Caspar Eric

Caspar Eric is a poet and activist, whose 2014 debut ‘7/11’ was lauded for its searingly honest depiction of heartbreak, desire, sex, drugs and boredom as a 20-something navigating life in Copenhagen.  Caspar’s unique writing style, infused with pop culture references has led him to be dubbed the nation’s preeminent ‘internet poet’ as well as the voice of the hashtag generation.  Largely autobiographical, Caspar’s work also deals with the reality of navigating life as someone with cerebral palsy.  

Explore more of Caspar's work here

Transcript

CE 0:03

I want to do something that means something to someone and can actively change their material world around them. And of course, that doesn't always happen, but just the possibility of that happening, that's what makes it fun. And that's what makes it worthwhile.

NP 0:24

That was Casper Eric, and this is Lord Portraits. Casper's unique writing style, infused with pop culture references, has led him to be dubbed the nation's pre-eminent internet poet, as well as the voice of the hashtag generation. Largely autobiographical, Casper's work also deals with the reality of life as someone living with cerebral pausey. Casper, welcome to Nordic Portraits. Thank you. Casper, I mentioned from the outset 7-Eleven, and up until the point of its publication, you'd released a series of poems that had really struck a chord with the underground scene.

CE 1:35

Yeah. I was in the blogosphere as we were in that era.

NP 1:39

Yeah, and suddenly you're releasing your debut book, and I just wonder what you remember of that time going from a relative unknown to suddenly making a splash within the mainstream literary landscape.

CE 1:56

I when I decided to write poetry, which was like five years before that, I kind of started to just do everything it took to become a poet. And I started going out in the Copenhagen literary scene as well. So I actually knew a lot of people already because I just hung out when there were readings. There were a lot of readings in Copenhagen at that time, 2012, 2013. So it didn't feel like a big shift for me, but the way people looked at me was different. And I had a lot of confidence. So I think I just I knew I was a poet before them. So it's just nice to be seen as something I knew at that point I could do and I wanted to be, and I already was, which is also my main motivation looking back at it was of course also living with cerebral palsy, as you mentioned, and always kind of being seen for that, or having my disability being seen before me. And so the whole poet thing had a lot to do with wanting to become someone or be something that people would see when I entered the room. Oh, here we've got the poet Casper Eric. So when I look back at it, and sorry for the long answer. No, it's great. But it but it's become this has become important to me. So when I look back at it, it's that feeling I tap into that what I wanted from a very young age to actually make something happen in the world that people would remember me for, it retrospectively felt like, okay, I did that. It worked out. And I remember my dad came to my first release party, and nobody in my family is a reader, especially not of poetry. And uh he gave me a Kindle as a present, which I never used, and now I have one that I absolutely love. And then he wrote me a card and it said, Wow, I can't believe you can make money off of this. That was a whole card. And I remember thinking, okay, so he gets it now.

NP 4:04

That must have felt really rewarding.

CE 4:07

Yeah. But reward is a weird word to use about it, because it wasn't like a rush of emotion. And I also want to say it's not like it's a feeling that's stuck. I I still need to prove myself constantly, and I'm kind of ashamed of it because I know that that part of my personality is so entwined with living with a disability. But um, it felt it was more calm emotion. It was like things just clicking into place and me seeing okay, I can be this person in the world and I can do this thing, and and also 7-Eleven, which was not about disability at all, got good reviews for a debut, and I kind of made my own space on the Danish literary scene, and it was more about that for me. Feeling that I had my own little corner of it that I was in control of, and I did that better than anybody did. And I think that's something when you live with like a different body, that's something you learn from almost like the get-go. You kind of learn to strategize what to say when you're on lunch break, so you don't get picked at, and uh yeah.

NP 5:15

So just backtracking a little bit, you said that you'd been writing poetry for about five years. So around oh nine, you start writing. Yeah. Coming from a family that you yourself said weren't big readers, your mother's a pharmacist, your father worked at a bank. Yes. So where did your first interest in literature come from?

