I am a Danish poet / writer / translator and artist.
Everything on here is written by me personally #fuckAI.
I have written poetry for years – since my school days. Poetry allows me to say a lot with very few words, which is simply beautiful! It is also one of the world’s oldest art forms, and a splendid way of communicating complex things.
I started writing poetry as a self-therapeutic endeavour, which worked wonders through my teenage years. And poetry has followed me until today (my mid-thirties) where it is and remains my favourite means of expressing myself.
What Does Poetry Mean To Me?
As a teenager, I took up poetry as a means of communication that made up for the fact that nobody spoke to me, and I myself spoke to nobody. I nonetheless sought a way to express myself – and the method ended up being poetry.
Ironically, English poetry (not my native language). It was somehow easier to “speak” in a foreign language, where I could sort of keep my emotional turmoil at arms length.
I make it sound like writing poetry was somehow a rational decision I made, but it wasn’t. Poetry just started sort of happening.
Poetry can be convoluted and requires you to think. It you choose to read poetry, that is something you seek out. You are open to new perspectives and ways of seeing the world. And that is amazing – the world needs more of that attitude.
I was thrilled to discover, in my late teens, that I could connect with an audience online. And I still am today. I am humbled continuously by the fact that so many of you visit this website and leave me messages about my work. Thank you so much for that!
I could also mention the fact that poetry is one of the oldest and most distinguished art forms in the world – but I will spare you an hour-long lecture on that point (for now). I feel incredibly blessed to be able to continue the tradition, and it is deeply inspiring to know that I am part of such a long chain of poets – going all the way back to antiquity (and further) – all dealing with more or less the same themes.
How My Poetry Reflects Me
First and foremost, poetry matches my way of thinking and communicating quite well. It is distilling complex thoughts and emotions into bite-sized pieces. I try to do this in speech as well (a very inefficient means of communication), but writing offers much better opportunities.
I also tend to make associations and see patterns other people sometimes struggle to follow. But in poetry, that’s fine. It ties right in.
When writing poetry, I can disappear into my art for hours, and distill whatever I have to say at the moment. But if I attempt to write longer pieces, I lose focus and cannot really hold the entire work in my head. That is for instance why I’ve never managed to complete any of the countless novels I’ve started writing over the years.
A poem is easy to structure, bend and manipulate. And short enough to keep in my head in its entirety.
Poetry marries words to rhythm and rhyme, making difficult ideas more accesible to the human brain, and complicated things more easy to remember. To begin with, I primarily wrote blank verse, but over time, things started rhyming more often than not. And eventually, I slipped into my own personal brand of end rhymes, cross-rhymes and Nordic-style alliteration (rhyming consonants at the start of words, not just the end of words). This reflects my language and cultural heritage, even when I write in English.
As a result, my poetry doesn’t fit a specific format. But the rhyme and rhytm tends to become complex as I sound everything out in my head before writing it down. It is very much intended for recital (feel free to try!).
Poetry has been at alternating times therapy, prayer and simply conversation for me. A general trend has emerged over time though. If I were to sum it up I would say that I have simultaneously become both more and less personal in my writing, than I was initially. More, because I am obviously drawing on personal experience and since I have grown older I have a lot more of that now than I started out with. And less, because my poetry is no longer as inward-looking as it was when I was a lonely, troubled teenager – rather, I have come to see how my experiences and what I go through in life does not make me unique; rather, the broad strokes of it are universal experiences applicable to everyone.
I guess, in short, I have just grown older and my poetry has followed me on the journey.
A Brief History of My Poetry
I have written poetry since I was a child. It really started coming together in a series of frankly awful love poems I wrote as a teenager (thankfully long forgotten by everyone except myself).
I started publishing on this site when I was 20, back in 2011, because I wanted my own platform that I had complete control over.
The quality and quantity of my writing varied greatly. The quantity went up dramatically whenever I was feeling depressed or anxious, and I stopped writing entirely when something positive happened in my life – which fortunately started happening more often as I entered my twenties.
The earliest poems were generally terrible – both because I lacked practise, and because I wrote in a foreign language I didn’t fully master yet. But over time, things got better. It wasn’t until I felt somewhat confident in what I was producing that this website came into being.
But even then the themes were much the same. Loneliness. Depression. Alienation and isolation. Feeling different and a bit lost in a society I didn’t quite understand. Struggling to connect and communicate. Craving love and connection, but feeling that it came at too high a cost when it did materialise.
And then in my mid-twenties, my whole life was turned upside down. I got married, changed careers, bought property etc. etc. … And unfortunately that meant that I almost stopped writing. Because prior to this point, I saw poetry as largely a therapeutic tool, I didn’t need it when things were going fine.
So I finalized my collection “Light Requires Darkness” when I met my husband. And I wrote “divisive / dismissive / missive” shortly after. And then I basically stopped writing for 8 years.
I did compile a collection of leftover fragments to close a chapter.
But I was really busy going to law school and getting married, and everything was going great. So I didn’t realize how quickly time passed.
And then in 2025 I was out on the other side. Older. Hopefully wiser. Happily married, with a brand new degree in law and economics, and a stable job for the first time in my adult life. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
And before I realized what was happening, I was back to writing poetry. I was happy to discover, that personal problems wasn’t my only source of inspiration. I had a lot to say, and couldn’t help myself from putting it into words. And I finally had the time and energy to do so.
So that sparked a whole new era of my poetry – a far more mature and (in my eyes) more worthwhile era. Also, I had gone back to writing mostly in Danish. I felt a deep need to connect with my roots, and I also didn’t need to shield myself behind a foreign language anymore since the poetry I came to write didn’t make me feel nearly as exposed as my earlier works.
And that brings us around to the present day, where I currently have three poetry collections underway, and it doesn’t look like I will ever be able to stop.
Poetry just keeps happening to me. That’s all I can say.
If you have read this far, I salute you! Well done!
On this website you will find my poems and translations from 2010 onwards. Everything written before then is frankly cringe, and I wouldn’t want the rest of the world to see it. 😂
I hope you’ll get something out of reading through it all.
If you have any comments or thoughts on any of my poems, I’d love to hear them – so feel free to write to me through the contact form. Thank you in advance. 💖
Lots of love, K-M