Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart, Outgoing Vessel, and My Jewel Box

It may be prosaic to begin this review with a nod toward Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure,” but it’s worth quoting a small portion of her prefatory note to the republication of the essay as a way to enter Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s trilogy of poetry:

I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening.[1]

The open text, in which “elements…are maximally excited,” enables possibilities for interpretation when one encounters innovations that appear at first blush overwhelmingly expansive.[2] While ambiguity can certainly arrest a reader’s travels through a text, formal innovations offer an entry for the reader to undertake their interpretative acts. Form is a starting point for this textual discovery, a conversation, and not its foreclosure.

We might take Hejinian’s statements as somewhat of a given now, but I was reminded of her essay as I was wrestling with Olsen’s interlocking collections Third-Millennium 

Heart (2012, trans. 2017), Outgoing Vessel (2015, trans. 2021), and My Jewel Box (2020, trans. 2022), translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. A Danish poet, librettist, and novelist, Olsen has published twelve volumes of poetry in addition to the novel Krisehæfterne: Pandora Blue Box, Atlantis-syndromet. As Emma Sofie Brogaard Jespersen notes, Olsen’s “inextricable ambiguity” is an integral part of her oeuvre.[3] Certainly this ambiguity is no exception in her recent work, where the poet’s deep thinking is condensed in the long poems that comprise the trilogy. And despite the ambiguity that subtends the collections, the poems’ complexities do not entail an “undifferentiated mass of data and situation,” where meaning appears unguided or indistinct. Rather, the poems unite—even if fleetingly—intersecting units of thought that cycle through and between each respective book.

Each of the books in the trilogy is a long poem divided into sequences—what the translator calls “poetic suites”—in which repeated phrasing and motifs (particularly those motifs relating to capitalism, motherhood, pregnancy, miscarriage, menopause, global infrastructures, and market forces) become regularized.[4] The repetitive language of these suites at first seems eerie and emotionally cool, as if spoken from the perspective of an indistinct and unaffected human individual. The speaker announces “I am no subject. // I have no characteristics. // I have no feelings,” a claim that we will later learn is false (Third-Millennium Heart, 41). This singular voice, however, shifts to a collective one, a voice of a society without any organizing structures or shared identities, in which we hear echoes of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s phrasing “body without organs.”[5] This collective voice articulates in one suite a “Society formation without middle / society formation without infrastructure / society formation without organs/institutions” (Third-Millennium Heart, 185; emphases in original). 

These connections between the individual and society remain ambiguous throughout the trilogy, perhaps owing to the use of neologisms scattered throughout the collections. These neologisms gesture to, but don’t fully concretize, a fixed coherent individual or collective. However, they do invoke the sexual, gender, and market logics that shape individual and social identities, as the following example indicates:

Jensen states in a note on her process of translation that she “seized an opportunity to translate matriarkatet (the matriarchy) to ‘the matriarchate,’ which denotes matriarchy and connotes the (free) market as well as Mother Market, a concept/character introduced in the same poem.”[6] I’ll say more about these concepts of the mother and market later, but for now it’s worth noting that Jensen leans deliberately into these strategic mistranslations of Olsen’s poetry to meet the challenges of the poet’s neologisms unobtrusively. It is also a strategy that implies a great deal of trust between the poet and her translator given the potential for error, but the mistranslations also have the advantage of permitting the wordplay of the native tongue to flourish in a second language.[7] The resultant poems thus offer a disjointed kinship between the Danish and English languages that generates a radical eeriness within the text. It left me, as a reader, feeling both ugly and ungainly in my interpretations because of the ambiguities that surround the singular and collective voices in the poems. Honestly, it’s rare treat to encounter poetry that beats you with its intellectual acuity.

