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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

PIP Biographies

Kirsten Hammann

[Denmark]

1965

Born in Risskov, Denmark in 1965, Kirsten Hammann attended Copenhagen School of Creative Writing from 1989-1991, a school which has involved several of the writers of contemporary Danish poetry.

Hammann has published only one volume of poetry to date, Mellem tænderne (Between the Teeth), in 1992, which was to characterize her later fiction. The grotesque black humor of the work in which a first person narrator speaks to the body about language itself. This figure is presented as an animalistic person who, in front of the mirror, “becomes civilized,” but gradually turns more and more bestial throughout the day. Per Højoholt wrote of the book in the Danish Jyllands-Posten: “These are strange poems, but with a notable power of their own; as though quite consciously seeking to reach layers in us to which we cannot penetrate without further ado. And as this must be said to be one of the objectives of poetry…Hammann has got away with writing poems which clearly and resolutely bear on the relationship between an acting, loving body and a naked, fearless consciousness, which modern Man has such difficulty in realizing.”

The following year, Hammann published a novel, Vera Winkelvir, and in 1997 a second novel, Bannister. She became nearly a cult figure with here novel and book of poetics, Bruger De ord I kaffen? (Do You Take Words in Your Coffee”) in 2001. Her most recent work is the fiction Fra smørhullet (The Diary of a Cozy Corner), published by Gyldendal in 2004.

BOOKS OF POETRY:

Mellem tænderne (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1992); Bruger De ord I kaffen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001)

[Reprinted from Suzanne Jorn, ed., The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20 th Century, Volume 8: In Transit—Sixteen Contemporary Danish Poets (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007).]
Copyright ©2007 by Douglas Messerli and Green Integer.