WAUW - Intensity and lyricism

Something happens when you read a poem. It can feel like a trickle down the spine, like something lightning or fiery, it can seem incomprehensible and indeterminate, in a moment time can suddenly stop. It can be described as a hiss or a roar, like WAUW or wusjh - and it can be called intensity. Intensity is precisely what the German literati Karl Heinz Bohrer calls it. In the course of his writing, he tries to show and describe what it is and when it occurs in literature and art. And it is based on Bohrer's descriptions and reflections on the nature of intensity that the book here proposes a definition of what intensity actually equals, and also how one can read with and after intensity - and, most importantly, without overlooking it .

Because isn't the meaning of literature and the meaning of literature actually its intensity? Why not - instead of looking for a meaning that should lie hidden somewhere - just let the poem work and seduce in its indivisible and overwhelming intensity. Instead of taking the intense experience for granted, or perhaps forgetting it altogether, follow the flow of the words in the poem; in colorful collisions, in the entanglements and displacements of metaphors and metonymies, in images that come into being and flow over each other, in meanings that get lost, and in all the music that is heard in the reading.

It is with an attention to these kinds of experiences, and based on Bohrer's understanding of intensity, that a number of Danish poems from Johs. V. Jensen to Henrik Nordbrandt and Signe Gjessing is reread here.