Mette Moestrup

Deconstructive Diva

 

By Lars Bukdahl. Translated by Anne Born
 

Mette Moestrup (b. 1969) made her debut in 1998 with the quietly mumbling poetry collection Tatoveringer (Tattoos) which in 2002 was followed by a very different, enthusiastic and extroverted collection Golden Delicious; her great breakthrough arrived with Moestrup's third book, Kingsize, in 2006, a  powerful presentation of quality, which deservedly brought her the newly founded Montana Prize for Literature this Spring.

Moestrup holds a degree in the history of literature and is one of Denmark's leading Rilke experts, and, as she writes in the poem 'A Bite of the Banana': 'Call me intellectual, I do it myself./ I can take it.' And the most delightful thing about her poetry is that she  does not distance herself from intellectuality, but firmly interweaves it into a brilliantly mastered, traditional poetic practice: harmonious : musically existential pain, and a playful intercourse with (traditional!) avantgardish strategies, such as pastiche and the ready-made.

One poem refers to the children's game of 'Mess-Mother' in which the players entangle themselves with each other really thoroughly, and Kingsize as a whole and, now and then, the individual poem may well also seem like a refined and hilarious round of 'Mess-Mother' for 1 sharp intellectual, 1 sensitive main poet and 1 crafty avantgardist, all by the name of Mette Moestrup: 1,2,3, tangle!

In the poem or text 'We Humans' is it 'only' the intellectual and avantgardist who coil themselves together: The list of exotic racial features take her verbatim  from the book by the Danish  anthropologist Kaj-Birket Smith's book We Humans, 1946, is expanded and undermined with examples of 'Danish' racial features and in a strange way the text turns into both a tart racism-satire and a  reversed utopia about community: Pocus Hocus!

Read the poems:

We Humans

Red Light