Journal
Long-form essays and meditations on poetry, language and silence – from Swedish modernism to Persian mysticism.
An essay on the most moving lines from Sappho, Rilke, Dickinson, Boye and Tranströmer – and why their sorrow continues to console us.
Why do so many poets write while others sleep? An essay on the role of night in poetry – from Gunnar Ekelöf and Karin Boye to Elizabeth Bishop and T.S. Eliot.
When language fails and sleep won't come, the poem becomes a kind of bandage – not a cure, but a way of holding together what has broken. An essay on heartbreak in poetry, from Sappho to Edith Södergran and Anne Carson.
A reading of Tomas Tranströmer that shows how the pauses, the breaths and the white space between the lines carry his poetry as much as the words themselves.
How a single poem about buds bursting open became a way of life for generations – and why Karin Boye's poetry keeps speaking into our own age of crisis and transformation.
Why 800-year-old Persian verses still strike us – and what happens on the way from Mevlana's Konya to the stillness of the Swedish language.
How a young woman in a Karelian sanatorium blew Swedish poetry to pieces – and built it anew. A reading of modernism's first Swedish-language breakthrough.
Beyond the myth of the self-destructive poet there is an artist of rare technical sharpness. A reading of the Ariel poems as metallurgy rather than autobiography.
Why do poets always write about autumn? A reading of three great autumn poems – Verlaine's violin lament, Stagnelius's nocturnal longing and Rilke's prayer for solitude – that shows how the season became the mirror of the soul.
One of the world's most untranslatable words is the Portuguese saudade – a longing for something that may never have existed. A reading of Fernando Pessoa, Pär Lagerkvist and Cesário Verde on how poetry has tried to name the unnameable.