I have technically been writing poetry since seventh grade. However, back then I obviously had no idea anything would ever come of it. I still hadn’t realized how powerful poetry could be.
The Turning Point
High school. First year. Danish class. Two poems by two different poets struck home within the same lesson. “Til mine forældre” (To my parents) by Gustaf Munch-Petersen, and “Erindring” (Memory) by Tove Ditlevsen.
The sheer force of those poems turned my impression of poetry upside down. It wasn’t just words arranged so that they rhymed. It was an opportunity to make people not merely understand, but also feel something.
From then on, I knew I wanted to write. And I tried. But my mastery of English wasn’t great back then, and writing poetry in Danish turned out to be way too personal, to the point of uncomfortable. It just came too close.
Themes: Loneliness. Alienation. Isolation. Adolescence. Sadness. Depression. Very personal stuff essentially.
So… When Did I Really Kick It Off?
Summer 2010. I was 19. My life had taken a turn for the worse, and as I came to discover in the following years: Every time something bad happened, so did poetry.
That’s the time I REALLY started writing, and realized that I now had the ability to express what I wanted to express, in a way so that people could actually understand me.
I wrote my first poetry collection in 2010 – it was called “Whirlpool” – and circulated it among friends and family. However, later on I dismantled it and incorporated the poems into other collections.
After that time, there was no going back. I wrote daily for the next several years – many of these poems have been compiled later on in “What Bits of Peace My Life’s Ensured“, and “Confessions of the Cold Light of Dawn“. Many others have simply been discarded.
Themes: Nature. Writing. Philosophy. Self-reflection. Alienation. Loneliness. Metaphysics. Love, unavoidably.
My More Recent Work
My “new style” was kicked off after an education-induced hiatus of two years. In 2016 I finally felt able to tackle writing poetry in Danish. “De spor man efterlader sig” – my only singularly Danish-language collection – came into being. It is a sad collection that reflects on the past and changing times.
After that, I went back to writing in English again with “Seen From a Distance People Lose Their Eyes” which is written in the same style I developed while writing in Danish. It primarily deals with loss, isolation, writing and reflection.
After that, I wrote “Light Requires Darkness” as the closing of a chapter. It started with material left over from “Seen From a Distance…” and just grew and grew. I wrote myself out of a depression and into a new future with that collection. The last poem I wrote on the collection was written on the day I got together with my now husband. And that felt like a natural conclusion.
The last (finished) poetry collection I have written was ‘divisive / dismissive / missive‘. It is fragmentary and written in a fit of rage after a dispute (long in the coming) with various family members who had watched me being miserable for years, never raising a hand (or voice) to offer any kind of help. I needed to get some things off my chest… and somehow it ended up evolving into a critique of social media and alienation in modern society in general – and the fragmentary nature of it suddenly seemed to make sense in that context. Which wasn’t planned, but just happened along the way.
It is, in terms of style, by far the most experimental collection I have written.
Themes: Identity. Belonging. Loss. Change. Family. Alienation. Technology and its Effects. Depression. Communication. Self-acceptance. Love.
And the Future…?
Who knows? I attempted to put a lot of my stray essays and poems from recent years into a new collection called “The 30th” around the time of my (you guessed it) 30th birthday, but it doesn’t really work for me. So I’ll probably remake it.
And as for other poems, I am writing a little bit every now and then. Not as much as in the past. But much better quality, if I may say so myself.
We’ll just have to wait and see where it goes.