Future

In collaboration with poet Shadi Bazeghi and in partnership with the Swedish poetry journal Lyrikvännen as well as Oslo Internasjonale Poesifestival, I meter I has created a cross-Nordic poetry festival that spans over time and space. The focus of the festival is trauma and resistance – hence the (Danish) title Trauma & Modstand.

Through three appendices in Malmö, Copenhagen and Oslo we want to create a framework in which poets and scholars can explore poetic form as a consequence of traumatic experience more than as pure aesthetics and look at the relationship between traumatic experiences, aesthetic expression and ‘traumatic form’.

With the festival Trauma & Modstand we want to create a dialogue about poetry, as a form of speech act and activism – understood as the ambition to use language performatively and to let language do what is expressed. In countries such as England and the United States, the concept of trauma literature has been researched and discussed. In the Nordic countries, however, it is relatively unknown. What connects the poets selected for the festival program is that they have written poems about trauma in one way or another, and that the occupation with trauma has had an impact on the form the poems take. The emphasis on aesthetics AND form is rooted in the idea that words are not always enough when writing about traumatic experience, and that a formal treatment of the text works can create space and can be seen as a form of expression for the emotions and experiences that go beyond the words.

The festival is supported by Swedish Arts Council & Nordisk Kulturfond.