Hardness as Genesis: Niina Pollari Reviews Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjær Olsen

One unfortunate side effect of being human is that we are, in body and mind, not too durable. An instrument need not even be sharp to harm a body; as for the mind, something as watery as grief suffices. Grief doesn’t even attack. It just washes over you until you’re split open, and then it goes in, and it doesn’t discriminate. It enters any available opening, and it stays there even as your body starts to repair itself. Once the healing is done, and you are once again able to put in your coffee order and listen to voicemails, you will no longer be able to extricate the grief. Now it’s enmeshed with your own material, and together you and it have grown larger. You can’t ever separate yourself from it again, and in fact “yourself” is an idea that seems more foreign with every passing moment of this new existence. Whatever happened to you is a part of you now, and you just have to move on, capillaries running with grief juice.

At least that’s been my experience. And so when Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen, author of Third-Millennium Heart (itself an examination of the ongoingness of grief and motherhood) wrote in her second English-language collection Outgoing Vessel about distilling the too-human parts of oneself, including feeling, including giving a fuck, into a glasslike orb that was too hard to break, and then sending it away… as people on Twitter would say, I felt that.

The main thread of the collection (translated by Olsen’s ongoing collaborator Katrine Øgaard Jensen) is occupied with a thesis of hardness as genesis. By this I mean that the narrator wants to use the action of closing off and condensing to create something totally new that can then be cleaved from the individual:

i have closed myself around itself
in a closed circuit
/orb
which i will send off as the outgoing
vessel that it is

The idea that it might be possible to separate something you no longer want, put it on a boat, and say I’m done with this, bye is aspirational for anyone who hopes that the journey of their emotional wounds is one with an end (even while knowing that the only end of grief is one’s own death). When you feel like less of the self you once were, you want someone to tell you how to fix this bad feeling. Reading this book, which is one long poem clipped into sections, some long and some extremely short, is instructional if you are seeking an answer. The narrator is misanthropic, adamant, and furious, and when she says things like “i am a stonehard orb-bearer/do not come to me with your soft shit” it feels like getting yelled at by someone who knows better. Why did I come to you with my sad little story? Did I not know that I could simply make it into a perfect orb? I am very susceptible to this kind of authority, especially when I am polluted with emotion.

Olsen gradually fills in the characteristics of the orb throughout the book. It’s beautiful and desirable; it’s nonporous (i.e., it can no longer be entered and no longer extrudes material) and inscrutable in its smoothness; it’s distinct from humanity and humanity’s feelings and attachments. And, most importantly, once it’s been cleaved from the self, the orb can be put on a vessel and sent away. In the universe of the main narrative of Outgoing Vessel, humanity is unrelatable; comfort is unrelatable; healing and journeys are unrelatable; the only aspirational thing is hardness as a new efficiency:

the hope to

always feel fortified and justified

to not have a personality

Is this book meant to be an instruction manual? No, but some of us would take anything.

Driving home the forceful point of the narrator, the language of the book is blunt, like trauma; the lines are short, and there are jarring moments of capitalization that seem to play against the expected meter of the line:

i use ALL PARTS OF the feeling
AS i would use ALL PARTS of my prey

i have become more calculating

If you read closely, you can start to notice the repeats and turns in the text; from ugliness and bluntness, variations emerge, and it’s possible to follow the appearance of a single phrase (such as “i have become more calculating”) throughout the text like one would a hyperlink. Seeing the same phrase in different contexts changes and grows its meaning. Olsen studied music and worked as a music critic, which influenced the way she thinks of the purpose of these repetitions on a theme. From a conversation with BOMB after Third-Millennium Heart came out: “my whole way of thinking about literary form is something I’ve taken from music. I ‘compose’ my books, work with sentences as if they were motifs, turn them and weigh them, repeat them, vary them, and often several voices emerge.”

