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She Who Writes is Another






an estate after death
now the book is mine





I don’t remember its contents
I only remember the name Ketil





I want to read it again for the first time
The Old Man and His Sons

I didn’t get anything out of it at school
the classes were long

longer than clock hours usually are
in nature down by the sea


I take Heðin Brú with me in the car
I know where I’m going


I drive along Oyggjarvegur


the drive across the island is the most enchanting I know
little to no traffic after the tunnel was constructed
the asphalt snakes through the raw landscape
as if it were part of the original mountain


I drive through Mjørkadalur
onward to Kollafjørður
and Hósvík
past my great grandmother’s old house


the trees in the garden wave me on
as if saying no one lives here anymore go!


I stop at the old whaling station at Áir


I have never seen a great whale
in Faroese waters
dolphins and pilot whales yes
a curious seal now and then yes
but never a great whale


I write a whale-thought
the darkness of the world is great
we live in the ocean-deep darkness
indifferent to the world on land

it is a kind of violence to kill a whale
and to read Heðin Brú
it just is
why?

I write
to kill
to read
to carve up
to get sand in your eye
to get seawater in your mouth


I can’t figure out
how the old machines have been used


butchery

boiler house

centrifuge

blubber cooker

press


I picture the steaming hot great whale
hoisted up by a winch
onto the butcher block
and liquidation gears
gripping into the teeth of other gears

all of it is rusted now

an iron world oxidized with the past

tanks
metal cylinders

and kettles that once steamed here


I read there’s a pod of pilot whales in Sørvågsfjorden
an excellent sentence yes
that I don’t hate

I am going to be in Heðin Brú’s world now
going to lie out in Sørvågsfjorden
along with lines about pilot whales
float in the fjord
soften in the wetness


soaked to the bone
the taste of salty saliva in my mouth


delicate strands of seaweed
woven into my hair
along with lines about the pilot whales


I don’t need to read any more than this one single line
and I am SLAUGHTERED


——


no I don’t hate everything I read

Hera Lindsay Bird writes

that it is bad behavior to hate
yet we have to do it anyway

to hate is a bad behavior
but I have to feel it anyway

thanks Bird


but no I don’t hate everything I read
not everything

to hate poetry

thus the poet is a tragic figure
the poem is always a record of failure

Ben Lerner in The Hatred of Poetry


attempts to convey truths in text
but you can’t do it without consequences!


failed attempts
provoke hatred

all attempts
are failed attempts

all attempts
provoke hatred

people don’t want hear poetry
they want to go home and not read poetry
writes Bird

indeed

to continue anyway
like the river
as it flows
through a terrain of text

to take a book of poetry off the bookshelf
to turn to a random page
and read two or three lines
and then

throw the text down with full force
the book hits the floor
slides under the bookcase

disgust
when the sentences crawl up the body
into eyes and ears

attach themselves firmly
like mighty limpets
leaving behind sticky trails of mucus

the text a cliff
a rock
a cave

but I don’t hate everything I read

I call it the Duck/Rabbit Proof
throw the duck a stare
and the rabbit hops down his hole
writes Billy Collins

I don’t hate that poem

I also don’t hate the poem Morning
and the line about the lawn steaming like a horse
early in the morning
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning


——


Marguerite Duras writes
that she who writes is another
maybe it’s nonsense

but

even the writer can die
is sometimes in danger
of losing her life
the writer dies rock ‘n’ roll death
in a hotel bathroom
with a pen in her veins
an overdose of black ink
if we don’t take care of her

or her freshness is killed during a pilot whale drive
and the slaughter only took 3 minutes

she who writes is scribbled
scratched down

carries herself with elegance and beautiful hairstyle


sets the table in the kitchen
plates

when guests arrive
forks

cleans up nicely
crystal

smells of soap
decorated

with past and words
scrapes

on the flat white stillness
sharp

smells like iron
absorbs

carves up
dries

flayed at the butchery
guts blood

freshly slaughtered
harpoon

thick whale skin
hooked on

boiled in an open tank

centuries old
swimming in time

entrails blown out all over the station
stinking

chopping crushing
bone meal

and you
want to stop her and her seawater
when the waves come crashing in

but if you write to her in a text
stop writing you writer
she’ll just text you back
YOU CAN’T STOP ME

because she doesn’t fear you
or the day

the writer
ready for disaster
already in the womb

within Liv        estranged interlacing    that she is

writes Claudia Rankine

wakes up early
before the broadcasts

runs down stairs
into mornings that smell of late summer wind

cites Orissa by Ola Julén
I began in despair
and my despair endures

in despair yes
and careless as a child

everything is simply better when you are a child

purer

lighter

freer

the child’s mind is a daisy wreath
hanging under a full moon
in the evenings
and the sky shines a limping cosmic light on hopscotch

the raindrops

the rainbow

the grass

EVERYTHING is better in childhood

we remember what we were forbidden
                        writes Stephen Dunn

I was nine years old
while rummaging through my
mother’s letters
                        writes Sophie Calle

the night: my shadow growing
                        writes Ocean Vuong

now I cut across the yard like a child
                        writes Fredrik Nyberg

I want to be your child
                        writes Ola Julén

the little hand that would have snuck into mine
                        writes Åsa Maria Kraft

I sneak back into childhood with my blue wheelbarrow
                        writes Tórodudur Poulsen

and the sky shines a limping cosmic light on hopscotch
                        writes she who writes

money in your pocket
to buy chewing gum
candy and beginnings

somersault

buttercups

scrape your knee

forget to eat supper

running

outfield

all movements soft as a pillow at night

jumbo band-aids

and then





when are you grown up
the field is a torture mattress
a cloth of grass-green nails
that turns the pointed end upwards
drilling into the flesh of your back
when you try to take a nap

there you lie grown up
and read A Report on the Banality of Evil
for example
sharp as a knife
she’ll SLICE you open
Hannah Arendt

you sit with the paperback book in your lap
298 pages in Beit HaMishpat

and you get a new name
ADOLF EICHMANN

you don’t get to run in fields of buttercups anymore!
shouts Arendt

the gravity stiff with blue-cold like a still lake

you wade out

the cold ground crunches under your wet toes

sand stone crustaceans
a starfish

you pick the nails on your nervous fingers
dip them in the sea
and the nails float on the surface
like life jackets without a body

while the sun shines

sea salt stings your skin

and then your waist
breasts
head under water






Note

The Old Man and His Sons (1940, Feðgar á ferð) is a canonical Faroese novel by Heðin Brú.






Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger published the poem recording Mítt navn við hondskrift (‘My Name in Handwriting’) in 2014, and her first poetry collection, Hvít sól (‘White Sun) in 2015. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and teaches creative writing at the University of the Faroe Islands. The poems featured here are from her second collection Eg skrivi á vátt pappír (I Write On Wet Paper), which received the 2020 Faroese Literature Prize and was nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Brad Harmon is a writer, translator, and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. His forthcoming translations include Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Threadsuns Press, October 2024) and Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (Sublunary Editions, November 2024). He currently lives in Stockholm. bradharmon.me