CE 5:35

I met a girl. I met a girl, and by total coincidence, her mom was like the biggest screen writer for theater, and the most funny one also, Lena Knutsen. And I didn't know who she was, but uh she saw something in me, and she was like, I have this massive collection of books. If you want to borrow some of them and maybe read them while you're here, and I did that, and she started recommending me stuff, and I I started writing on like a really banked up IBM computer during the late hours, 3 to 4 a.m. or something, when I couldn't sleep, and I was kind of half living at my girlfriend's house. I was 20. And then Lena saw me writing in the kitchen at night. Like she came out, you know, to get a glass of water when I in the nightgown or something. She was like, What are you doing? And I was like, Oh, I'm just writing. And I felt like she'd see me do crack cocaine in the kitchen or something. And we hadn't talked about what she did for a living at that point. And then the next morning she was like, Do you know I teach and help young artists sometimes? So should I look at what you're writing? And then I showed her like ten poems, and she was like, Yeah, they're not really good. But you know it can be a job to be a poet, but you have to work hard at it, like anything else, sports and stuff. You just have to practice. So I practiced and she pointed me to a high school, which is a very Danish concept, I think. Going away for half a year and meeting other people that wanted to work in the arts. So that opened up the whole world for me.

NP 7:14

Funny that you mentioned that sports analogy, because I've heard you say in the past that when you write, you approach it almost in the same way as badminton when you were a player. Like in TV psyching yourself up.

CE 7:28

Yeah. Mostly because I miss playing badminton. I'm not able to because of my legs and knees now. But that same kind of adrenaline rush, and the way you can get in the sown in sports is something I I was pretty good, and I was good at getting in the zone. And that kind of feeling of locking in is the same I can get with writing poetry and also performing sometimes. I love that feeling.

NP 7:54

I also find it fascinating that you weren't discouraged or deterred by the fact that she thought the poems weren't any good. You instead responded to the idea that okay, with hard work I can get there.

CE 8:05

Yeah. And also there were two poems, and she was like, These two are good. And I'd written those like five minutes before I was out the door to get pizza. And she was like, So as long as you don't think about it, we can see here that maybe you've got Italian. If you kind of put away all of your ideas of what a poem is, also because obviously you don't know what a poem is, you haven't even read contemporary poetry. So so maybe try that. And I just I felt an instant connection, and I knew that okay, this person is she's trying to help me here. So I thought, no, I'll just do anything she says, and I did that and it worked.

NP 8:41

So who were your poets, Casper? Who did you first connect with when dipping your toes into this vast ocean of poetry?

CE 8:49

In the beginning, none of them. And that was kind of the revelation for myself was okay, so now I'm reading all this, and I was good at analyzing and talking about cultural stuff when I like studied in school. But what struck me was that there was so little poetry from Denmark that was about the life I was living, or I didn't come across one single poem about the internet, for example. And I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. What if I did that? And so I did. But of course, there were like uh Thijs Ernsthoft and then Yaya Hessen, which I connected a lot with. We were friends and had the same editor. And I met Yaya when he was at high school and he bumped a packet of cigarettes from me. And I remember when I went to his release party in 2013, he came up to me and then he was like, Here I owe you a pack of cigarettes. And he struggled with a lot of things I never had to, like being a descendant of Arabic parents and uh being thrown around in the Danish welfare system. And ultimately he died from some of those experiences, whether it was suicide or it was a mixture of bad pills. Um yeah, but those were the main guys. What I did was I tried to put myself in a space between things that I liked. And the most important for me was the Norwegian old scene and the American deadpan poetry scene. And I was like, well, why is nobody doing this in Denmark? And then I tried to just do that.

NP 10:23

You mentioned that at that time nobody was writing poetry about the internet. Upon reading 7-Eleven recently, it really struck me how much these references to popular culture or technology that you weave in throughout the poetry still resonate, even though they might be outdated. Things like Skype or downloading movies or Medina, things that were very much of their time. Yet I wonder whether consciously at the time you were thinking that there is a universality to specificity.

