Radical Poetry in Iceland

Good ole Three Percent (they really are good!) has an interview up with Thor Steinarsson, who co-runs the Reykjavik International Poetry Festival, which just took place last weekend. And it's definitely interesting to get out of our sandbox for a moment and see what's going on in Iceland poetry! The organization that runs the Festival has been called Nýhil since its inception in 2004, but they're changing the name (to what, nobody knows). More on their evolution:

In 2005, the first international poetry festival was held in an abandoned factory with poets such as Christian Bök and Anna Hallberg. Since then, Nýhil has published close to 50 titles and invited over 40 international guests to the poetry festival.

Nýhil has taken on many forms over the past seven years dependent on the interests of the primary organizers for each year-long period. Organizers who have been involved at various points in the Nýhil collective have recognized that the shifting desires and urgencies of the local community now render the project as “complete”, and a core collective of folks previously involved are now in the exciting stages of closing Nýhil as a project while verging into a new collective that carries with it as a foundation the important groundwork Nýhil laid during its existence. The new collective will have a stronger focus on events, arts education, and translation.

Amande De Marco asks about the org's affinities:

Stylistically Nýhil is experimental/post-avant-ish . . . right? Are there any American or European organizations you would compare yourself to to help non-Icelanders understand what you publish?

Our collective supports hybrid, experimental, post-avant, radical, innovative text (often under the broader definition of poetry). Similar sister organizations to the previous manifestations of Nýhil (particularly as a publishing collective) could include Coach House Books in Toronto; Nokturno.org in Helsinki; BookThug in Toronto; Le Clou Dans Le Fer in Paris; and the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. In terms of our festival and arts education activities, sister organizations might include Krikri Polypoetry Collective in Ghent; Stichting Perdu in Amsterdam; Toronto New School of Writing; and the former Scream Literary Festival in Toronto.

She also learns more about Icelandic poetry and poets in general:

I was told that in Iceland it’s typical for writers to first publish a book of poetry, then later move to novels; does this mean that Icelanders read more poetry than other people? Or take it less seriously?

Young Icelandic authors tend to write poetry at first, before they commit to literary projects with higher word counts. I don’t have an explanation; it might be of cultural reason or economical. The Icelandic grant system might have something to do with it, where you have to show some published works to be more likely to get the government grant. But I don’t think that Icelanders read more poetry than others or take it more seriously.

Is any Nýhil poetry available in English?

Some poets affiliated with Nýhil have had selected poems or books translated into other languages — notably Eiríkur Örn Norddahl. We are actively developing plans for future multilingual anthologies that will feature Icelandic poetry in translation as well as poetry from other languages translated into Icelandic.

For more about the Festival and its shift in focus from "people actively identifying their works as 'poetry' to consider[ing] textual experimentation in a variety of formats (highlighting specifically new media work; cross-, multi-, and interdisciplinary work; and non-conventional publishing translated to performance," read on here.