Fitness Center
The courteous are the most beautiful people of all
Their dignity didn’t come by mail
And they don’t need pills to manage their headaches
Maybe I was born too late
Psychological maladies sweep through parish councils and the balance sheets of frightened kiosk owners
It’s not a nightmare anymore
The earth really is burning
From the telephone receiver, you can catch the scent of smoke
Letters rot in the mailbox
Maybe it was megalomania that made mankind call itself the crown of creation
Today that crown hangs on a peg in the theater
Cherry picking human right activists who lurk in the barrooms of the innocents
Editors who write grand editorials for national holidays
Lawyers who keep neurotic wives locked up in the fridge or on high balconies
Now administrate the brittle remains of noble skeletons
I was born too late
I feel like a stranger to these pawned streets
Raucous laughter makes my glassy veins shiver
Gone are the days when life was as straightforward as a manual for an alarm clock
I’m the last survivor of a civilization that had respect for something as simple as a glass of water
Maybe that’s where all these troubling visions come from
One day I dropped a coin in the jukebox at the café
Three angels suddenly revealed themselves to me
One of them was a former KGB agent
His widow now runs a fitness center in Moscow
The next angel looked like me, a surprised gentleman with enormous wings
And the third angel sang in seculae seculorum:
The water in a vase
Has the same shape as the vase
Add a rose to it
And it will smell like rose water
A fever rages through the alphabet
Ghosts who ought to know their place behind the fences of madness
Urge experts to write hopeless pronouncements on the ability of the word to reflect the world
Empty compasses run off with the highest literary accolades
And I dread women who shave away traces of ancient times
In the bush of the armpits there are perfumed words that whisper:
I am a nest, come and lie down here
But there’s something even more disturbing
I’m stymied by my own tolerance
The tenants that moved into my house
Have little by little forced me into a few rooms in the attic
In the basement they have a curiosity shop selling fur coats
Sometimes I wake in the night when they’re flaying tigers and polar bear cubs
On the ground level they sell democracy to single mothers
And special masks for people to wear at funerals, masks that are able to wring the most exquisite tears
And one day, the man who rents the upstairs flat asked me whether starlings really have the moral right to begin
singing at six o’clock in the morning
I was born too late
I listen intently through the consciousness of dead nobles
Sometimes I wish the town were a rat
I would happily stamp it underfoot
But I’m not a fit subject for poetic elegiacs
Maybe the womb is our hope when it comes down to it
Or maybe I should build an addition to the house
And open a fitness center
Crooked Smiles
Crooked teeth
Lean against one another
Like happy girlfriends
There is no law
That says that teeth should be even
Despite the fad
For straightening crooked smiles
Bruised Poem
I’m thinking about the Price brothers—
you know the ones I mean—that famous part of celebrity chefs,
the dignified embodiment of haute cuisine.
Firmaments of whipped cream,
babbling brooks of gravy,
heartstrings sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.
Maybe these siblings provision the royal family on holidays,
listening patiently as her majesty the queen spins yarns
about how Knud, the hereditary prince of Denmark,
her grandfather, once attempted a coup d’etat
and didn’t even lose his succession rights over it.
I mean, if I got eighty million krona a year from the state,
all I would do is regurgitate old tales and piss and moan.
A stranger got in my face.
At the bar last night.
He called me a poetaster and a damned prole.
Lucky for me, a woman intervened.
She said she has a thing for poetasters and the proletariat
but hated idiots.
Oh, what a rotten world.
Oh, what a pinched life scraping by as a proletariat,
always having to worry,
to be sneered at,
to scrimp and save each penny,
to have people shove in my face the idea that the individual has the right to choose.
There comes a day when your kids get the taste for alcohol.
Sometimes you hear them crying
and ask what’s wrong?
Their answer:
you wouldn’t understand, you fucking prole.
I know that too much anxiety can break a poem,
that it should be undaunted, able to throw itself from a cliff,
trusting the angels of heaven to bear it up.
And should the angels fail to show,
the bruised poem may yet find shelter
where its injuries can get patched up
while somewhere the Price brothers season the royal sauce.
Doorpost
When my children were young
I’d notch their height into the doorpost,
with their name
their measurement and the date
beneath the mark.
Now that they are grown and gone,
I ask myself
what doorpost I can carve my loneliness into.
Waiting Room
He’s waiting for a new liver
now that he’s pickled his own.