CE 10:56

I think there's a universality to the datedness of everything and the feeling that even though I'm in the now with this kind of internet world around me, I know that this will be outdated in like three years and nobody will understand. I think that is a very present feeling in the book. Acceleration of time and the splintering of a common language is a big part of the book. And like I read a lot of philosophy about how you construct a self and Judith Butler on not as much her queer theory, but more her Hegel-inspired texts and stuff. And I remember Ariana Rhines, which was a big inspiration of mine, also from the States, had like this sentence in her book Cur de Lyon, where it said, Who is the you of YouTube? And I thought a lot about that and tried to put it in the book. And you also see in 7-Eleven there's a lot of brackets where you'll have like Paradise Hotel season nine, brackets, 2012. So everything is also specifically pointed out to be from a time that's not anymore. But what I also wanted was a lot of my peers talked about being part of almost like the history of literature uh and the curriculum and stuff. And I was like, fuck that shit. I just want to do something, and it doesn't matter if nobody will read it in five years, but if they'll read it now, that's fine. This idea of myself as someone that would be like in the libraries and you'll pull it out and the book is dusty, and you remember this. I I wasn't interested in that. Now I'm more interested in it because I'm almost 40. But um, I didn't care. Because I just wanted to be a poet, and I think that was kind of a strength also for me.

NP 12:45

How do you look back on the craftsmanship itself of that book now, nine publications later?

CE 12:52

When I look at it, I always want to like do stuff with it and I want to do it over almost. Like remix it? Yeah. But then what I try to remind myself is that maybe the strength of that book is exactly that it was written by a 27-year-old person that wasn't very schooled and that then allowed a lot of choices in the book to happen that I would now edit out and make beautiful in another way. Yeah. There is a raw immediacy to those poems. I think so. And I think that is why it is now kind of a classic in terms of youth culture and on the Danish literary scene, it's curriculum in the schools and stuff. So and that's something some of my best mentors have always tried to remind me. Like, I have a lot of people around me that have given me really great advice, and I think one of the best advices I've ever gotten is just like when you have this feeling of not succeeding, or somebody gives you a bad review, or you're in like a fucked-up media debate about something that makes you sad, try to remember what people like you for, and all the people that actually read you, and try to give those people energy back. Because it's also arrogant to only mind people when they don't like you. So I try to remind myself of those things.

NP 14:14

So having had the success with your first book, in which, as you rightly point out, you didn't overtly address your life with cerebral palsy, what was then the impetus for you to not only mention your disability in your writing, but in more recent publications, really focus on it?

CE 14:32

I didn't want to really focus on it. I wanted to do one book about it, and that book was Nike. And the first thing was I read Ariana Rheinz's Current Leon, and it was a long poem, and it was just on a bedside table on a literary festival in Norway where she was. And I read it and I was like, oh, this is also a way to write this kind of very cool but also intelligent, long poem form that is aware of its literary roots, but is also very pop culturally aware. I wanted to do that, and then I was like, can I do that with my disability? Can I put disability into pop culture? I thought that would be a fun thing, and also I felt like my disability was always something that was in opposition to being pop. It was like, oh, you have a cool jacket or you have this style, even though you're disabled.

NP 15:27

Is that largely due to the lack of representation that you saw in popular culture?

CE 15:33

It's largely due to the vast amount of ableism in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish culture, and also just everywhere you look in the world, really. I think is the best answer. This feeling of always being seen as someone who had to kind of hide my disability, always being praised for the disability to be something you didn't notice. That was a motivation to put it in the forefront of the poems. And also, I had a very good friend, Algaron, who was also a poet at the time. And and um now she does fiction and was long listed for uh the Booker Prize. And she just I gave like 20 interviews or something when 7-Eleven came out where I was talking about this directness of poetry, honesty, and saying it as it was, and she was like saying it as it was. You've said this 20 times, you've mentioned your disability exactly zero times. So, what does that mean? Uh, and to be fair, when she said that, I almost felt like I hadn't even considered the fact that I could do a book on living around in the streets of Copenhagen, and uh I hadn't even thought that I could write about being in the hospital as a three-year-old kid, which was weird because that was exactly what Yaya Hessen, as I mentioned, actually brought to poetry. But even though he was there and he sold the most books any poet has ever sold in Denmark, there was nothing that kind of struck me as, oh, I can also tap into something that has to do with being a minorized person. Yeah, so Olga kind of sparked that in my mind. Every good idea I've had has come from the outside, apparently. From a woman also. So my talent is listening.

NP 17:17

So you listened and responded. How was it for you then to release work that was explicitly dealing with your disability? And what was the response?

