I fear indifference and intellectual laziness

This article originally appeared in Atlantic Review #4 in 2023.
Written by Jákup Bogi Joensen / Photo: Súsanna Smith Johansen

Beinir Bergsson is a poet and the very image of the new, flourishing generation of poets and writers in the living underground culture of the capital.

– A caffè latte, please, he says with a smile, taking a seat at a table in one of the round cafés in the city centre.

A relief – or not.

He is present. A quality that seems as innate in him as his gift for poetry and prose. But within himself he carries a fear and a dread of decadent corruption and decline. Yes, quite simply of fate.

– Writing poetry is a way of keeping myself by the scruff of the neck, he says.

The words carry weight and count heavily in the scales. His tone reveals that he means it in earnest.
But what do they mean, those words? And why does it matter so much to this poet, with his deft pen and his poetic imagery, to keep himself by the scruff of the neck?

– I fear indifference and intellectual laziness and the philistine in myself. It is so easy to fall for temptation and become a victim of the culture industry that the German philosopher Theodor Adorno warned about as early as the middle of the last century. In our day it is so easy to take life lightly, to lean back and rock yourself to sleep on easily digestible pap and empty calories, and to forget the task of being a reflecting human being who takes a position on the world. If we do not take care and attend to that task, fertile ground is created for detachment, and in detachment lies the danger of coldness and indifference, of investing nothing in other people and finding ourselves quite enough in ourselves. That is what I fear most, and I dread the thought of being that kind of person, he says.

A hard fate
Beinir Bergsson was born in 1997.

His childhood home is in Sørvágur. His mother is an office worker and his father was a craftsman. His upbringing in the home village was good and secure, but fate turned hard all the same.

Beinir was severely tested by life while still very young, and came early to an awareness of the existential and sometimes bitter terms of existence, when his father was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2010. Beinir was only 13 then, and on the threshold of the difficult, shifting teenage years. The school and the people around him did what they could to offer some relief. Beinir went to sessions with a psychologist and was part of a bereavement group. He was set the task of writing about his grief and putting his thoughts and emotional experiences down on paper. And although finding well-turned sentences came easily to him, it was not at all a task that suited him. Quite the opposite.

– I hated it to the depths of my soul, says Beinir, and lets the silence speak.

So the texts were quickly pushed aside and stowed away in a drawer. There they lay, mouldering and all but forgotten, for several years.

But then something happened. An idea suddenly surfaced and began turning over in his head. Beinir took the texts out again, worked them into shape and in 2017 published his first poetry collection, under the title Tann lítli drongurin og beinagrindin. The collection is coloured by grief and loss and homeless love.

What at first glance had looked like an endless tale of suffering without much meaning had been given new life and wind under its wings. An 18-year-old stepped into the light with his gifts and his rare talent for poetry and prose.

Beinir himself believes there is a great difference between the first collection and the second, Sólgarðurin, which came out in 2021.

– The first collection was written by a person who writes, but not by a poet. The second one, by contrast, was, he says.

He argues, among other things, from the close relationship between shape, form and content, thought through and woven together into a higher artistic unity.

– Somehow the feeling when the second collection came out was that the poetry was being weighed differently, and that for the first time I had to prove my worth as a real poet, he says.

Four years separate the two poetry collections Beinir Bergsson has released under his own name so far. Four years is a long time, he acknowledges. And although the collections are not large in scope, there is a reason to be found behind the gap.

– It takes a long time to write poetry down to the bone, to find your way in to the very core of the message I want to bring out in my poems. A poet is required to be able to describe precisely what is being written about. Writing poetry is therefore something close to a Sisyphean labour, forever weeding out what does not belong. In the end there is almost nothing left but the words that really matter and that describe exactly what the poet wants to bring into the light; a feeling, an event or a situation that has arisen, for instance. And even then the poet hardly has a finished answer to the mysteries of life. More often it is a wondering question and an inquiry, with the word and the sharpened pen as the tools, he says.

