books received: The climate of the lion-cut, followed by Anaesthesia, under and over

By Irene Jensenius (translated by Berta Viscossi). Stark Horse, Schenectedy NY. 2007.

Stark Horse, the small but valiant editorial house based in the bucolic Schenectedy must be lauded for its consistent effort in introducing to American audiences the most select Scandinavian post-neoconcrete poetry. In this daring new bilingual translation, Robert Viscossi presents two of the seminal (or rather, as the poet herself would insist, "feminal") works in the latter, metaphysical oeuvre of Irene Jensenius, published in that fruitful year of 1968: The climate of the lion-cut and Anaesthesia, under and over.

With these two works Jensenius, the famous burning Lilith in the Swedish Winter of Lust, inspired the public incineration of not only the brassieres in avant-garde Swedish literary circles, but, also infamously, that of the Swedish literary establishment itself. Viscossi usefully discusses this performative dimension of Jensensius's poetry in the book's introduction, referring to the Kopfwurst incident. In the New Year's eve of 1970, Isabella Kopfwurst, a German literature student at the University of Göteburg and ardent admirer of Jensenius, was caught in the midst of preparing a dozen of molotov cocktails (following the recipe found in Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise). Together with the explosives were found a stash of hashish, mimeographed copies of a pamphlet denouncing the bourgeois practices of the Swedish Academy of Philatelists, a double-ended dildo and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an ironic reference to the opening verses of the second section of The climate of the lion-cut: "Bring me your/ double-ended peanut butter and jelly/ sandwiches:/They/ are soundly better than the duplicity of bourgeois philatelists."

Born in 1929, Jensenius, the youngest daughter of a diplomatic family, received private tutoring in Copenhagen before attending Heidelberg University. Her parents, with backgrounds in philology and the arts, frequented the Hjelmslevian circle. At age 18, Jensenius was deeply moved by the zoosemiotic research of Uexhall, which inspired her first collection of poems "Poetry of the bees." These typographic poems, composed in spurts at the Jensenius's summer home in Ytterjärna over a period of ten years, were first exhibited and performed in a small gallery in Göteburg, where Jensenius had moved, at the start of her academic career as an entomologist and social organizer. As usual with these type of early performances, little or no documentation has been preserved, other than Cobra's Asgar Bjorn's sardonic but enlightened comment "If this is art, then anyone is an artist, right?"

While Jensenius's work has been summarily divided by critics between this early, typographic phase and the later, so-called "metaphysical" phase, Berta Viscossi argues that several figures, metaphorical and alliterative, introduced already in Poetry of the bees remain present in these two last works of Jensenius's short but fecund career. The first one, evident to Swedish speakers, is the recurrent presence of alliterative guttural sounds. These are inherited from the turn of the century naturalist manuals that recommended these exercises as positive for their expectorative qualities. An alternative hypothesis points to Jensenius's maternal grandfather Alois von Schlessinger, an enthusiastic Austrian ethnomusicologist who pioneered the study of Sakhalin throat singing.

Another recurring theme relates to amoris venere, the Bee-man buzzing throughout the parallel (in the second edition, face-to-face) excursus of Poetry of the bees. In her notes to the poem Viscossi argues that this "Bi-man" and the humming woman ("vinna surrar") that repeatedly appears at critical sections in Anaesthesia are in fact equivalent. The work that allows Viscossi to reach this conclusion is, precisely, The climate of the lion-cut, where it is noted that in fragment 12 (usually remembered for its detailed description of the vulva), a recurring "surr" leads to the appearance of the lovemaking bee-- here Viscossi remarks the detachable nature of the Bee-man's "phallus," the fact that the males of the species are not held in esteem within the bees' sorority, and that this same lovemaking Bee-man indeed reappears (and is not eaten up!) throughout as a persistent "hummel surrar." This insight leads logically to a consideration of the separatist utopia that Jensenius was envisioning, plans for which she was already at work in her early retirement in Ytterjärna's Anthroposophic community, and which were curtailed by her untimely death in the spring of 1969.

Viscossi's excellent translation, and the beautiful edition of Stark Horse, presents a great contribution to the scholarly understanding and general appreciation of Irene Jensenius's woefully understudied poetry.