There on the outskirts of existence
he dreams that a DNA match
will be hit by a car
or choke on a fishbone.
Another Waiting Room
The night lost its keys
an empty pram waits for Jesus
empty vessels wait for all of us.
Along the milky way leaky faucets drip
madness.
They sold the stars
slandered the rain
disrupted the night’s system of light.
Heaven’s a nursing home for the gods
never mind
but the angels
those flautists of our shining dreams
I demand to know the names of their killers!
Six Poems
Jóanes Nielsen
translated from the Faroese by Matthew Landrum, Tóta Árnadóttir, and Paula Gaard
Listen to an excerpt of the original Faroese read by the poet:
On April 5, 2023, three hundred people gathered in Løkshøll, a concert venue in Runavík, to celebrate Jóanes Nielsen’s seventieth birthday. The evening featured musical settings of his poems, speeches from scholars and fellow poets, and a reading from the author himself. A venerable and much lauded figure in Faroese literature, Nielsen is certainly the most commercially successful author from the tiny island nation. His novel Brahmadellarnir was published in English and German translation, the latter coming with the largest publication advance ever given to a Faroese author. Nielsen’s prestige and success—well deserved, in my estimation—are nonetheless ironic considering that he has always set himself against the establishment and used his literature to protest against it.
A lifelong communist and self-described “red preacher,” Nielsen spent much of his career as a dockworker, fisherman, and sailor. Many remember his first foray onto the public stage when the twenty-three-year-old had himself strapped to a cross and paraded through the streets of Tórshavn one Easter Sunday as he recited poems and railed against the oppression of the worker. This debut set the tone and tenor for his career.
Though now a grand old man of letters, he still positions himself as a champion of the working class. In a recent bilingual reading at Sirkus Föroyar, Nielsen and I read originals and translations exclusively of his biopic poems. Drunk sinner-saint poet, anonymous fisherman, overlooked literary master, hapless Danish sea-captain now vilified by history—his work considers the underdog.
Tall with weathered features and windblown hair, Nielsen cuts a prophetic figure. I did a reading with his wife, poet and artist Rannvá Holm Mortensen, last summer and shared a bottle of wine with the family afterwards at Café Brell. I was chatting with their adult children when Jóanes suddenly leaned in. “Matthew,” he said. “Do you write by hand?” I told him I usually started all my work in a notebook. “Good,” he nodded. “One must write with their body.” I have made a habit of it since and have done so here.
A lifelong communist and self-described “red preacher,” Nielsen spent much of his career as a dockworker, fisherman, and sailor. Many remember his first foray onto the public stage when the twenty-three-year-old had himself strapped to a cross and paraded through the streets of Tórshavn one Easter Sunday as he recited poems and railed against the oppression of the worker. This debut set the tone and tenor for his career.
Though now a grand old man of letters, he still positions himself as a champion of the working class. In a recent bilingual reading at Sirkus Föroyar, Nielsen and I read originals and translations exclusively of his biopic poems. Drunk sinner-saint poet, anonymous fisherman, overlooked literary master, hapless Danish sea-captain now vilified by history—his work considers the underdog.
Tall with weathered features and windblown hair, Nielsen cuts a prophetic figure. I did a reading with his wife, poet and artist Rannvá Holm Mortensen, last summer and shared a bottle of wine with the family afterwards at Café Brell. I was chatting with their adult children when Jóanes suddenly leaned in. “Matthew,” he said. “Do you write by hand?” I told him I usually started all my work in a notebook. “Good,” he nodded. “One must write with their body.” I have made a habit of it since and have done so here.
Jóanes Nielsen is one of the preeminent figures in contemporary Faroese literature and culture. A dockworker turned political activist and writer, he has published seventeen books including the novel Brahmadellarnir (Mentunargrunur Studentafelagsins, 2011), which was nominated for the 2013 Nordic Council’s Literary Prize and is published in English translation as The Brahmadells.
Matthew Landrum is the author of Berlin Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2019). He is an administrator and teacher at a private school for students on the autism spectrum in the Metro Detroit area.
Tóta Árnadóttir holds an MA in Faroese language and literature from the Faroese University, where she is currently an assistant professor in oral tradition.
Paula Gaard holds an MA in Faroese literature and language from the Faroese University, where she is currently doing a PhD in literary reviews.
