Several scholars have analyzed Olaf Bull’s long poem Sneen (Snow). None of them, however, has focused on the title by treating snow as the main issue of the poem. The function of this motif is to open up the protagonist’s eyes for metaphysical concepts, i.e. Kant’s concept of the Sublime. As this concept is a mere idea without any connection to empirical nature and closely linked to the motif of writing, the poem becomes metapoetical. This is precisely what the title is indicating. In this view, the protagonist’s walking-tour is just a pretext to talk about poetical devices on a metapoetical level. This can be seen by the underlying contradiction between the protagonist’s and the text’s reasoning. The very nature of the poem’s sound system, caused by rhymes, contradicts his intention so that the poetical devices also offers a solution for the protagonist’s core problem, which is the antagonism between mind and matter.

Nature oriented poetry has been a topic of increased interest recently, partly due to the forthcoming of an ecocritical field in Scandinavia. This essay questions an apparent scepticism towards anthropomorphizing language among ecocritics. Through readings of canonized Norwegian poems with trees as a common motif, it argues the ecocritical potential of anthropomorphism. Texts by Tarjei Vesaas, Hans Børli, Jan Erik Vold and Geir Gulliksen are studied with emphasis on metapoetic tension between realistic-mimetic description and anthropomorphic allegory. The selected poems all seem to explore the (in)ability of poetic language to express the otherness of nature. Rather than anthropocentric simplification, such awareness might imply affinity to Timothy Morton’s criticism of holistic positions within the ecocritical field. According to Morton such perspectives risks concealing significant differences.

Rather than defining a musical genre, the label ‘music & poetry’ points towards collaborations between poets and musicians emphasising the very collaborational aspect. The article deals with an example of such a collaboration, namely the one between the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard and the musician Klaus «Q» Hedegård Nielsen. Their common project is simply called Ord og trommer (‘Words and Drums’). The project is primarily unfolding live on stage, and it is to a great extent centered around rhythm; Søndergaard is sampling and looping his own recited free verses, creating repetitive rhythmical language sequences – in a sense metricising them. The rhythms and sounds are transformed into an almost-non-semantic word-music and with tight, improvised, constantly shifting drum patterns, the drummer Q is framing and accentuating the rhythms of these word chains in constantly evolving ways. Thus, the sounds are moving farther and farther away from ‘the poem’ and the voice of the poet and increasingly deep into a sensuousness that appear more animal and machinic than human. Ord og trommer is analysed as a radical example of an acoustic turn in contemporary poetry. With their captivating rhythms, extracted from written free verse poems, Søndergaard and Q is capable of bridging the gap between traditional high culture and popular culture.

The article discusses Danish conceptual literature in three tempi. First, the article identifies the key features of American conceptual poetry, which has influenced Danish poetry. Next, the article categorizes conceptual poetry in relation to two pairs of concepts, namely on one hand a readymade poetics and a montage poetics, and on the other hand metapoetic and a social-political orientation. Finally, a multilevel reading strategy is tested in relation to conceptual poetry, as the conceptual text is viewed from four different angles, as an idea, as a coherent text, as an appropriated text that has moved between two contexts, and as a literary work that has specific textual features. The weight of the different angles depends on the nature of the analyzed text as the range between the conceptual texts is large. The article discusses four Danish (Norwegian) conceptual works by Rasmus Graff, Paal Bjelke Andersen, Martin Larsen and Pejk Malinovski, but there are also perspectives on other works. In summary, four crucial points of conceptual poetry are discussed: The relationship between conceptualism and the literary tradition, the author’s role, the concept of work, and the reading strategy, used in relation to the conceptual text.