A way of life
The work of a poet and writing author is often a greatly underrated and little valued job, Beinir Bergsson believes, because the poet is fundamentally always at work. It is a way of life, he says.

– The poet has to be present the whole time, to sense, to experience and to take things in. It is a way of being and of existing as a human being in this world. In many ways it is a philosophical and deeply reflective existence. A way of observing and capturing the moment and its various nuances. It is an attempt to understand and grasp the world and to fix the experiences on paper. The craft of the poet is therefore both an emotional and a cognitive labour, and what matters is being open to whatever shows itself, he says.

But what is it that Beinir Bergsson writes about in his poems?

– I write to a large extent about love, because love has many faces. It can be about a universal love, about love of one's neighbour, or about same-sex love. It can also be about love that is lacking, about love that is not there, he says.

But he stresses that it can sometimes be both sensible and necessary to distinguish between Beinir the person and the poet of the same name, because the poems do not necessarily say anything about his personal experiences. They render, rather, a pinch of a recurring, existential ground note and of the question of what it is to be human.

– The art of being a poet is being able to lift a personal experience as far off the ground as possible, so that it becomes a general and universal description. The poet's voice must be honest and authentic, but not necessarily private and personal. That is often when a poem succeeds, he says.

Beinir Bergsson himself believes it is fundamentally a great deal to ask of people that they set aside time to read poems and try to understand and grasp what the poet has on his mind. He acknowledges that reading poetry is a time-consuming sport, because the poet often wants to make the reader stop and dwell on something – to think it over.

– I have a sense that more and more people are giving up reading poetry, as they grow lazy and no longer feel any need to wonder, to ask questions and to look for nuances and anomalies in existence. That is a shame, because poems are meant to challenge the reader, says Beinir.

The uncertainty
Although his gift for writing poetry and high-quality prose is obvious, he has little time for the notion of the exceptional individual who stands out and is raised to the skies as a true genius.

– I am lucky and happy to be part of a budding and flourishing artistic environment, and I very much doubt that my poems would have been so well written and so fit for publication without good and capable people around me, he says.

The question, then, is whether we should expect more poems and more books from his hand.

– Time will tell. At the moment I am a little in doubt, and the future is hanging in the air, he says.

The reason is that an inner struggle has arisen between the writing on the one hand and everyday life on the other. A reality that is the confluence of several different circumstances.

– One of my greatest dreams is to have children. But that is not exactly the easiest road as a gay man, nor as a gay man in a relationship, because hard conditions are set for parents who want to adopt, he says.

And then there are all the other conditions. The financial ones not least. Earning a living as an artist with no fixed income, but a fluctuating one, is often a great challenge and does not always meet with goodwill in society. The banks are given free rein to set conditions that are too hard for a loan for a home of one's own.

– Perfectly ordinary people, let alone artists working under unusual circumstances with a fluctuating income, do not stand a chance, he says, adding that it ought not to be that way.
And so we return to the question of whether more poems and more books can be imagined.

– Possibly, and possibly not. I hope so, but I have also come to the conclusion that I will live perfectly well if no more books are added. It matters less to me whether people see me as a poet and an artist and expect something of me. I am first and foremost a human being who wants to be present in life, he says.

FACTS:
Beinir Bergsson was born in 1997.
He is a poet and translator and has studied German, literature and translation studies at the university in Reykjavik.
He has studied creative writing on the programme in artistic practice at the University of the Faroe Islands.
Beinir Bergsson has so far released two poetry collections. The first, Tann lítli drongurin og beinagrindin, came out in 2017, and the second, Sólgarðurin, in 2021. The collections have been translated into other languages, among them Icelandic, Danish and Greek.
Several of his poems have appeared in print in Faroese journals, and other poems have likewise been published in newspapers and journals abroad.
Beinir Bergsson was the first to be honoured with the Ebba Prize of the Faroese Writers' Association in 2018.
He was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2021 for the poetry collection Sólgarðurin.