Application summary

I started out some years ago with poems related to the political, philosophical and religious writings of Simone Weil and the marine biologist and ecologist Rachel Carson. I now want to add a new poem, about mourning rituals, a mother who disappears slowly into dementia, and conversations with trees. The poem will consist of repetitive and fragmentary dialogues, a chorus of voices from the past and the present and be based on a certain kind of listening. Since my mother’s life started in the forest, her father being a lumberman, the poem will also be about the sawmill in Ljusne, where the whole population circled around the forest, the logging, the timber rafting, the sawmill. Dementia is like a reverse creation, an infinitely slow decaying process, lined with sadness and oblivion. A language emerges that consists of unmoaned words, memories that do not meet, ephemeral worlds, subtle sensations, attempts at understanding that break down and of constant repetitions of the same phrase and questions, dependent on a particular kind of physical communication. It interests me as a poet since this late style, to use Edward Said words, of language also seems a possibility for communicating beyond the human sphere, so necessary for us living in the Anthropocene – to destabilize the center, using the periphery as new ways of listening and experiencing, that could heal and open new paths beyond the destruction we live in. With her background, her childhood, my mother has a strong connection to the trees. Her similarity with the trees is also getting stronger with years. Both are like vessels of time, the trees with their hidden annual rings, their bark, their mysterious beauty. I’ve been taking notes from our walks over the last three years, both documenting her slow disappearance and our moments of contact, while taking photos of the trees surrounding us through the seasons. With these notes I’d like work in Saari and spend a lot of time in the woods.