Jan Erik Vold is an author, translator, literature communicator, essayist, and artist. He is best known for his poetry and his poetry performances in the jazz & poetry genre together with musicians such as Jan Garbarek, Chet Baker, and Egil Kapstad.
Poetic «talking voice.»
Violence is one of the most famous poets of his generation. However, he also has an almost overwhelming production in other genres, most often related to his involvement as a literary communicator. Vold’s lyrical production bears a generational consciousness, but the individual releases still appear as different projects, each with its distinctive character. The motifs in Vold’s poems are often everyday and concrete things, pine cones and back pain, the Oslo tram, and more wide-ranging leitmotifs such as the white and «nothing.» Vold is best known, however, for the language itself in his poems, “toneleiet,” the diction resembles everyday language in several ways.
In a unique position is the work of Gunvor Hofmo and her boyfriend Ruth Maier, who were deported and killed during World War II. In this context, Jan Erik Vold is a participant in JKfest. The book The Singer of Darkness. A book about Gunvor Hofmo (2000) contains previously unknown texts by Hofmo, a biographical sketch of Violence, and a collection of photographs. In 2005 he published the essay collection Merry Christmas with Gertrude Stein and other essays, and in 2007 came Ruth Maier’s diary. A Jewish refugee in Norway and 2016, Kánon / Kannon / kanón, a book with articles on several authors and cultural personalities, in which Violence in title and content raises the question of literary quality and a canon debate, among other things, by applying an expanded concept of poetry. This is an extension that we can safely say that Violence has practiced for large parts of his career, including the combination of poetry and jazz.
(Source: Store norske leksikon)