These neologisms, mistranslations, and repetitions produce curious intimacies between the poetic suites and each book, despite the “I” declaring their lack of feelings, despite this speaker’s multiple declarations of rage and hate. Third-Millennium Heart, the first in this trilogy, opens with a heart, “a / place of many chambers,” which gives us a minute sense of how this collection plays with relationalities, networks, and affect (3). While the heart is a symbolic seat for feeling, we are also confronted with a biological body that swells with pregnancies and expels liquids and miscarriages. Menstrual blood, urine, sperm, eggs, and viscous affect all enunciate their moving, raw materiality as the speaker declares emphatically: “Everything will be thick and RED, everything will flow” and “My urine has smelled abnormally bitter the last few days” (7, 100). The body—regardless of gender—is an object that labors, produces new matter, and expels wastes. In the process, motherhood is constructed as a means of production and an extended metaphor for capital and markets. Consequently, Third-Millennium Heart connects the “mother” and the “market” with sexual and political penetration. Both markets and mothers are penetrated and are penetrating: both produce new bodies that contribute to capital and labor, and both tap into exploitable resources to erase virgin territories and virgin bodies in the process. 

The drive for motherhood and markets, to produce and to penetrate, at first blush seems insatiable for the speaker. “I want more than just love,” they claim. “I want // to become an army, become water // I // must penetrate everything” (125). But perhaps most telling is the idea that motherhood, capitalism, and its free markets are in fact composed of extreme individuality without any social cohesion underlying their formations. This lack of cohesion foregrounds a stage of capitalism where “everyone / makes someone else’s money” and “Dynamic and flexible individuals are both stretched between a Big / Mother State and the dream of a virgin market” (129, 156). Further, I hear the philosophical echoes of our contemporary state of “liquid modernity” in Third-Millennium Heart—what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “individualized, privatized version of modernity,” where collective action, structure, group identities, and relationships have undergone such rapid social upheavals that they are unable to “keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change.”[8] Any coherent group identifications collapse in this liquid, information-based “era of instantaneity,” and with them, any hope for collective political action.[9] The only voice that matters in the free market is the privatized individual, who has “to be everyone”—as Olsen’s speaker notes, because collective political action in the free market is virtually impossible (47).

I’m not entirely sure if I hear a complete dissolution of a collective identity in the trilogy—at least not in Bauman’s sense of liquid modernity—but a fragmentary voice is legible in Outgoing Vessel, the second book in this trilogy, where each suite concludes with a “technoscientific” poem. As the translator notes, Olsen sutured lines from the collection’s variegated sequences and, using Google Translate, translated them first into other languages, then back into Danish, to produce the resultant poems.[10] The overall effect of these technologically mediated poems reveals an incoherent subject, where the “I” is disunified, occasionally jumbled, or difficult to parse. In the sixth and final “technoscientific” poem, for example, this technological mediation produces a messy breakdown of the speaking voice. The pronouns in the poem shift rapidly between “I,” “we,” and “you” points of view:

“technoscientific6” underscores those everyday social experiences and the fantasy of the good life under capitalism, where subjectivity is dispersed between individuals. Elsewhere the spelling errors, unexpected majuscules, and irregular punctuation in the technoscientific poems highlight a frustrated speaker, whose fantasy is frequently interrupted as they “shout into the void..” (95; italics and punctuation in original). Despite the ambiguity of this subject constituted in capitalism, Outgoing Vessel successfully accumulates networks of anger, grief, and a converse want for both connection and alienation that circulates throughout the entire book. The speaker, for example, declares at first “I must be forced into love” only to state instead that “everyone must love me” (84, 86). At times, this speaker seems emphatic in their desire to protect themselves from instances of intimacy. “I am a stonehard orb-bearer,” they state:

It is hard to know what to do with this outpouring of extreme anger, where self-hate and self-love toward subjectlessness and placelessness feel particularly immediate. Recurring spatial tropes of orbs, jewel boxes, stones, eggs, vessels, cocoons, knots, and empty human spaces—including “a coffin that grows inside me”—demonstrate a claustrophobic grief toward loss without a precise understanding of what this loss might actually entail (107). Furthermore, the speaker appears conciliatory at times (“I am sorry for my loss” [149]), only to appear sadistic elsewhere. “I perceive self-hate as a necessary skill,” they write:

Yet the overall effect of these ambiguous affective positionalities is a heightened sense of transgression both toward themself and others who seek intimacy in human company. Undeniably, there is a real pleasure in the rawness of this speaker’s anger, which serves as a kind of authentic articulation where grief feels particularly encompassing and singular: “I HAVE TO COME UP WITH EVERYTHING MYSELF/ NOTHING I’VE SEEN CAN SAVE ME” (82). If lines like these appear overly angry, they are. In a privatized society without kinship, social burdens are left to the individual to resolve on their own terms. 

