Is there to be no end to the torments the human world inflicts on poetry?

...I better have trolls as a target audience....

The odd duck who barged in here, high and mighty, demanding a “poetry workshop” has already left—thank goodness.

According to Ted Gioia, Substack is some kind of brainchild of Hunter Thompson. I’ll take note of it—but to me it’s more like an endless Tupperware party for niche writers, each tending their own little plot—a target audience, something I’ve never really had—and constantly hawking cute little sets at them. That constant fug of self-promotion and pep talk—so very American—but then, I hardly have an audience here anyway; no one’s exactly craving my “complicated fuss.”

An odd fact: for a long time online my nickname was “maanantai,” the Finnish word for “Monday.” I chose it back then as my Chello handle—simply because I loved the sound. So Finnish already drew me in, and Véronique once wrote a kind of art-story set entirely in Finland. I now know fifty Finnish words and hope to know five thousand a year from now—it’s a lovely cherry on the cake, since I also command some Hungarian (little) and Turkish (little to fair).

I managed to revise twenty hard-as-nails poems from the Norwegian section. Plus a few leftovers where I still have to decide what to keep. Some English translations:

*

We wander along a dead river-thread,
past a graveyard called ‘Fred’.

Frietzerkers haunt
like child-dream fries.

The burrowing blue
in the Stardalsälven
breathes forever its own lullaby,
an endless veil of turquoise ore
like pebble-gods asleep in stone.

The threads of the sky-weave awaken
in the water of her truth-life,
flare up, shivering, from the depths.

*

A land
full of threshing balloon-men
who wonder whether children
are only little helium factories.

When a Norseman strikes, he strikes;
where others see great machines
he sees the high-sailing sea

hears, in the first light,
the child that has risen.

—

Between the rose-marble blocks in Hennsett,
where long-gone buttercups
point the wrong way toward Sweden,
as if foretelling a return—
for everything sings southward
in the hope of being seen again.

—

You were right, Dad,
life is one great fuckansi
which we, with the scrawn of a photograph,
must face.

We serve the moment
that must polaroid-slice
against the other’s light.

A fossil
that vast-black
bore the world,

still and lustral as the white
that, since antiquity,
breathed through paper.

—

It is too easy
to forget the silver-work of the mountains,
to carry it far away
out of the wild grip of the dark
and the trolls’ lure-song.

All too easy
to learn from winter alone
how to disappear—

haunting like a rune,
swallowing its own name:
Vrökkungen.

*
For the remainder, I will delve into the life and work of the poet Paul Brekke.

Why Brekke in particular? Well, I have a handful of persuasive, volume-architecture reasons. The Norwegian section has to be properly counterweighted against the other two, and it must also say something about the real relations between the countries—a task that’s anything but simple.

Field Commander Benders thus has a fresh mission. If I can convincingly lock down the final ten to fourteen pages of the Norwegian section, I think I’ll have managed to surpass Ginneninne—which was the aim of this book.

*

As in a Cinema Hall

As in a cinema hall, though without
knowing how I myself have come
here, and midway through the performance —
What is it about? Hush
But what is the film called? Hush
And the usher shines, squints at me
with a shielded flashlight —
Why don’t you take a seat? What about
these suitcases?
They’re mine. Hush, he pushes me —
Have you been drinking? Keep
quiet, or you’ll have to leave again.

And distantly, a memory that once
I protested? Didn’t I scream? Stomp?
I don’t remember, just stumble upward
on stairs with numbers glowing
green against Exit (red)
and afraid. From the screen behind me
voices, metallic loudspeaker-roaring
whispering as from shrieking winches
and a grave-darkness around me
only the heads just barely, so white above
the seatbacks, and when I speak to them —
Hush! Then out with you
headfirst through the door, out
but only into a cinema hall, exactly
like the last, and the same film
Are they playing it forward or backward?
Hush. And the usher and it all
again, up the stairs
out again, but always only back in again.

Paul Brekke

*

That looks hopeful. With luck the trolls still listen to poetry; you can’t rely on people nowadays. It seems not a single work by Brekke is in print. In Norway itself I can find one title—woefully scant—and even that can only be ordered as an e-book if you have a Norwegian phone number.

Is there to be no end to the torments the human world feels compelled to inflict on poetry?

Martijn Benders, 09-09-2025