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In The Likeness Of Man: Johannes Bjerg’s Penguins By Jack Galmitz
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Jack Galmitz has
kindly written an analysis of my bilingual haiku book
“Penguins/Pingviner – 122 haiku”. I am very honored
he chose to do that and grateful for him reading the poems
in this way. As Jack himself is a well known haijin with
excellent publications to prove his skills I am doubly
honored. Here is the full text: In The Likeness Of Man: Johannes Bjerg’s Penguins By Jack Galmitz I’m not a betting man, but if I were I would
wager that there isn’t a human on earth
who doesn’t like penguins.
Sure, at the zoo you have your big cat lovers and your
seal lovers, and your reptile lovers; but, who, pray tell,
doesn’t
simply adore penguins. Again, though I’m no
betting man, I’d wager that it has
a great deal to do with the fact that they are like us,
made over in our likeness, with this difference: they’re
essentially benign. This makes all the difference doesn’t it? I mean, if human beings had a history of
benignity, we might love our fellow men in the same way we
love penguins. But, alas, history has the last word and
penguins, I’m
afraid, win out. So, the fact that Danish poet Johannes S.H. Bjerg wrote a bilingual book
titled Penguins/Pingviner
(Cyberwit.net, 2011), which contains 122 poems
about penguins is, in itself, not so surprising. The fact
that he is the first that I can think of who centered his
attention on Penguins is what is dismaying. In fact, I
think Mr. Bjerg is the very first poet to write about
penguins and he’s from Denmark, not Antarctica. So go figure. Perhaps, Mr. Bjerg is just
the most loving man in the haiku world and that’s why
he wrote Penguins:
to give back. On a more serious
note, Mr. Bjerg opens Penguins
with a poem that encapsulates, as any good opening of
a book does, the technique, purpose, model of what will
follow throughout. It is something of a meta-poem, as it
uses the time-tested haiku technique of comparing two
disparate things by their physical likeness, yet tethers
two things we generally think of as unrelated. There is,
however, a tongue-in-cheek attitude expressed in the poem
and it is this sense of humor, this device to break apart
ordinary associations that we find as Mr. Bjerg’s method of choice. on the backside of
the moon lurking
penguins Americans
usually refer to the “dark” side of the moon, so I don’t know if “backside” is meant as a rude reference to the buttocks
or whether it is how the Danes refer to the side of the
moon that never sees sunlight. In any event, since the
moon doesn’t
rotate on its axis, the dark side of the moon has always
represented a mystery to man and now it is solved:
penguins are lurking there. This, of course, is absurdist
and meant to be so. Penguins, like the moon, are mostly
black with white bellies and thus similar in appearance to
the moon, with its white facing us and its darkness kept
from view. Thus we have haiku in its pristine form. The poem is impossibly true, what Tzvetan Todorov called the fantastic
and the fantastic is the modus used by
Johannes Bjerg throughout Penguins.
So, for 3 the sake of further
articulations, let us have a definition of the fantastic
as understood and written about by Todorov: Todorov's
greatest contribution to literary theory was his defining
of the Fantastic, the fantastic uncanny, and the fantastic
marvelous. Todorov defines the fantastic as being any
event that happens in our world that seems to be
supernatural. Upon the occurrence of the event, we must
decide if the event was an illusion or whether it is real
and has actually taken place. Todorov uses Alvaro from
Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux as an example of a fantastic
event. Alvaro must decide whether the woman he is in love
with is truly a woman or if she is the devil. Upon
choosing whether the event was real or imaginary, Todorov
says that we enter into the genres of uncanny and
marvelous. In the fantastic uncanny, the event that occurs
is actually an illusion of some sort. The "laws of
reality" remain intact and also provide a rational
explanation for the fantastic event. Todorov gives
examples of dreams, drugs, illusions of the senses,
madness, etc. as things that could explain a fantastic/supernatural
event. In the fantastic marvelous, the supernatural event
that occurs has actually taken place and therefore the
"laws of reality" have to be changed to explain
the event. Only if the implied reader cannot opt for one
or the other possibility, the text is purely fantastic. Perhaps
the most commonplace assignment of categories to penguins
is as French bistro waiters, waddling with their black
suits and white shirts. sore
throat- I’m served chamomile tea by
penguins Where
should this poem be placed in Todorov’s schema? With a
sore throat a person could have a fever and so the
illusion could be real or the fantastic uncanny. Yet, our
first inclination is to laugh, because of the similarity
of penguins to waiters and the updating of this image by
the use of “chamomile tea.” Then there is that
time-honored association of penguins and nuns based on the
likeness of the nun’s habits with the penguins’ colors.
Mr. Bjerg cannot resist the humorous confrontation of the
two; it is something like slapstick comedy, but the
slapstick comedy of surrealists/dadaists like Marcel
Duchamp, Hugo Ball, et al, in that rather than
anthropomorphism , penguins are given their due as so
human-like as to equate to human beings. outside
the church a
show-down between
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