There’s a New Screen in Town

There’s a New Screen in Town

So far poetry has proved far more adaptable to a higher-and-higher high-tech world than prose fiction, which clings to the book as if the only thing justifying it’s existence were the bar-code and ISBN-number (not to mention the prize-tag). This would be relatively easy to explain away if we were only talking about longer fiction »

Reading the Eddas (With Google Translate)

Reading the Eddas (With Google Translate)

Living abroad I regularly get asked about this miraculous language I speak – Icelandic – and if it’s true that we make new words for everything under the sun and can read the 13th century Eddas as easily as if we were drinking ice-cold... »

Gung Ho

Gung Ho

Hot-shot Chinese businessman, millionaire poet and patron-of-the-arts Huang Nubo, recently decided to start a fund to promote the cultural relations between Iceland and China, inventively named “The China Iceland Cultural Fund”. Reminiscent of pure Icelandic small-town nepotism, one of the main catalysts for Huang... »


Cotery Poelumn: Pwoermds

Cotery Poelumn: Pwoermds

It’s a poetic mouthful – a hard-to-perform sound poem in its own right – “pwoermd”. When you Google it the machine asks if you meant “powermad” and you’re half... »

Roskilde festival

Roskilde festival

Dear friends. Tomorrow morning I fly to Roskilde festival to perform at ‘Ordets Område’ – the literature part of this famous rock festival. I’ll be performing as a part... »

Inscribed round the rectum of a Hollywood superstar

Inscribed round the rectum of a Hollywood superstar

The Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, the Cybook Opus, the Sony Reader, the iLiad – and now: Megan Fox’s right flank. We’ve come to accept the fact that books... »

The Icelandic Poetry Community

The Icelandic Poetry Community

A reader recently asked, by way of my editor, that I share a few words on the Icelandic poetry community. My first response was a long-winded, athletic “boooooooring” while... »

Mad Skills

Mad Skills

A few words about the surprising qualities of sucking really hard Recently I read on the news that a man, one Kenny Strasser, had successively duped the producers of... »

Left, Right and Center

Left, Right and Center

– a self-righteous rant One of the greatest conservative projects in poetry is called New Formalism. In short it supports the return to rhymed metrical verse and classical themes.... »