To be friends with everyone is an impossible act: for humans, gods, mythological and religious, animals, spirits, cartoons, ecologies—each at some point in their existence, not friendly. Poetry as a sociosensual cultural transmission is mostly an impossible act—especially through translation—and the established Norwegian poet, Gunnar Wærness, kicks us right into this paradoxical abyss with the title of his new book, friends with everyone.

Alas, Wærness’ poems have a vicious solution to be friends with everyone: be everyone, i.e. destabilize identity, or persona, by using what Wærness intuits as a hyperpersonality. Wærness renders this theory in “Imagining a Hyperpersonality” noting that “[i]t's limiting to be a person . . . Perhaps I have tried to constitute the lyrical 'I' as a meeting place where different voices collide within the framework of a single subjectivity, a kind of experimental identity” (45). Hyperpersonality edges toward the antipoetry of identity poetics, and these polyvocal anti-identity poems sprawl in fascinating splendor from this poetic hyperpersonality in friends with everyone.

Wærness writes anti-identity poems as Nicanor Parra writes antipoems. Antitranslator Liz Werner defines Parra’s antipoetics thusly: “antipoetry mirrors poetry, not as its adversary but as its perfect complement; it is not by nature negative, but negative where poetry is positive, and vice versa” (Werner x). Wærness accomplishes this by placing identity and its subsequent business in poetry as a metapoetic subject throughout this book—that special conjuring of inseparable form and content.

In this collection, Gabriel Gudding deftly translates Wærness’ Norwegian. Wærness is from Heimdal in Trondheim, which is 300 miles north of Oslo, and he has a dialect, Trøndersk. However, Norwegians are taught to write in Bokmål, which is akin to standardized English. Gudding provides an excellent overview of the linguistic oppression in the Norwegian Language Conflict and its colonial aspirations in the afterword, “And the Carcass Says Look” (241-249). There he quotes Wærness in one of their conversations: “Universalism is the hallmark of the ambitions of the colonizer, not the colonized” (244). friends with everyone is an amalgam of the above linguistic diaspora and the hyperpersonality required to wrestle into being a syncretic contemporary mind amid constant cultural alienations.

The book is organized in seven waves—sections—each with a piloting subject. To summarize will diminish each wave’s scope as it’s often greater than these bullet points, but here they are: nationalism, identity, family, language, empire, ecology, whiteness. These subjects propagate, transfer, reflect, refract, and diffract into and across each other as any wavy wave will.

The poem titles are written as journal entries # (title / date), and throughout these poems, the primary formal elements are caesura and line break. There is zero punctuation, until the seventh wave. In “2. (the sea / November 9 2015)” presented in its entirety below, we begin to calibrate some of the oscillations described above:

chum for the eyes      chum for the sky

maritime carrion and kleptoparasites and neoliberalism       i

am sitting in a boat      trying to think like a boat

only manage to think like a raft

a trickle-up-effect      throng and longing and bubbles

a trickle-down-effect      national boarders drawn

with a zigzag of rain on a windshield      and i

am an epistle on the sea       a human envelope

steamed open       for all to read

my application is completely pulped       a prayer dribbles

from my mouth        tears and mascara       why did i beg the sea

to teach me to think       as a sea       the sea says       i

don’t need to think        i       encompass all

already       kelson oars gunnels buoy       eye

flesh and sail and bone       i have swallowed every bit

of the boats       a boat’s a contusion

on the waves       up there       you’re floating

and wondering how you look

with your belly exposed       some sea prey

a white keel splitting       like a zipper       my eyes foam

with visions and see        that one

who eats suffering       shits tears       and one

who eats people       shits history       and the eyes

that see me in such stories       i cannot close

These caesurae and their white space are used non-traditionally throughout these poems. In “Imagining a Hyperpersonality” Wærness gives a rough definition:

I felt like a ruffian when I said that the caesuras [sic] were a kind of 'blank punctuation,' where the caesura partly functioned as line division within the verse, partly as a comma, partly as a tool for emphasis, partly as parentheses, Dickinsonian dashes, sometimes as a period or colon, and that it gave me the freedom to build long sentences with heaps of inserts without getting lost in rhythmic and rhetorical punctuation hierarchies. (45)

These white-space caesurae and the lack of punctuation create a murkiness and indeterminacy here—a folding of speakers into layers. There is the poet as speaker and the sea as speaker, just as there is the mind as boat then raft then sea then vision then you perceiving yourself reading a speaker’s commentary on your reading. Such fractal misdirections enhanced by the caesurae and chunky breaks in syntax are the crux of the formal expression of Wærness’ hyperpersonality in action.

