Luleå Biennial 2018
17.11.2018~17.2.2019
In Pernilla Berglund’s poetry language and place continuously both constitute and unravel the other. No meaning is self-evident. The poems attempt to approximate a particular experience of language and place only to since rephrase their premises.
1.
The road looks like the road, the big waters to the left and the mountain shelves
high on the right. The roads are as alike as I
differ.
2.
History walks beside us, we have walked beside you. If you could have seen us
beyond what we said, the shortening of time, just as I could have been
another. It is tangible now. I shall mourn myself a place.
3.
Here we are at home or the experience is a limit towards reality.
The position I speak from I must always seize. If we told ourselves against,
a clarity that could be. Here we would be safe.
4.
To communicate in order to avoid. I borrow shoes from the storage, speaking
on the hill, to fell wood like judgement. I walk from your opportunity, turning
the moss and the branches we collect from the ground, brush that has been cleared. Density
was in our way, every time we visit, now the stairway is overgrowing. I am spoken to
beneath the downed.
5.
If we are sufficient in language, that it is always about speech.
We reside in the voice or what could become a strength. How can I know
when I coincide with myself. The bark back of the tree is also
its front.
6.
You speak of cutting wood, from Felling downwards, ask for help with
the regrowth. The writing scars the ground, we shall no longer recognize ourselves.
The first page in the book that has come off and keeps falling out.
7.
At the clearing grounds, we drove there to see
When it is time for fall, when everybody leaves into the woods
Felling the animals and falling into place
The use of all your expressions
The place as an excuse for the abscence
© Pernilla Berglund 2015
Translation to English by Mikael Berglund 2015