Dag T. Straumsvåg, The Mountains of Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems, trans. Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg

 

DEBTS

We owe Tomas and Elisabeth dinner. We owe my grandmother a visit to her grave. We owe my brother Christmas presents for the last two years, and Lars a solid win at bridge. We’ve neglected our garden for years, not to mention Mrs. Hansen next door. We owe our cat fresh sand, $22,000 in back taxes, and the wife’s boss a beating from long ago. We owe the changing weather several weeks of flu. In the neighbour’s pool, the yellow rubber duck has capsized, its legs sticking straight up in the air. We owe it a resurrection. And now, down the block, the mailman comes with a heap of new bills. We owe him so much. We’ll never be able to pay him what he deserves.

I’ve seen bits of his work, whether through journals or chapbooks (including one through above/ground press), for a while now, so it is good to see a larger collection by Norwegian poet and translator Dag T. Straumsvåg, his The Mountains of Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025). Translated from the original Nynorsk into English by the author himself and Minnesota-based author and translator Robert Hedin, the book also includes an introduction by Canadian poet, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, as well as a foreword by co-translator Hedin. As Hedin’s “FOREWORD” begins: “The Mountains of Kong presents sixty-one of the rich, evocative prose poems of Norwegian poet and translator Dag T. Straumsvåg. A bilingual edition, it includes a generous selection of poems from his previously published volumes as well as a gathering of new poems that have never before been translated into English and appear here for the first time.” Hedin continues:

            For those who prefer poetry to be prudent and well-behaved, the poems of The Mountains of Kong will come as a surprise. They are not well-mannered, restrained, or fastidious in any way, nor do they follow a traditional narrative path. Instead, they are quirky, quixotic, and, above all, endlessly inventive—brief, jazz-like riffs that through their deft phrasing and many unexpected turns travel a constant course of discovery, often voyaging off the map into worlds where nothing is as it seems and “not a single landmark is where it should be.”

It is interesting to hear Hedin’s framing of Straumsvåg’s work as being outside a “traditional narrative path,” as Stuart Ross’ introduction, “A NORWEGIAN POET IN NORTH AMERICA,” describes the poems assembled in this collection as having a foundation well set in North American poetry and poetics. “His sole book published in Norway,” Ross writes, “back in 1999—Eg er Simen Gut (I Am Simen Gut)—was primarily a collection of nature poems, but his interests—including his immersion into the works of Russell Edson, Daniil Kharms, and James Tate, among others—eventually took him to wildly different poetic territories after that debut publication. And Dag has since been championed by a good dozen prominent poets in the US and Canada, where he has attracted a modest but devoted following.” Ross then offers a list of further North American poets that Straumsvåg has engaged with, including the late Canadian poets Nelson Ball and Michael Dennis, Montreal poet Hugh Thomas and Kingston poet Jason Heroux, with whom he has been collaborating with for some time now, as evidenced through A Further Introduction to Bingo (above/ground press, 2024). Certainly, Straumsvåg’s poems are oddly surreal, and I certainly wouldn’t know anything of the literary context from which Straumsvåg (and his first collection) emerged, but one easily sees this current selection of prose poems setting firmly and comfortably in a tradition of poets such as the late American prose poet Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected poems here] and American writer Lydia Davis [see a note I wrote on her work here], for example, for their shared appreciation for the slightly askew and surreal self-contained lyric prose narratives. “I’m sure it’s possible to accumulate some wisdom in this life. There are a couple of mistakes, for example,” Straumsvåg’s poem “THE LITTLE TYKE” begins, “I’ll never repeat. But basically wisdom serves no practical purpose, and the added weight only leads to back pains, headaches, balance problems—a condition dumped in your lap like a baby you didn’t know you had.” It would be interesting to be able to discern the more obvious Norwegian elements Straumsvåg weaves into his prose poems, but as yet, these are elements of which I am otherwise and completely unaware.

Straumsvåg’s poems very much lean into what Edson spent decades crafting, an aesthetic and structure of the short narrative with surreal edges, an aesthetic that also touches upon elements of the work of multiple other contemporary English-language North American poets such as Stuart Ross himself [see my review of his latest here], Hamilton poet Gary Barwin [see my review of his latest poetry title here], Wisconsin poet Nate Logan [see my review of his latest collection here], and Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany [see my review of his latest here], among so many others. “The place was empty. No scissors, no combs or half-empty bottles of dye,” the poem “ABANDONED DOG GROOMING SALON” begins, “no dog hairs on the floor, no posters of poodles. I turned the small room into a study, slept on a couch in the back. The first year I dreamed of dogs every night. By the fifth, pets were no longer allowed, and I stopped dreaming.”

To place that in a bit larger context of the North American prose poem, Straumsvåg approach seems marketedly different to the more lyric offerings of poets such as the fractals of Toronto poet Margaret Christakos [see my review of her latest here] or Salt Lake City poet Lindsey Webb [see my review of her debut here], or the direct statements and experiments by Canadian poets Lisa Robertson or Anne Carson [see my essay on her latest collection here]. There’s a directness to Straumsvåg’s lyrics, working narratives that pull in and out of deliberate focus, unexpectedly turning left or right or even across, never ending up in a place one might expect. His poems begin with a solid narrative foundation, heading in one direction and then swerving elsewhere, either gradually or suddenly or accumulatively, managing to exceed all expectations, with one step and then another towards truly odd corners and surfaces. Honestly, this is a delightful collection; is that something reviewers even say anymore? This is a delightful book, and I hope there are more of them. “There has to be a mountain range near Tembakounda in Guinea that stretches east to the Central African Mountains of the Moon,” the title poem begins, “James Rennell thought. The source of the White Nile. So he introduced it on a map he sketched for Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park (1799), dividing the continent in two, and named it the Mountains of Kong.”