Wærness and Gudding comically engage semantics as an ideological position. In “42. (the eye/ December 14 2014)”, Wærness comes after the phrase, “the sun is up” and mocks “as if the sun had a bed / in the world        where it could sleep      without setting fire to the house” (167). Beyond the staccato stand-up humor, Wærness ventures deeper into the ideology behind these common phrases “so old have the words become        they heard what they want to hear / and might as well go on believing their own truths” (167) only to triumphantly stumble upon a moment of poesis: “homeless and speechpoor bare bones freezing through the long language nights / for six thousand years we’ve been the sun’s arms and legs // now that’s what i call talking     that’s what i call // running around and calling things names” (167).This is followed by the anaphora “we used them . . .” and an onslaught of scenarios where metaphor has satisfyingly calculated how spiritual perceptions connect to the human body, eventually concluding that poesis itself is an existential necessity. This delight at torqueing a new phrase into existence is a delight that’s encountered frequently in friends with everyone.

Humor is rampant in these poems, especially directed towards other poets engaged in the business of poetry. Wærness considers the poetry festival in the aptly titled “40. (poetry festival / July 26 2016)”. The poem opens “yeah it’s lame      to travel this far / to talk about yourself      but sometimes / we just have to” (161). This poem is a spiral of self-deprecating snark, but in a way that addresses material concerns about the system in which we participate. It continues:

       so dear poets       and lovers of literature

in plundered and neocolonized countries

or in boring and hollow tax havens

we write and we write       about stars and planets

titties and ass       death and resurrection       and shed a tear

because we say it all so well       with blowdried hair       waxed asscracks

designer jeans       prepaid dinners

and the hired funereal bartenders

but tell me       why are we reading poems

in the fucking smoking lounge

of the grand continental excelsior hotel (162)

The absurd excesses continue as well as the class signifiers and apologias and mea culpas all inherent in the poetry industrial complex. Wærness quips at the end of this poem: “and that i’m not saying this to ruin the mood / but everytime we meet one of us has to say it / and today it was me” (163). No poet is safe from ridicule in these poems, including Wærness. However, these poems don’t dip into the analytical whinging for the hatred of poetry, à la Ben Lerner, instead we’re offered a textured melancholy of a poet spinning in his national prominence.

Crucially, these poems balk at the metapoetic finitude of an imperial poet as unifying nationalist instrument. In “36. (empire / February 13 2015),” the poem opens with a formal address, “honored assembly thanks          for letting us stay here / this beautiful country         this proud people / brothers sisters friends        i have heard         you are empire / but you don’t look like empire” to punch up its sarcasm. The poem glides into derisive compliments of the spoils of empire, and grinds down to diabolical turn onto the unexpected subject:

when you hear that my country is disappearing         you don’t get terrified

when i have translated this         so you can understand that my country

is disappearing         you don’t get terrified         no

instead you grow furious         because i am terrified

now that’s empire (151)

This tonal shift from playful mockery to genuine political analysis is constant, so much so that mockery and sarcasm tend to fade into veracity. It’s one of the many satisfying gestures in this text, perhaps the most.

