Excerpt from the interview “I try to live my life as a metaphor”

The wonderful thing about the written word is that it can retrieve the key memory, says Nicolaj Stochholm, who has recently published the critically acclaimed Femogtyve digte og en drøm (Twenty-five Poems and a Dream).

By : Karen Syberg

The key memory
“Poetry is a stream in my memory, it is through the written word that I remember; that I see; that the key memory presents itself.”

By the key memory do you mean something supra-personal?
“Yes … and something alien, too – something that butts into your own little life.”

But it has the characteristics of memory?
“The wonderful thing about the written word is that it can retrieve the key memory. When I write, memory comes in waves. You can be sitting on a bench somewhere in the middle of the city and suddenly see an apricot tree right in front of you.”

With a nod of acknowledgement to Inger Christensen’s Alphabet? (Inger Christensen’s Alfabet opens with “apricot trees exist / apricot trees exist.” KS)
“There are lots of nods of acknowledgement in my book to poets I have read. I have given up, once and for all, the thought of being an original subject. I have tried to give voice to as many as I can currently accommodate. The poems are a tribute to love, to the others.”

And yet your poems are rather original anyway?
“Yes, it’s really strange!”

Many of them are constructed as associations leading to one another and continually leading to new images. Is that what the reader should understand as the waves you talk about?
Nicolaj Stochholm thinks this over before he answers.
“Yes, that’s it. You could say I write into thin air with trust. Trust, because the tradition is so much bigger than me that at some point I’ll run into it and write myself back, as it were. I believe in poetry as a force that sweeps me along. And sweeps the reader along.”

Does that mean you begin by writing something completely different from what you end up with?
“I often begin writing from a feeling, which I try to make as precise as possible. It brings out other feelings, thoughts, life situations, which then write themselves into the poem. I try to keep myself open – I have, after all, given up being a controlling, original subject. But I can have a small degree of control if I am in a position to follow the movement.”

But we are still far from ‘automatic writing’ in your poems. They are both complete and tight?
“It’s not a question of automatic writing either, but of abandonment to the process.”

What is the difference?
“The revisions! I often write ten lines in one go. And afterwards I spend weeks and months writing each line out, so I reach the furthermost associations for every line. The original lines are in the middle of the page, and from there words pour out to both sides of the sheet. Then I revise from what has come out of that process, and often end up back with what I wrote first. With a few crucial changes. But I have reached a very practical attitude to writing, I work with my hands,” declares Nicolaj Stochholm, and stresses that Twenty-five Poems and a Dream is, for him, very concrete. It deals with the things that surround him, he says, pointing at a little candlestick with a cobalt blue candle shaped like a dolphin.
“There’s a dolphin with a breathing-hole of light,” he smiles. The dolphin features in the final poem of the collection, “Hver dag” (“Every Day”).
“I don’t recall the last two years as a writing process, but as a love affair,” he adds.

Are you thereby saying that you have come to embrace the tangible outer world with greater love?
“Much more lovingly. I see it as being saturated with poetry. In every person there is a smidgen of something inalienable. And I won’t be scared of transformation in encounters with another or the same person.”

To travel is to write
“I’ve explored getting away from myself. I’ve packed up and gone many times, and I’ve travelled a lot. Eighteen months in France, two years in Spain, eighteen months in Ireland.”

Isn’t that also a way in which to find yourself? When you’re away from home you have to be grounded in yourself as you can’t rely on all the usual things that keep you together?
“You have to open up. That’s why you have to travel in order to get away from yourself.”

Surely there is some form of continuity?
“In poetry itself. Travelling for me is analogous with writing a poetry collection. It’s about finding yourself in a new sense. It might sound banal, but I try to live my life as a metaphor.”

Meaning…?
“To see things twofold. To take a step in the world and a step alongside the world. To allow yourself to believe that you can walk along the Milky Way.”

Are you saying that there is a world beyond the material world?
“No, rather that you have to acknowledge that a good many worlds exist simultaneously, and try to move freely between them. I write for the freedom to be exactly as I am, freedom for everyone. And for the right to believe in everything!”


This is an excerpt from an interview published in the daily newspaper Information September 30, 2000.

Translated by Gaye Kynoch