CE 17:27

There was a lot of different responses. I won prizes also, and I was definitely taken seriously in another manner now. Also just because writing two books, it was back-to-back years, so it was also like I'm here to stay. But I think in what you're asking, there's this kind of expectation that then something would change in me or be released or something, at least in my own mind. But I think for me, all these experiences with disability, all these thoughts, I'd always had them. They were just such a natural part and a part that I didn't share with anyone. So I didn't even notice them. So as soon as I started writing, it was fucking easy. It was just like, oh yeah, this scene, this scene, this scene, this scene, how can I tie it together? Oh, there's also this scene, and there's also this statistic. And then I started researching and stuff. So my central emotion was here is how I'm already feeling and what I'm already dealing with. The surprise and the change was for people around me. My friends, my family also, they were like, Oh, I didn't know you felt like this. And they were also kind of ashamed. Someone were like, Do you mean me? Have I done something? All these questions started popping up in them, and and and that was kind of a that actually took a lot of energy for a while in my private life. But I think it wasn't a shock to my parents, and it's also not a tragic book. It's about breaking up with a girlfriend and finding your voice and being mad that disability has such a that there's such a lack of talk about disability and ways that you're allowed to be when you're a disabled person or being looked at. And I think for my mom, for example, she was like, Well, I try to do the best I could. Do you feel like I didn't do enough? Then I just told her no, and then that was fine. But at the same time, I think she was like, Well, there's a lot of your story that is also my story. And she hadn't talked with anybody about it. So I think that was weird. Because one thing is she didn't choose to have a son with disability. I don't think she noticed it even, or that's what she says a lot of the time. But what she certainly didn't choose to have was a son that chose to become a poet and that chose to talk about his emotions. And that was new for her. And that was also a new thing in my family, I think. So that was the biggest shock. 7-Eleven was very apathetic, but Nike is very personal. So that was new.

NP 19:59

You said in the past that probably the biggest gift you felt you received growing up was that your parents uh instilled in you this sense of stoicism to just get on with it.

CE 20:10

Yeah, definitely. A pragmatism. Don't focus on what you can't do, just focus on what you can do, and then do that better. And I'm eternally grateful for that way of bringing me up. But of course it also created a sort of lack of language around my own disability. A lack of the idea that I could actually write a poem about it, for example.

NP 20:33

Yeah, I wondered about that because uh you're given this mindset from your parents that you see as a gift, but you've also spoken a lot about the importance of dreaming big and challenging the societal misconceptions or prejudices around the notion of disability. Are those two points of view at loggerheads in some way? They clash, of course.

CE 20:55

It's hard to criticize structures of silence and structures of ableism, and then not indirectly, of course, also point to the way your parents brought you up and this fixation on fixing people with disabilities through surgery and this hope on behalf of your kid to be normal, which I totally understand. So of course that clashes. Not so much in me, that clash has always been there. But it's a clash for my parents, of course. So we try to talk about it sometimes, if they want. I always let them read what I'm writing before it comes out and let them comment. My dad's response has mostly been throughout eight collections of poetry, being like, oh, this was kind of hard to read, this part and this part. Uh good job. And then that has kind of been the end of the discussion. I think they're proud and they're glad that this is happening. And I think my mom can also see now that I'm starting to because I also work as a disability rights activist or try to talk about these things. Open up that space that I didn't have in myself for younger people earlier, maybe. Try to make it more okay to be angry, for example, has been a big part of it. And a big part of how poetry can be political, I think. And my mom can see that. She can see what it does for other families. And we now have like a shared language of, oh, do you also follow this Instagram profile with this mom that has this kid with cerebral palsy? And we're like, oh yeah. And my mom was like, oh I love this mom and I'm like, I love this kid. So we also bond about things now in my childhood that we weren't able to from a grown-up nostalgic perspective.

NP 22:42

Well speaking of growing up and growing older, one thing that really resonated with me from your 2023 collection of poetry New Balancer or New Balances was the fact that you were coming to terms with an aging body and finding yourself in this new stage of life where you're trying to navigate what the future will look like physically living with this disability. You start the book with a quote from Blade Runner Roy Batty. I want more life fucker.

CE 23:17

Yeah which is also a reference to Nike the Roy Batty character is present in the first poetry collection about disability I did. So it was like a callback also.