Gudding does spectacular work translating Wærness’ demotic phrasing and tone. To examine a moment in “4. (talkshow / April 17 2015)” the Norwegian and English will be side-by-side:

kalt en moderne nasjonalstat     se meg danse     called the modern nationstate     watch me dance
når leirbålsanger fra dypeste folkedypet             when the campfire songs   from the deepy deeps
sjokker ut av munnen på meg                               of the people      honk out of my mouth
og besverger hele hovedstaden                              to implore the entire capital (22-23)

The striking phrase “from the deepy deeps” feels strange; same with “honk out of my mouth.” These are absurdist terms for an absurdist poem where the speaker is a “many-eyed mite     who ate himself fat” in “flowerprint bedding / called the modern nationstate” (23). The literal translation of “deepy deeps” is “from the deepest of the people’s deep” or “deepest folk depths,” which don’t seem like good choices here. “Honk out of my mouth” could be translated more literally as “stream out of my mouth,” but “honk” seems appropriately vigorous and absurd. On the other hand, “besverger hele hovedstaden” is more literally translated as swearing, cursing out, or casting a spell on the whole capital. “Implore” seems soft here against the terse weirdness of the other choices. For an English-only speaking audience, these would be unnoticeable, which is the beauty of these choices Gudding makes.

Gudding has an adroit ear to transmute the rhythms of Norwegian into English—a feat on its own. Here are some lines from “22. (cuckoo / march 11 2018) “kookoo eggs     made of ridi koo lous gas / pop and rise     on ludi koo rous wings / a hatch of foolsgold eggs     in pods of sedge eriophorum” (91) The music is in driver’s seat of this translation and gassing it. The poem ends in total sonorous ecstasy while managing to dig into an allusion that contextualize the poem for an English-speaking reader:

the spring is coming now coming in

icumen now       sing loud crowcrow      the seed is growing

the meadow’s in bloom      coming in now      crowing

in now      the spring icumen in (93)

When read aloud, the timing of the breath created by the caesurae is remarkably similar to Norwegian pacing. Notably, it’s difficult to sense this without experience in the language, but open a YouTube video of Norwegians in conversation and this feat may reveal itself. Moreover, the allusion lies in that last line. “Sumer is icumen in,” also known as the “Cuckoo Song,” is sung in the round, much like the nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” This addition of the allusion is not inherently obvious in the Norwegian text, yet Gudding’s transculturation vivifies the poetry for an English-speaking audience.

The sixth wave addresses freedom and unity through the dream of a poet inhabiting other fictional activists throughout history. The penultimate poem, “54. (the dream of jesus gossaert / October 12 2015),” is the dream and the last poem in the wave, “55. (unity / may 19 2020)” is a dialectic about that experience, freedom, unity, and identity. It’s marvelous and shocking way to end a book that thoroughly embodies hyperpersonality, and it was the original ending to the Norwegian version of this book, Venn med alle.

For this translation, Wærness decided to add another poem as the seventh wave, “(expert at being born / November 10 2011),” which in the afterword Gudding notes that “Wærness calls the poem ‘a carnivalization and a mashup’ of The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga as translated by Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene (U Cal Press 1969), Wole Soyinka’s poem ‘Abiku,’ as found in his Idanre and Other Poems of 1967, and ‘I am Anjuhimeko’ from Hiromi Ito’s Killing Kanoko as translated by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books 2009)” (246). The conceptual premise of the poem is the speaker is a baby that is repeatedly born and murdered by its father, and in the brief moments it’s alive, it argues with the father and descends through the stages of grief, along with a few new stages. It’s an immensely powerful and disturbing poem—also shockingly funny and sincere, a fitting end for friends with everyone.

For Norway to give its most prestigious prizes to Wærness reveals some awareness of its participation in neoliberal proclivities, which does not absolve but at the least is an acknowledgment. In contrast, a U.S. Poet Laureate would never be someone this outwardly critical of global neoliberalism. Meanwhile, to have this exquisite translation of a foreign major poet exist in the U.S. is a gift—one that readers should unwrap and consider.






Works Cited

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Wærness, Gunnar. “Imagining a Hyperpersonality.” Translator Sean F. Munro & Liv Munro. Nordic Poetry: A Journal of Poetics, Volume 6, Issue 1, pp.43-45. 23 November 2023.

Werner, Liz. “Introduction: The Authorized Antitranslation.”Antipoems: How to look better & feel great. Nicanor Parra. New York: New Directions Books, 2004.