Pip: osoparavos.com — where the poems arrive before the poet does, and the body already knows the way.
Mara: Today we’re sitting with a single piece of work by Adam Donaldson Powell — a long-form Norwegian poem that moves through possession, body memory, and the silence that answers when language fails. Let’s start with what the poem is doing and why it matters.
Besetjing — When the Body Moves Before the Mind Does
Pip: The title translates roughly as “possession” or “occupation” — and the poem opens not with a person making a choice, but with a movement that precedes any decision. The central question the poem keeps turning over is: who is actually the one beginning?
Mara: The poem names that uncertainty directly. Here is the poem’s own formulation: “Kven som byrjar, veit eg ikkje. Det er ikkje eg, og likevel er det ingen andre.” Who begins, I do not know. It is not me, and yet there is no one else.
Pip: So the speaker is both agent and passenger — and the poem refuses to resolve that. The consequence is a self that can’t locate its own origin, which is a genuinely unsettling place to write from and to inhabit.
Mara: What follows that admission is a series of images that carry the same quality — the hand that moves without knowing what it does, described as water that simply knows how to flow. The body stops at the same table, the same glass, the same shadow falling slightly crooked across the floor, every time.
Pip: Ritual without intention. Which is either very Zen or very haunted, and the poem seems comfortable leaving that open.
Mara: The shame arrives late in the poem, and it arrives quietly — not as a voice, not as a verdict, but as light growing colder in the room. The speaker stands in it without knowing whether to leave or stay, and the poem offers this: “Og kanskje er det ingen skilnad.” And maybe there is no difference.
Pip: The ending holds the whole thing together. Something that resembles the speaker sits in a small light that never goes out — because no one is there to switch it off. And the speaker sits beside it, as if finally arriving somewhere they have been walking toward the whole time.
Mara: The poem closes on scent — faint lemon, or rain, or a life never lived — and the final line makes clear that the smell passes through the speaker and moves on, as though it was never theirs to keep. Memory without ownership. That is the poem’s last word on the subject.
Pip: Possession, body memory, a self that trails its own movements — this is poetry that lives below the threshold of decision.
Mara: The kind of writing that doesn’t explain itself. It just waits, like that small light, for the next arrival.
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