NP 23:28

But it's also such a great way to set the scene for what's to come in terms of these existential issues you're wrestling with. Yeah definitely reading New Balances for the first time was mind-blowing for me because I just was so unaware of this as you put ableist bubble that I've been living in. I mean it was like seeing the world through new eyes. Your perspective on what it means to navigate public infrastructure, logistics, things that I completely take for granted for example an elevator's broken at a metro station I find that annoying that I have to walk the stairs you talk about the fact that it would require going to another metro stop where you can then take a functioning elevator, then taking a bus back to the location you wanted to get to in the first place. All of the logistics that I was completely oblivious to.

CE 24:20

What I will say about for example elevators or escalators that are out of order is I can walk. I can still walk a flight of stairs if I need to I'd prefer not to but um I can do it. But what it does to me when I see an escalator out of order or an elevator out of order is it points to the lack of attention to that being critical infrastructure for a body that we seldomly see and think about. So exactly what you're talking about. Like we don't think about logistics and a lot of the time when we talk about disability people start to go into this mindset of oh how do I treat people and how do I think about people with disabilities. Oh I think it's nice they're here or whatever. But what we don't think about is how impractical and how everydayish it is to have a disability and how exactly that lack of attention or way of thinking about it is what is most annoying for us. And how even the people with best intentions are just thoroughly ableist. I mean we have one of the best welfare states in the world we like to say in Denmark but it's de facto broken down for people with disabilities like when you need to apply for a vehicle or even just a crutch or whatever. There's a 50% uh what do you call it? They get it wrong 50% of the time and then it gets sent back to something where you can file a complaint and people are dying also with disabilities in Denmark when they have to go to like a living space for people that have to live in enclosed areas and stuff because nobody's coming at night and we have something now called hot tub cases because there have been four people the last two years who died from just injuries from being boiled because they were put into too hot order. I mean I can't even so the welfare state doesn't work for people with disabilities. And I think a lot of people don't know that even in Denmark also they have been taught to not care. So even when I point it out in morning shows or evening shows or in an interview people won't even get mad about it because they have been brought up with this inner voice that says oh well but we do do a lot of things for people with disabilities or well it is just hard to live in a different kind of body and even though nobody can decide what body they're born into we can't help everybody just have a normal life. I think that is an automatic voice that turns on and you don't even notice it and that voice has been there for so long that it's it's very hard to you do anything about.

NP 27:05

One observation I've had coming as an outsider to a welfare state such as Denmark is that there seems to be a real preoccupation with the idea that there are those who contribute to society and those who are a drain on society. Yeah. And it's almost that that's created an apartheid socially do you see that in the way that disabled people are treated?

CE 27:29

Definitely I just never put it so bluntly but I think that is a very nice way to put it politically we have this group that is seen like a burden a cost for society and then other people are some that contribute like something you would give a beggar through taxes right because we do that through the welfare state then everybody gets to say oh I'm doing a lot with my taxes and I just want to say I I pay a lot of taxes and people with disabilities pay taxes too and that's a whole other economic and social discussion. But yeah. When you had your mind blow wasn't that the nice feeling though to have your mind blown and then be like oh shit there's this whole thing going on that I didn't think about and then now you get to think about it.

NP 28:18

Yeah it's confronting and if I'm honest it also brought up a strong sense of guilt.

CE 28:24

But why I'm asking is I think exactly that kind of sense of guilt is our biggest obstacle because I don't care about your guilt. Like well that's a personal feeling for you. You can use the guilt you can actively use the guilt. Guilt is just something leaving your body right it's like your privilege of ignorance leaving and then what's left is guilt. And that is not a nice feeling but it's a feeling you get to not have if you do something about it. And why that is an important question which I also hate sometimes to go into because this is going to sound like we need to grapple with disability because every one of us can end up disabled. But I mean the reason why we need to do it is you are going to be disabled someday. I'm just way ahead of you right so that mind space that you need to go into at some point in your life you're going to be so far behind if you don't start to think about your body as something that won't be able to do the things it can do now for the rest of your life. Yeah so just to go back to the Roy Betty quote to also kind of stay in the poetry that is the feeling I hear for most people when they end up with a disability or they get a disability later in their life oh now I just want more life or I want to be able to do this. Well yes I can help you to do those things and also you could help yourself if you helped yourself to be able to have possibilities that you don't have right now politically if you just thought three steps ahead. So a diminished welfare state for people with disabilities I'm deeply saddened by it and it is going to be a problem for me but it will also be a problem for you and when you are cast into that system then it will also be a shock to you it won't be a shock to me and I will have the support system and I will have trained for how to manage and navigate exactly a system that doesn't see me as something valuable to invest in. You won't and you won't have maybe people to ask which is now sounding kind of dystopian when I say it like that. But but that's a good reason to also be interested in disability rights. Also if you have a mom or you know which is weird right because everybody knows this in their heart. And I think one of the reasons why we have so little language for these things is because it's something that we try to kind of repress in ourselves. We actively walk around and try to not think about.

