Gunnar Wærness, friends with everyone (trans. Gabriel Gudding

 

the shadow of the homeland is a sea
that follows us in our journey    it waits for us
beside the rivers    that resemble blue intestines
spilling from the folds    of the map we stole

i conjure from this tangle    of viscera and bowels
the carcass we called the world    we chased it with swords
first in boats    then books    and at last with this
one bare hand    that burns here    on your thigh goddess
which you brush away    saying    if you want to fuck
comrade    you have to stop calling me momma

these are not my words    that are crawling down the edge
of the map of the world    drawn with crushed cochineal
soot and blood    on vellum here    where the seas and grown small
and the countries have disappeared    while the rivers have widened (“6. (such a friend to everyone / march 23 2015”)

I’m intrigued by the punk swagger of musical, muscled language of Norwegian poet Gunnar Wærness' poetry collection friends with everyone (Action Books, 2024), a collection that offers his poems in original Norwegian alongside English translation, as translated by American poet and translator Gabriel Gudding. The collection is constructed out of fifty-five numbered poems across six sections, or “waves,” with final, seventh “wave” made up of a single, coda-like poem set at the end. Throughout, the poems accumulate across a narrative expansiveness, each building upon the prior, some of which are quite lengthy, almost unwieldly, across multiple pages. There is an element of this collection reminiscent of so many of those hefty Nightboat Books selecteds, offering whole new worlds and histories of writers of whom I had previously and completely unaware (it is always good to be regularly presented with new worlds beyond one’s borders), and Wærness’ poetry, at least as evidenced through this collection, is polyvocal and explorative, providing an outreach one can never quite see the horizons of, beyond the stark works set upon the page. “you are your own / many-mentioned / heretic-angel,” the poem “21. (the angel of history / june 1 2015)” begins, “all of us who believed in you / each plucked something / from your fire     as a souvenir // on your yellowed image / the contones and rasters / are your fire’s cinders [.]” And there’s something of the date set in so many of the poem titles, jumping around in time and space, that provide a kind of untetheredness; it suggests dates of composition, perhaps, but might also be a kind of red herring, or even providing dates from original composition, set in this particular order through and for other means. One might wonder if the collection might provide a different shape if the poems were set in sequential order as suggested by each date instead of the poems’ numbering systems, or if the very notion of Wærness’ expansiveness would render such reordering entirely moot. As Gudding writes to open his post-script, “And the Carcass Says Look”:

In August 2022 about twenty Scandinavian poets and critics gathered for a symposium in Sundsvall, Sweden, to discuss the work of Gunnar Wærness (pron. Varniss)—in front of, with, and despite the misgivings of Wærness himself: I was fortunate enough to attend. The symposium principally focused on only one of Wærness’s several books, Venn med alle. The Danish poet Glaz Serup asked Wærness about the many voices being sounded from the “I” in the book: from which or what reality or realm are these voices speaking? It’s an understandable question: everything speaks in Friends with Everyone. Or maybe: it’s more that speech is distributed across a range of entities, a crowd of voices, sometimes democratic, sometimes geologic, sometimes botanical. Nonhuman animals speak as they blink into extinction, the sea speaks, a mite speaks, rocks and trees speak, the collective hiveghost of colonizing white people speaks, a prisoner, a cup, a goddess, a bowl, an eye, a tongue, a flower, a fetus. Lenin speaks from cupboards and drawers. We hear from unborn children and the dead speak from unknown realms. Even words speak in order to ask to be spoken. And somehow behind these voices are other voices: the mite seems to ventriloquize immigrants, while poets are trying to ventriloquize whole nations. The whole book seems suffused with monstrous speech, a gothic panpsychism. The issue then in Friends with Everyone is reliably present: who or what speaks and why? To whom are they talking? And who is the friend?