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Departing from Roland Barthes’ association of text and textile, and feminist theory on weaving as text production, this article analyzes the textile qualities of Inger Christensen’s “Letter in April” (1979) and Amalie Smith’s “Thread Ripper” (2020). In “Letter in April”, Christensen establishes a connection between writing and spinning or weaving through their shared temporality of varied repetition. In “Thread Ripper” Smith alludes to Christensen and makes of the continuity between text and textile not only the main theme of the book, but also its structuring principle. Through a materialist conception of the text, regarding it as a woven fabric, the article focuses on the textual patterns of the two works (stylistic figures in Christensen, graphic composition in Smith). The connection from Christensen to Smith leads to a further connection to ecocritical conceptions of weaving as no less than a cosmological principle. On a concluding note, the article argues that weaving is not only connecting, but also disconnecting, cutting.

The essay compares Inger Christensen’s (1935-2009) poetry and poetics with the work of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011). It tests the potential of comparison by asking what happens if we compare what might be the two most prominent women writers of Nordic post-war modernism, two writers whose paths have crossed over the years. The first half of the paper traces a shared constellation of motifs (eye/butterfly/death) within two books of poetry, Trotzig’s “Anima” (1982) and Christensen’s “Sommerfugledalen” (1991). The initial comparison of motifs leads to a shared poetics. It offers a trotzig’ian version of Inger Christensen’s version of the condition of secrecy and fundamental parallels in their philosophy of language and the subject. But it also points to a major difference between the real as a mystic category in Trotzig and Inger Christensen’s more seamless, lucid, and dreamlike style. Advancing further into a stylistic comparison the linguistic and visionary abundancy of Trotzig’s “Anima”-poems reveals an overlooked quality in Christensen’s: That Christensen’s poems are also luxurious, albeit, typically, with moderation. The balancing of sense and sensibility appears by comparison to be a key trait in her poetry, highlighting its classical inclination. The paper demonstrates how comparison makes its subject visible by way of the other, and how comparison points out new nuances or flavors in the texts as it opens a conversation between two major women writers of Nordic modernism.

Words and Objects and Words as Objects – Self-referential Structures in Inger Christensen’s alfabet and Herta Müller’s Collages in Schreibheft Vol. 74 Inger Christensen’s alfabet is one of the most formative contributions in Danish eco-poetry that also initiates a broad reception of Christensen’s œuvre in German literature. Besides the ecocritical tendencies the text establishes a self-referential dimension that deals with the relation between a human speaker, its speaking about ‘world’ and its reference. In this regard the text implicitly debates the verbal material and its (connotative) semantics that one has to use. This dimension of alfabet is one of the main linking points for a productive reception by Herta Müller. Especially her collages published in Schreibheft expose the materiality of linguistic signs and speech. In addition to this, the specific constitution of the collages which are made of newspapers and magazines shows that linguistic signs not only refer to a real reference but also (and mainly) to discourses and other prior communicative contexts.

Sounds, Light, and Jellyfish: Metaphorical Shifts in Inger Christensen’s “Gopler” [“Jellyfish”] and Pia Tafdrup’s “De fem sanser” [“The five senses”] Metaphorical shifts from one subject area to another are a central structural strategy in Inger Christensen’s work. This principle will be demonstrated and discussed in this paper by referring to the poem “Gopler” [“Jellyfish”] from “lys” [“light”], 1962. The Danish contemporary poet Pia Tafdrup, whose work is influenced by Christensen, also makes use of a distinctive, associative imagery in her pentalogy “De fem sanser” [“The Five Senses”] (2014–2022). This paper contrastively explores the ways in which metaphorical shifts function in Christensen’s and Tafdrup’s poetry. Christensen realizes the metaphors’ potential in a radical way through the semantic superimposition of different subject areas. Thus, the regularities of the designed world are solely valid within linguistic structures, opening up new spaces of cognitive experience. In Tafdrup’s work, the texts’ different levels of meaning tend to remain separable. Here, the focus is on an associative technique of erratic and surprising transmissions, often applied to the external and the internal in a way that the cutting conciseness of the poems touch the reader almost sensually.

