kingBIRD: Butterfly Valley

This project is inpired by the poem 'Butterfly Valley – a requiem' written by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.

A requiem is a death mass. Although death is the central scene in “Butterfly Valley” the poem is also a tribute to our fragile lives.

Form: The poems are written in the form of a classic, rhymed sonnet where rigid composition and repetition are the keystones. The form is ancient and very rigid, but it's the strength of the poem that the lines are repeated and translated into a new context and therefore changing significance. The constant recurrence patterns, shifting meanings and strict use of repetitions can be seen as process searching for cognition. In the classic sonnet there is an expectation that the text contains both an observation and a perception of something and an interpretation or an epistemological conclusion of those.

What is happening in the poem: The poem opens up with a spectacular sight of butterflies fluttering up in the midday heat in a valley in south Europe – exuding colour and warmth. For the narrator the flying butterflies awake glimpses of childhood memories, and thus begins the unfolding of the central topics of the poem; memory, nature, love, life and death. The narrative self is mirrored in nature and realizing herself as being enrolled as a part of it.

Death: The awareness of death is becoming more progressive throughout the poem. In the last sonnet the narrative self both reconciles herself with everything being finite, but also that the world still contains many moments of happiness.

kingBIRD, Butterfly Valley, 2009, ceramic

Why this inspires me: Describing a poem’s form and knowledge of butterflies is quite concrete observations and interpretations that can bring you some way into the understanding of the poem, but here the poem starts to bristle against. If these concrete descriptions are to make any sense the reader must go a step further and surrender the mind and just go into the maze of the poem. The sonnets are playing around, changing from concrete descriptions to liquid pictures and the sensory impressions change from the near to the outreach of cosmos. The contrast between the poem’s rigid composition and the feeling of the transient fluttering butterflies is elegant.

The built-in repetitions of the Sonnet Crown (Lines put into new contexts) are forcing the reader constantly to correct his or hers understanding of the poem. A reader trying to organize the poetry universe in a linear or hierarchical structure fails, because the universe is born labyrinthine. Nor is it possible to analyze the sonnet individually in order to assemble the partial analysis into an overall interpretation. The contrast between the tight composition of the poem and the feeling of the transient fluttering butterflies ensures that you must go along with the playful nature of the sonnet if you want an answer to your questions.