NP 31:02

And that's something you address a lot in your writing is the broader social and economic forces that are at play, the capitalistic conditions we find ourselves in the forces that seek to distract us from the idea that as you rightly point out we are all going to have to actually face our own mortality at some point.

CE 31:21

Yeah. And we're recording this at a time of immense insecurity in the world wars left and right climate crisis that nobody seems apt or willing to do anything about and I think you know if we had more people with disabilities in power we would be able to face the climate crisis way faster and way better. Why don't we ask people to solve our problems that have been trained to find new solutions all their lives and the thing that I've heard most when I was young back to where we started also was well just don't focus on what you can't do. Don't cry about what you're not able to do anymore just focus on what you can do. And I think the climate crisis has this aspect which is kind of parallel to the body aspect we're not able to change our world around us for something better because we just don't want to because it's hard and it's not nice and I think that that privilege is a very imposing force on what needs to be done right now. Yeah.

NP 32:32

Does any part of you resent the fact that you have to be this spokesperson for disability in Denmark? No I love it. I get so much back from it. And there's no part of you that feels I wish I could just retreat and do my art?

CE 32:51

Well yes but then sometimes I do my art and then I'm like oh I wish I could just have a normal job with colleagues and lunch breaks. I think that's a very common feeling to get tired of what you're doing sometimes and then fuck it. I also get tired of having my body and I get tired of sometimes being like a person in the media even though now people see me as something else than the disabled person I was when I was young walking into a room and I sense something around me. Now they know who I am almost and that is also kind of annoying because now I've told so much about myself but I mean to sit and whine about that every time I get that feeling of oh I wish I could do this and this I try to just go back to that feeling of I just want to write poetry. I just want to be a poet and you know here I am and I'm able to live off of it. That is the biggest gift.

NP 33:50

Well Casper would you be up for reading us one of your poems from New Balances?

CE 33:56

Yeah. This poem is called My Mom at the Hospital and I just want to say I did something you should never do but I translated it myself so I could read it now. I'm three years old and my mom feels that I'm walking a little weirdly the doctor says she's a classic mom who wants a child to be perfect but my grandma works at a small hospital out in the suburbs and gets me a quick x-ray scan. Doctor number two wants to straighten a bone and then I'm referred to the National Hospital for my first surgery. Just before I'm put under Doctor number three walks in and says wait a minute and then the waiting My mom just wanted to finally move on but now they're asking me to catwalk down the hall. She can't help me I can't be helped then Doctor number three says Oh this boy he's just diplegic. Watch how he holds his arm to the body This is how she tells it my mom but I remember the anesthetics mask, its rubber against my face and the ivy in my hand making everything so real The next day I got my first badminton racket I'll never forget the taste of anesthesia and orange juice. I know how the juice of sickness tastes how a mom sounds while she's crying on the floor mattress the silence you can suddenly conjure in yourself. We were so young my mom too I know that you did the best you could we had crutches for some and chairs for others.

NP 35:41

That's beautiful thank you you're welcome shortly after the book from which you just read New Balances came out you received two very high profile literary prizes. Yeah and during that time whilst you were experiencing this great success there were major cuts to the funding of your community here in Denmark. So it felt like you came back with a vengeance for your follow-up book Crib Dicta.

