Annual Report: Souvenirs from a Terrible Year

Sitting here on my computer on the last day of this horrific year taking stock of some of the stuff I did….

After a few years of not writing poems, the poetry poured out of me this year, starting in late winter. Lyrics about parenting, chemistry and art.

The poems are largely about my seven-year-old son and my mom, who died in the spring. Their bodies register so many vectors shaping US politics and culture - immigration, adoption, chemicals, bees, disciplinary forces.

I was also really influenced by the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico and Georges Didi-Huberman book about him. Didi-Huberman looks at Fra Angelico’s work not for “resemblance” (or “realism”) but “dissemblance.” Or we might say distortions, noise. That dissemblance is in the mode of the poems, but it is also in the subject matter. The world makes distorted copies.

I put them all together into a manuscript - The Adorations - when I was in Santiago this past October. Which is why I got an evil flower tattoo to mark the occasion from a local tattooiste. Another form of writing.

Here I am at Vicente Huidobro’s grave:

I was in Chile to read from the Spanish translation (by Kate Hedeen and Victor R Nunez, RIL Editores). It was a great visit, loved meeting with Chilean poets and critics, I read in the Neruda House. Which is kind of like singing in Graceland.

I didn’t end up going back to Neruda’s poems, but I did go back to Huidobro’s, which has been translated so well by Elliot Weinberger (Altazor) and - here - Infante/Leong (Sky Quakes):

The sky hides its mystery.
At all stopovers one imagines a hidden assassin. The meek singers die of heart attacks from the mere thought of it.
Thus, the sickly butterflies will devolve to their larval condition which they should never have left. The ear will relapse into infancy and fill itself with marine echoes and those algae that float in the eyes of certain birds.
Only Isolde knows the mystery. But she skims across the rainbow, her tremulous fingers in search of a special sound.
And if a blackbird pecks at her eye, she lets it drink all the water it wants with the same smile that attracts herds of buffalo.

(from Sky Quakes, from Co Im Press)

Huidobro’s writing is almost startingly like mine - we share an interest in mysteries and violence, the tension between a baroque sensibility and a push toward directness - even though I seldom think of him as a “major influence.” But then influence works in mysterious - and volatile, anachronistic, transcultural - ways. Maybe it’s true as I was told in Chile: that I’m actually a Latin American poet.

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This winter, Black Ocean published my translation of Aase Berg’s Aase’s Death this year. This book was hailed in Sweden as a return to poetry for Berg. She had previously published a number of prose books, including the somewhat controversial but critically acclaimed autofiction The Hag. But none of these have been published in the US, so here it is just the next book after Hackers. In her diaries (which were published, I wasn’t spying), Aase writes that she was surprised that I find them very dark, because she thinks they are funny. I see her point, but the humor comes from the darkness, the extremity of it:

No Sunlight Reaches All the Way Down

Males assume miniature forms

to parasitize on females

The giant squid makes suction marks

on sperm whales

The fatigue is oblong

Sometimes a can of cheap beer drifts down

All ideologies die

below 3000 meters

The poems take place literally and metaphorically on the bottom of the sea. US poetry still overwhelmingly tends to want to instruct its readers in how to be good, how to be empowered, make the world a better place, redeem history (as Leo Bersani put it). There is no redemption in Aase’s Death. We might associate depression with a static “being stuck.” But here the “being stuck” is a very powerful affective zone, which like the bottom of the ocean gives rise to strange creations, weirdly deformed language.

For me, this is also a book that harkens back to literary history. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of Harry Martinson’s nature poems, such as this one (trans. Fulton):

Evening Inland

Silently the mystery is mirrored. It spins evening

in quietened reed-beds.

Here is a gossamer no one notices

threads from grass to grass.

Silently cattle stare with green eyes.

Soon, evening-calmly, they reach water.

And the lake holds to all mouths

its giant spoon.

But, Aase’s book takes place on the bottom of the sea, with its grimace-like fishes. Aase also drew on Martinson with Dark Matter, her re-write of his classic Aniara (I guess Dark Matter is now a classic too).

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With Action Books I published some great books - Ghayath Almadhoun’s fierce and timely I Have Brought You A Severed; Hand W & E, ML Martin’s queer translation of the mysterious - possibly feminist - Old English poem/riddle Wulf and Eadwacer; and Kate and Victor’s translation of great Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn the Losses:

Burn the losses. Already burning

in my mother’s head. Before,

the truth burned and

my thought burned too. Now

my passion is indifference.

I listen to

invisible teeth in the wood.

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Gamoneda is probably the poet whose work I spent most time with this past year or three, a truly visionary poet of a searingly personal surrealist poetry. Looking forward to reading K and V’s translation of his Covid poem, where Vallejo appears as a bird on the IV pump. Awhile back I wrote a post about him on here.

I also spent a lot of time translating and thinking about Eva Kristina Olsson’s ongoing “psychadelic autobiography” (which includes several books). Also a lot of time with Amelia Rosseli’s poetry (translated by Antognini and Woodard, and Jennifer Scappettone), a poet I feel a lot of kinship to, perhaps because of the multilingual energies in her poems (something Scappettone has written a book about, which I hope to review in the near future).

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This year I also started editing Notre Dame Review, where I published two issues full of great writing, including previously untranslated outtakes from Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, new translations of Raul Zurita, and poems by Dorothea Lasky, Richard Siken, and others, mostly by poets I had never read before. It was a ton of work, but very rewarding in that it opened up my ears/eyes to new writing that made me feel like US poetry is very lively right now, even if the establishment’s rewards/awards culture hardly captures these energies.

It will be very hard for me, but I hope to be able to keep both these publishing ventures going, as international spaces where truly lively poetry can ferment and inspire.

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The biggest thing for me this year was however not directly literary. My mom, Barbro Göransson (née Haglund), died from pancreatic cancer in the spring.

My mom was a singular person. When I was a kid my dad worked as a journalist in Eastern Europe and travelled a lot, was occasionally jailed, but my mom was always there. She raised me on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (She wanted a daughter so she could name her “Johanna” but she got me instead). When I started to write as a 13 year-old it was those records and her copies of Beat poets and French writers in translation that were my first loves.

From her I probably also get my thorniness and difficult personality. While my dad is charming and outgoing, my mom has always been kind of shy and prickly. But she was always 100% true to her thoughts and feelings. She was very leftwing and hated Trump. And she never compromised. In the last few years, she carried out a relentless - but in the end failed - attempt to get her condo association to start planing (instead of constantly cutting down) native flowers. She was a trained horticulturalist and had been obsessed with flowers since childhood. One of our favorites is the “anise hyssop”:

Though she reprimanded me for not using the latin names. Many men in her family, going back to the great mycologist Elias Fries, were horticulturalists and botanists. She said she got goose bumps when my daughter Sinead won gold in a botany award in a high school “science olympiad” contest. We often sent each other photographs of flowers.

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Goodbye 2025, you were both terrible and exciting.