The final collection, My Jewel Box, extends these outbursts of grief and loss. As with Third-Millennium Heart and Outgoing Vessel, My Jewel Box’s poetic suites repeat the excesses of viscous affect and the aging body. Blood, pregnancy, and menopause are connected to a larger cosmic envelopment: “the fact that my body is a moebius strip,” states the speaker, “i stick my tongue out into the cosmos” (220). In keeping with the undercurrents of productivity that circulated in the previous collections, the arrival of an unproducing menopausal body lays down the stakes of debt, transaction, and payment that eventually overlay the “unproductive” aging body. 

Motherhood entails a deep physical and financial toll on a body capable of producing life and death. Lines like those quoted here can be read ironically, given how capital transforms all kinds of bodies into tools of production while also exhausting them. Is there any relief, then, when bodies stop producing capital and wealth? Is it possible to live a good, luxurious life when the reproductive organs have finally exhausted themselves? I am not certain that Olsen provides a satisfactory answer, since the possibility of relief is only a fleeting thought. As the speaker implies, the menstruating and birthing body is itself locked into a cycle of exhaustion and fertility: “suddenly my lower body feels so heavy,” states the speaker, “it’s the blood paying me / a visit / again” (200). More likely, Olsen invites us to navigate the global burdens of late capitalism pressed upon the individual mothering and menopausal body. The trilogy’s accomplishment, then, is a live approximation of frustration toward those infrastructures that turn bodies into vessels for transaction and debt. In this sense, Olsen’s body poetics expresses the failures of our humanity in a planetary moment of crisis where sharing pain is itself “the only true payment” (82). 

Given the trilogy’s complexities and ambiguities—and I am sure many counterarguments to my readings can be proposed—it is a shame that these books have not been more extensively reviewed, perhaps owing to the challenges they present. Yet these collections are meant to be challenging, not only for what they reveal about networks of social and individual identity, but also for what they highlight about translation as a mode of making an idea legible. As Jensen writes, “[Olsen] doesn’t consider her own poetry the original work but rather a translation of an idea that is much bigger than her.”[11] In this light, the trilogy takes on even greater complexities, with grand concepts, such as infrastructure, networks, and even language, to be understood through the laboriousness of the author’s translations of the big picture. One way to approach the trilogy, then, is to appreciate how Olsen instantiates big ideas through neologisms, body motifs, and the combative relations between the individual and a depersonalized society. In many respects, Olsen’s translation, coupled with Jensen’s intentional mistranslations, indicate how difficult it is to identify where the boundaries between individual and society, author and translator, node and network lie. The trilogy itself is not a closed circuit; as the speaker declares in My Jewel Box, “nobody is closed” (233).

Notes:
[1] Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press), 41.
[2] Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” 43.
[3] Emma Sofie Brogaard Jespersen, “Sensibility and Semio-Capitalism: A Bodily Experience of Crisis in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s The Crisis Notebooks,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no. 60 (2020): 152.
[4] Katrine Øgaard Jensen, “Translator’s Note,” in Outgoing Vessel (Notre Dame: Action Books, 2021), 199.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 149–66.
[6] Katrine Øgaard Jensen, “On Wrungness in Translation,” World Literature Today 92, no. 5 (2018): 6.
[7] See “I Will Erect the New Paradise: A Series of Mistranslations by Ursula Andkjær Olsen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen,” BOMB, May 5, 2021, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jensen-olsen-outgoing-vessel/.
[8] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000), 7–8, 2.
[9] Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 128.
[10] Jensen, “Translator’s Note,” 200.
[11] Jensen, “On Wrungness in Translation,” 6.