Signe Gjessing

‘As for the world: it is done with forgetting’ 

This 30-year-old poet and philosopher from Denmark has already published four collections, which have not gone unnoticed in Denmark; at home, she is regularly compared to Inger Christensen. For her work she received, among other awards, the prestigious Bodil & Jørgen Munch Christensen Prize for emerging writers. Her best-known collection is her most recent, Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, inspired by the work of Wittgenstein. About the famous philosopher, she herself says, "I don't think he would love this book, but maybe he would laugh a little at it.". In her collection, Gjessing makes a marriage between philosophy and poetry and uses these genres to explore the limits of reality. Big concepts like The Universe, Reality, Possibility and Being follow one another in rapid succession in poems that don't seem to take place in any time or space. In her measured style, Gjessing writes clearly on what she thinks and perceives, sometimes in a serious, sometimes in a playful tone. During Poetry International, Gjessing shares these philosophical thoughts and poems with a Rotterdam audience for the first time.