Jørgen Leth is one of Denmark's foremost modern poets and a leading international filmmaker. As a poet, he consistently employs unostentatious, matter-of-fact language and exhibits strong filmic qualities, often in the form of notes and stage directions. Poems and films: two sides of his extensive ouevre, intricately interwoven. Watch the poem. Read the film. Leth was doing intertextuality almost before they called it anything. Trivial Everyday Things is a collection of Leth's poems spanning some forty years, selected and translated with exquisite restraint by Martin Aitken. It is, astonishingly, the first book-length collection of Leth's poetry to appear in English.
"One's eye changes things. One's eye makes things come alive." Experience the much-admired Danish poet, writer and film director Jørgen Leth in this video where he reads one of his unique poems and compares writing poetry to performing alchemy.