaga.dk
Charlotte Jung is a concrete poet and playwright based in Stockholm – for more information about her and her work please see www.charlottejungwriter.com
