Peter Laugesen (1942 - ) is part of the powerful 1970s generation of Danish poets, which included, among others, his friend Dan Turèll (1946 - 1993). These poets drew inspiration from the American beat generation -- in Laugesen’s case, from Jack Kerouac in particular. The Danish 1970s poets valued poetic energy and expansiveness as opposed to the prevailing trends toward conceptualism and political poetry. Along the way, the70s poets made room for birdsong and silence, hymns and haiku, though never wavering from their committment to constantly and completely keep their writing as in-the-moment as possible.

Laugesen’s masterpiece is not any single volume. Rather, it is his ongoing, diligent output, in the form of one collection after another annually since 1967, that has become not only his masterpiece, but also a masterpiece of Scandinavian literature of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. But if one had to choose a single volume from the early 2000s, a volume that exemplifies Laugesen’s mature voice and has its own distinctive profile and anatomy, the clear choice would be Yak og Yeti (Yak and Yeti), 2012.

Yak and Yeti is subtitled “Blues for Chenga.” And Chenga is not a Tibetan poet-colleague; Chenga is, as faithful readers will already know, Laugesen’s Tibetan terrier, with whom he took daily walks for many years in and around Braband, his home neighborhood outside Århus. Many of Laugesen’s poems, whether or not they mention the dog, spring from these walks. Yak and Yeti is a “blues” because in the real time of the writing, the aging dog declines and ultimately dies. This may not be as great a sorrow for the reader as for the poet, but it comes close. The pathos of the book’s two final poems is the essence of simplicity:

Dharma’s trumpet
in Chenga’s fur
She won’t come back
tomorrow

Wind and rain sweep
over the little grave

The title Yak and Yeti is Laugesen’s epitaph for, and tribute to, the dog in light of Tibetan mythology: the dog in these poems functions as both a sacred cow and an abominable snowman. In many of the poems Chenga does not appear directly, but her presence is always felt, if only as a certain blue, melancholic tone and an insistent awareness of death amid Laugesen’s characteristic swirling and concentrated meditations on everything and nothing, wind and weather and interrelated artistic choices ranging from Kandinsky to Ben Webster:

the strange tired
off-kilter days of the past
wild weather
white drifts
the black thoughts’
red hearts
in the mirror

and now
it’s better
now
closer to death
now
far less tired
now
I’m awake

Awareness of death is also attentiveness to life.
The current U.S. president uses the phrase “like a dog” to describe those he considers spineless and worthless. But for Laugesen, there is no greater honor than being compared with a dog, with one dog in particular, her humble majesty Chenga:

The night rises up
like an old wet dog 

Lars Bukdahl