Poetisk Podcast #13: Atomar (Atomic Scars)

Atomar is based around a collection of 40 poems by Lene Henningsen, read aloud by Marina Bouras and Jens Albinus, with sound and music by yours truly.

One of Lene’s initial images for the collection was in terms of form:

I saw pages with spread, splintered words before me, with countless variations of spaces and pauses between the statements of the words, images, “melody lines”.

Later she wrote that:

Atomar starts from a present, a real lived present, and visions break out from that present in attempts at change, expansion, movement. The eruptions are violent, atomic. There is cultural criticism, but also the desire to remember the beautiful, the deeply culture-bearing. There is in the microcosm a sadness over the difficulty or impossibility of relationships, and in the macrocosm sadness over something similar; the impossibility of peace and care of the planet.

Between desperation and hope, the atoms continuously burst and form both their and our space, time, and future. And on the souls and bodies that live through it all, are the theatre of it all, atomic scars remain; in the poems fleetingly shaped like parts of a letter, the perhaps tiny empty space between two words, or touched by a breath after a comma –

It’s all in Danish, but an English translation of the poems (which might provide a good companion to following the podcast episodes) has been published and I’ve made a number of short videos with English captions for some of the poems.

poetiskpodcast.dk/produktioner/atomar