And the repeats and refrains give something else away, too. Olsen’s narrator, with all her bravado, is breaking down a little. Once you see this breakdown, it’s everywhere; it’s in the little details, like when Olsen writes:

no one except me can hate feelings
anyone else who claims to hate feelings:
let it be known how they still succumb to them
anyone else who claims to hate feelings:
let it be known how they, in weak moments
open up to them and

and become soft with longing

among all time’s winners
i am the hardest

It’s easy to be seduced by the confidence of these lines. “Among all time’s winners/I am the hardest” is a punchy final couplet on a page; I, with my mushy sadness, was totally on board the first time I read it, having wanted for someone to tell me how to get rid of the feelingness inside of me for a long time. “I am the hardest” is such a powerful statement that I almost didn’t question what it meant to be “time’s winner” (it means to die). But there’s an even smaller detail here: the repeat of the word and at the end of the meaty stanza, and again at the beginning of the single line that follows.

This line is trying to convince you that anyone who claims to hate their feelings but still has them is a weak liar, but that repeat of “and” is a little glitch. When I started to really think about what this was doing, it reminded me of the end of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” another life-instructing poem: “The art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” With its double emphasis of parenthetical and italics, the call to “Write it!” gets all the attention, but the doubling-up of “like” is no accident; it’s a trip of the tongue from a master. I won’t spend time analyzing this famous poem except to say that the repeat of that little connecting word always makes me remember the human behind it. In Olsen’s case, the repeat is merely one of the first instances in a series of tongue trips. That it happens so early in the book is equally telling (it’s on the second page). This narrator wants you to know how tough she is, but is also showing you just how vulnerable she is, too. My editor asked me why I didn’t resent the macho fantasy of the text; I have two answers to that question. The first is that I respect unlikable women. And the second, less pithy answer is that some of my enjoyment came from the parts of text where the narrator stumbled. It’s like adding salt to the brownie recipe. It’s not a mistake; it makes the whole thing better. The multiple conflicting voices in the book are flexing their power, each in different ways.

I considered the challenge that the multiple voices must’ve presented to Katrine Øgaard Jensen––it would be easy for a translator to selectively turn down or up some of the voices in order to work within the many syntactic limitations of English (I confront this issue when working from Finnish, with its stretchy grammar, to rigid English). But reading the translator’s note offers a glimpse to the working relationship: “I wanted to allow the work to mutate in translation, to form an identity of its own in English,” Jensen writes. “Fortunately this approach aligns with Olsen’s own philosophy[…]: according to Olsen, she is simply the first translator of the idea, and I am the second.” This is a collaborative relationship that allows for the breathability of the text, and for the generative possibility that linguistic mutations give the text in the shift between source and target language. Knowing this, I feel good making my observations even though I have not read the original Danish, and do not have the ability to do so.

So the main narrator wants to compress all emotion in order to form it into a “NONDEGRADABLE ORB/MY OWN PLANET,” but is stumbling in spite of her own bravado. The book has a parallel narrative, too, though: there are italicized codas of sorts, labeled “Technoscientific,” that appear at the end of each poetic section. From the translator’s note, I learned that Olsen composed these by compiling lines from each section, then feeding the mass of text through Google Translate in multiple languages and back to Danish again, and doing a cut-up of the results. The result is multivoiced and different in spirit than what I consider the “main” poems to be. Instead of compression and alienation, the technoscientific sections convey language of growth; there are plants, habitats, and other aspects of the natural world:

And it appears, you open your mouth: this is Life,
a plant-thing inside me, homeless, lakes, a blue/clear rise..
This is life.

I liked these parts the least in the book, but reading the context from Jensen illuminated their purpose for me––considering the process makes them more interesting, even if I don’t find myself moved by them on their own. The entire work is one of translation, of course; acknowledging this is integral to reading it. But knowing that these sections in particular are the result of so many crossings of the language barrier, and of so much resulting mutation; they take something essential from the sections that precede them, and let it succumb to its own nature until it’s grown over. And that Olsen chose to end each section with them reminds me of human structures gone to wild. There is the wall of what was once a fortress, now covered with ivy. Or maybe it’s covered with some kind of unknowable plant, here on this earth long after humans are gone, having taken our small human griefs with us.