Finding Summerbirds: Ornitophonic Translation-Poetics in Mette Moestrup and Nico Bleutge This article investigates selected texts and oral performances by two contemporary authors, Nico Bleutge and Mette Moestrup, who adapt or rewrite Christensen’s poems. In the works focused on (Moestrups poems “My Language” and “Hvad betyder det for sommerfuglen”, Bleutge’s speech “Den Wiederholungen folgen” and the poem “fischhaare finden”), translation plays a central role, and animals (especially winged ones) become a motor for transformational movements between languages and authors. Unsettling the semantic and structural level of language, the named birds and butterflies set loose acoustic dynamics that lead us back to Christensen’s reflections on mortality, contingency, and poetics in her essays.

This article discusses the high regard for Danish poet Inger Christensen in Germany and her connection to the Künstlerhaus [Artists’ Residence] in Edenkoben, located in Rhineland-Palatinate. The Künstlerhaus serves as a cultural institution where international artists from various fields can reside and collaborate. Inger Christensen had strong connections with the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben and participated in its German-Danish poetry project. During her visits to Edenkoben, she wrote several poems. In an essay, the poet described Edenkoben’s landscape as paradise-like. This article, on the one hand, examines these texts in the context of Inger Christensen’s stay in Edenkoben. On the other, it sheds light on “Weg der Gedichte”, a project that stages Inger Christensen’s poem “Erinnerung an Edenkoben” in a public space around the Künstlerhaus, showcasing the role of poetry in rural settings and its ability to enhance the experience of nature and hiking.

This essay discusses the relationship between Inger Christensen’s work and contemporary Danish eco-literature. Christensen can seem like a towering predecessor. Yet, the relationship is more complex than a question of anxiety of influence. This essay argues that Christensen and contemporary Danish literature exhibit differing ecological imaginaries, and that this becomes clear when one examines Christensen’s utopian writing, her heliocentric utopianism, of the late seventies and early eighties, and when one examines how ecological threats are depicted in her work. For Christensen, the paradigmatic threat to the world is the nuclear bomb and its excessive use of energy, for today’s literature it is the feedback loops of pollution, exemplified in the threat of climate change.

Apple Picking with Inger Christensen. (Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, Uljana Wolf) Inger Christensen, maybe the most vividly received Danish writer in contemporary German poetry, is often discussed in the light of her poetry’s formal innovativeness. This paper will shift the focus on poetry’s relation to the world as another aspect repeatedly addressed by contemporary German poets when referring to Christensen’s work. Discussing three essays by Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, and Uljana Wolf this paper traces their approaches to Inger Christensen’s poetry with a particular interest in personal encounters with nature and real-world sensual experiences as the core and outset of Inger Christensen’s poetic writings. The paper tries to conceptualize this perspective on her poetry by referring to the Haiku as a form of poetry that depicts a sensual and affective experience of nature along with Roland Barthes related concept of tangibilia on the one hand and to the sociological concept of resonance as developed by Hartmut Rosa on the other.

“Verdichtung der Sprachmaterie” – Thomas Kling and Oswald Egger in Dialogue with Inger Christensen In order to shed light on the important function Inger Christensen had for the German poetry scene in the 1990s and 2000s, the article examines texts by Thomas Kling and Oswald Egger. The central argument is that both Kling and Egger drew on Christensen’s sophisticated nature-philosophical inspired poetics in “det”/“das” to break away from an experimental poetry that is primarily interested in questions of language and media theory. Both seem to be particularly fascinated by Christensen’s attempt to think of the relationship between language and the world in terms of a chiastic entanglement, which shows clear traces of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. But despite this similarity, they react very differently to the poetological considerations of the Danish poet. Both do not adopt Christensen’s reflections uncritically but attempt to utilize them for their own aesthetic purposes.