The Sentence Should Be Treated Like a World Itself: A Conversation with Signe Gjessing

Signe Gjessing, photo by Robin Skjoldborg

To coincide with our publishing of Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus – translated from the Danish by Denise Newman – Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Gjessing about taking inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein and her pursuit of what lies beyond poetry.

When did you first encounter the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and what led you to using his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as the basis for your poem?

He was there all along. I read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the first time during the summer when I was writing my second book, which involved disintegrating into fragments in a search for that which lies behind poetry. I borrowed his way of dealing with the world, writing in fragments as a vanishing point for the successive space of image-poetry: the world as the counterweight to the poetic image. In my third volume of poems, Ideal events, I wrote poems in accordance with Wittgenstein’s proposition 4.031:

'In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment. One can say, instead of, this proposition has such and such a sense, this proposition represents such and such a state of affairs’

It describes making sentences as situations sprung from logic instead of by association. Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, my fourth volume of poetry, is poetry beyond poetry, which as I see it, exists in space. The most distinct feature of the book is that it is spaceless. Having invited the world into the poem, it transcends it. Since Wittgenstein drove me out of the poetic space, he became the ground on which I stood and eventually went further from.

You’ve stated that you want to use Wittgenstein’s language of propositions ‘to unite philosophy and poetry’. What do you think is offered by the joining of poetry and philosophy?

Novalis says that poetry is like jumping out from philosophy. As I see it, the measure of consequence – the fact that a proposition can have an impact on our view of the world and, finally, on the world in general –  philosophy when united to the poem is like poetry dipping its feet in the cold stream of reality. The dazzling courage of Wittgenstein himself is what inspired me to play with philosophy; a sort of loop saying something, so that we change our view of the world only to discover that the sentence is alive and should be treated like a world itself. The basis for all this lies in a couplet of humility and audacity, which Wittgenstein treats in the concept of the tautology: being co-creative of the world without having said anything new.

The language employed in the poem, with its series of numbered propositions, allows for the separation of ideas with a mathematical precision. Why was it important for you to keep Wittgenstein’s logical scaffolding, and what effect did you want it to have on the reader?

I wrote it like notes, as Wittgenstein did, and made the system afterwards. I had a Leibniz-scale, in which I ordered the propositions according to their degree of reality, possibility, multiplicity and singularity. All of them could be contained more or less in Leibniz’ sentence: ‘This world is the best of all possible worlds’. Both in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, I find that the mathematical system is a new way of making language, when propositions can be both figures, as points in themselves, and sentences that connect to other sentences. In this way, the poem catches a glimpse of being both language and figure, philosophy and poetry.

In your foreword you identify another foundation for the poem, which is perhaps separate from Wittgenstein – the presence of ecstasy. For me, this is its creation story narrative, its arising, filled with stars, flowers and silk. Could you discuss your expression of ecstasy in the poem, and its development from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

Ecstasy as related to the world is a way of breaking its bonds which are mourned for in a Romantic longing, especially in the Romantic Danish poet Schack von Staffeldt, who calls the world a prison. My poetry does not accept longing as a final state; my second book is all about having the heart to do everything and in my view of literature, poetry can embody true reality. Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus breaks with the idea of the world as an exile from the beyond – by placing the world in the beyond itself. It makes the foundation of the world travel. There are allusions to the mystical state of ecstasy, which is a more traditional view on mysticism than Wittgenstein’s concept, although it is deeply moved by his view of the mystical as the way of seeing the world as a whole.

Wittgenstein predicted after the publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that his work would not be properly understood and appreciated. Do you feel your approach to his text will create a new understanding, and would it be one he would agree with, or not?

My poem will absolutely not create a new understanding. It is a poem which has been inspired by both Leibniz and Heidegger, and it threads its own path within the philosophical vocabulary. More so, it transcends where Wittgenstein is silent. By opposing Wittgenstein, I do, in a way, also want to state that no one can say something about his work. That he has in a way said it all. I very much believe in his book.

SIGNE GJESSING (b. 1992) is a Danish poet. She graduated from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing, Forfatterskolen, in 2014. She has published several collections of poetry and a novella, and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Bodil & Jørgen Munch Christensen Prize for emerging writers. Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus is her first work to appear in English.

DENISE NEWMAN is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. She is the author of five poetry collections and the translator of Azorno and The Painted Room by Inger Christensen, and by Naja Marie Aidt, Baboon, winner of the PEN Translation Award, and When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book, a semi-finalist for the National Book Award.

Tractatus Philisophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing, translated by Denise Newman, is available to buy from 15 April 2022.