KENNETH KRABAT
Poet & writer | Denmark
I was born in København (Copenhagen) in 1963 into a working class family right as times changed and mother could take her own job and 2 saleries provided the tiny family with their own car and, in a few years time, the option to own a summerhouse on the edge of Storebælt with a view to the rest of the Danish isles (lying a bit here). To a boy from the slum of old København this view is forever spectacular.
My father worked in the harbour as his father before him, and his father before him. For 43 years of my life, until my father retired as the manager of heating in all business and
warehouses, the harbour worked hard to replace my blood with salty water. My mother was administratively moved between Shell gas stations as an accountant and problem solver, but
she never wanted to be the boss. I believe both of them just generally preferred being on good terms with people, and therefore never aspired to real boss positions of loneliness.
Out of this I came - into a borderline school system of frustrated teachers, new laws forbidding teachers to hit children, and new times all over the western world. This was in 1969. Luckily for
me I had the same teacher for 7 years, who (unfortunately for other children) pampered those of talent. So, I was excluded by the other children for this, but did learn something of value,
reading and writing, fx.
Following experiments in 1984 with LSD, years of loneliness, abandonment and intellectual neglect words just rushed out of me, and for years nothing else mattered: Only writing poetry. Poetry
immediately gave me recogniction, identity and a (faulty) feeling of self worth, as well as an excuse to present the old-fashioned system of disdain for creative acts and purposes with a well
deserved fuck-you finger in the form of literary experiments.
After a few “traditional”, though very angry, books of poetry as an early adopter of the Internet experiments were intially with “delivery mechanisms” - eg. daily poems to
subscribers (1999 and 2006) for 1 year, books on floppy disks, cd, dvd, PDF, html - and design as part of the text (eg. in “alle veje fører til Magtenbølle” (all roads lead to Magtenbølle) an
alphabetical content index in a poetry collection dealing with the absence of a center of anything (1993)). Later it was the character > turned this and that way and combined in several
fashions to form an alphabet, which in turn became a language telling 55 stories without the use of a single word (DRAMATIS PERSONAE, begun in 2003 and finished in 2013). 2016 saw the publication
of a children’s story about sorrow in Kroatian, which has yet to be published in Danish.
In 1987 I published my first science fiction story; the 2nd in 2008, and then aprox. 1 every year since then. Had I not spent so much time on poetry, I might have relocated completely to the future. (Btw. I collect Time Travel movies http://krabat.menneske.dk/kkblog/all-time-travel-movies/)
2017 saw the publication of ROSSO.NIENTE. a collection of poetry in Italien, which has no Danish counterpart. And a collection of approx. 17 one-act plays favouring the dialogue btw. 2 voices,
called HÅRDT OMTALTE FJERKRÆ (POULTRY HARSHLY MENTIONED).
My stay in Rome in January of 2018 at Circolo is bi-focal: An expanded version of ROSSO.NIENTE. into Danish, and the necessity to select among 700+ pages from the past 5 years into a
collection of poetry about lifelong anger, bullying and cancer.
When I return to Denmark I will continue an ongoing state funded project from year 2017 of figuring out how to write a book of poetry about the refugee situation in Europe (with my friend and
partner, poet Cindy Lynn Brown).
Writing poetry makes sense to me. Not being able to write makes my (perception of the) world a very scary place.
Poet At Large
Rome Jan. 4th 2018
web krabat.menneske.dk
works bit.ly/KrabatWorks