CE 36:07

Yeah yeah crib was a response to having found the kind of will to write about these things both politically and personally and then a big energy in crib is this cost-benefit analysis of sharing your innermost thoughts and rages and then this promise of if you do this well enough then it will have a political impact and then seeing that the response was actually just the exact opposite not because of my poems but just because the political system is how it is benefits are being caught for people with disabilities. And that started to happen in England and here and in Australia as well and I researched a lot of different countries and so that became a central question. What do I have to say to actually move you and not just move you while you're reading but also move you to actually do something about it afterwards. Yeah so I thought I'd write a book about that. Because that seemed like an important not just cultural but central question to doing political art are we doing political art as something you can say that your art is it's political or are we doing political art because you want to do something politically about what's happening? Which is something that I think a lot of art scenes through history have been called kitsch and poem should be more than trying to do something and then I'm like well why should they and that is also why it's going to be my last collection of poetry which is like an energy in the book. I'm going to say this one more time and then I'm going to shut up because I can't keep just writing poems about experiences of harm and discrimination against myself or other people trying to transform mothers' histories into poems so we can finally hear what kind of things they're actually facing. I can't do that anymore and have this trade off where I make a lot of money, I win a prize, I get interviewed, invited into a show and then the world moves on I mean what's the point?

NP 38:09

Yeah and you eloquently expressed this at the end of the book and please excuse my crude translation to English where you write I now bury my voice in the soil of this poem. See you on the other side Casper rest in peace Casper rest in pieces. Yeah that was very nice. Yeah exactly and the title itself Crip Dicta Crip Poems what is the origin of the word Crip?

CE 38:34

It's an American word that has a very clear sisterhood with the queer terminology. So Crip stemming from cripple and then being this word that a disability movement in the 90s took back to denote disability in a different way and trying to go around this idea of disability always being seen as a lack and not as something that you can see possibilities in. There's a whole theory Crip theory is like a whole branch of critical disability studies. So that's what it's about trying to see the possibilities of the perspectives of a different body.

NP 39:13

The reason I raise that term particularly is I'm curious as a wordsmith and a poet what your perspective is on words and labels in the way that we refer to people with special needs. My impression from reading your works and having heard you speak is that you're quite open in terms of terminology. Yeah that is true. Is that because you feel that words don't matter that much when looking at what moves the needle socially and politically of course they matter but uh what we don't speak about matters more.

CE 39:49

And I think I am a pragmatic in that way that I'm like well of course it's important to have a discussion about what kind of words we use about each other to say disabled. Do you say person with disabilities? Do you say handicapped in them for example which is a far harsher word in English but I think also it can kind of be a maze that you get lost in where you think that if I use the correct word then things will change. And I think that can be an energy for people with disabilities sometimes but mostly I find that this discussion about terminology stems from people without disabilities that want an easy out or an easy thing that they can be told that they can do to then respond to that feeling of guilt that you mentioned. Because that's the only question I get every time is so what should I do? And then this question of terminology always comes after that. So should I say this or this? Because language is easy to change even though well and then of course that's not true because pronouns apparently is very hard to say they them for some people and so on and so forth. But um we can get lost in that discussion and then not talk about people dying that are not getting the benefits they should just get in that sense I'm pragmatic and I don't think that whether you call me a spastic or you call me a diaplegic or you call me Casper Eric or you call me a person with disabilities I don't think that necessarily changes the material reality of how we treat people with disabilities. But then again I'm saying that as somebody who is already thinking about these things. And that's why I'm saying that the things we don't talk about is important. When we speak about what language we should use we should be very aware of what language is not allowed almost into culture. For example language about a disabled body that can also be full of lust and wonder and beauty and um that can also be a taxpaying body or just you know that kind of language.

NP 41:59

In one of your other poems you apply the term spastic to all spheres of society. Yes.

CE 42:06

And also it's a very uh it's a poem that has a very clear reference to Mikhail Strong in Denmark who did an N-word poem which was inspired by Patty Smith's N word song of course and it was provocative to some people but it was also you know fun just calling everything aspasti I felt like it was democratic in a sense and it tried to tie this idea of disability as something personal or something derogatory tied together with the climate crisis or seeing a body of water as something that can be in a disabled state also. I think that can be a poetic way of viewing it that opens up to different perspectives on sustainability and care. Care is something everything needs we all need to sustain our lives and then what people notice when they start to think about disability is oh my god I've received all this care that I wasn't aware of and there are all these people that have actually suffered from a lack of care. I mean my disability is not my problem the lack of care of my disability is my problem.

NP 43:13

And that's basically what all of the books are about I think one thing I wanted to talk to you briefly about Casper was this idea of collaboration because in my mind writing is a solitary act but you seem to go out of your way to dispel that myth.

CE 43:30

No I think we have this idea of like the lone genius especially with poetry compared to also novels and stuff but no you have to for me at least the most important part of my work has always been showing it to people I trust with good minds. And then being in conversation about what art should do and what was happening in the text and stuff and then trying to solve it and do it better and make it effective I think what sets being a writer apart from other art forms sometimes is because we have this kind of trobe about the lone genius that we also love in pop culture, then it's always me sitting alone in a studio when I do an interview. So I'm never here with like an editor or a friend or whatever. But I like to talk about art as collaboration or as the room between you and then something else. I mean this idea that there's just like a lightning bolt that strikes down in your brain and then something beautiful and true comes out. Who does that? And writing about something that you think is important is also writing about something you think is important for someone. And I think writing for someone is something we're taught not to do. But that is the most important for me. I want to do something that means something to someone and can actively change their material world around them. And of course that doesn't always happen. But just the possibility of that happening that's what makes it fun. And that's what makes it worthwhile.

NP 45:05

I love that. You said that perhaps nine publications in twelve years could be the result of you with your disability feeling the need to constantly identify yourself or be seen.

CE 45:18

Yes, definitely.

NP 45:19

One could argue that's maybe also the trait of an artist.

CE 45:22

Yeah.

NP 45:23

I just wondered how you feel about that now given the fact that you've recently done the mic drop with Crypticta and are now focusing on writing novels and of course your activism work.

CE 45:35

I also work as a writing teacher and especially for people that have had a hard upbringing or people with disabilities in workshop groups sometimes. And I think what I try to talk about is that the need to be seen can also kind of become a prison if that is why you're writing. If you're writing poetry to be seen then then we're back at that thing with disability for example where it becomes your personal responsibility to perform to achieve other people's love. And that is a hard place to be so I think writing with a disability also has to try to transgress that feeling and for me that transgression has happened by just having fun and having this idea this very naive idea that poetry can change the world but I'm thinking about when you're saying what you're saying I'm just thinking about this it can be a curse to want to be seen especially if what you're doing is then writing something that has to be reviewed by people but then I'd just rather have people try than not try.

NP 46:52

Just as we draw to a close Casper you are at this juncture in your career where you're moving into long form writing and very much an active voice in the political and social landscape in this country at a very fundamental level what gives you hope I don't think you need hope.

CE 47:17

Like you don't need hope in order to do something. I'm not running on hope I think hope can also sometimes be something that slows you down. If hope is something that makes you project a future where oh it's gonna get better then I think hope is a problem almost so for me I I try to keep emotions of hope and stuff out of it. What I hope to do or what I just try to do is I try to make beautiful good art that is important and then the most important feeling for myself is it doesn't end with me. Like this idea that I have to perform to be good enough to bring about political change that's probably not how it works. But I can maybe start something and spark something and maybe this amazing person comes along in two years and I've been a role model or I've opened a little corner of a space somewhere that they tap into and then something happens. And maybe that's hope. But I think it's also a very realistic idea of how change is brought about and at the same time I also want to insist that that is a slow process and I mean we also need quicker fixes here. So I think there's something personal about hope that I don't like because we don't have to hope we could just all agree to do something. So I don't want to hope and I don't want people to hope I want them to actively do stuff and I want them to actively get mad about how things are right now because I have an idea that getting mad might jolt you into action. I don't have time to hope for a prime minister that will get a child with a disability in the future so they will wake up and then suddenly have the need to actually do something. That is a statistic that is against me. But I think if we had a prime minister with a disabled child they would one be a better person and be a better prime minister and also we wouldn't face the problems in terms of how we have arranged social welfare state right now which is a I think a statement that when I say it out loud everybody can kind of tap into that and understand it. Of course we wouldn't and it pains me and it saddens me that that is what has to happen that people with children with disabilities understand what I'm talking about way easier than other people there's something very disabled about the normal body Casper it's been such a pleasure talking to you and talking about your career and your life I just want to thank you for sharing it with us so honestly today.

NP 49:59

Thank you so much. Nordic Portraits is a series by me, Ben Catford. The music was composed by Nina Leo and the visual identity by Copenhagen Bass Studio Frame. To learn more about today's guest and all the others from this season visit Nordicportraits.net you can also follow us on Instagram and remember to rate and subscribe on iTunes so we can get the word out