Danish poet and writer Søren Ulrik Thomsen reflects on memory, mortality, the city, and the enduring power of poetry. For Thomsen, writing begins when something in the balance between himself and the world “doesn’t add up,” as he puts it.
Drawing on a career that has spanned more than five decades, Thomsen speaks about Copenhagen as both a physical place and a poetic landscape. Thomsen recalls moving from the rural province of Stevns to the heart of the Danish capital as a teenager, describing it as “the beginning of a whole new life,” and reflects on how the city’s streets, weather, and rhythms became central to his work.
Throughout the interview, Thomsen returns to recurring themes in his writing: autumn, rain, decay, and the passage of time. Far from seeing these as merely melancholic motifs, he argues that poetry transforms loss into meaning. “If something sad has been transformed into a poem, then it’s no longer sad,” he says. “It’s aesthetic because it can contain the grimness. Therein lies the true beauty.”
Reading from several of his poems, Thomsen explores the relationship between everyday life and metaphysical reflection. He describes poetry as existing in a “high-voltage field between a theory and a song,” a place where thought and music, meaning and form, are held in tension.
The conversation also turns to aging and the experience of living between past and present. Thomsen speaks candidly about the growing discrepancy between the world as it exists in memory and the world as it appears today, comparing the two to “tectonic plates that have shifted.”
Rejecting the romantic myth of the self-destructive artist, Thomsen reflects instead on art’s capacity to preserve experience and create lasting meaning. “To me, writing is a struggle against death,” he says. “If you manage to lift something into a poem… then you’ve saved that moment from destruction and death.”
The interview offers a rare insight into Thomsen’s creative process, from the role of rhythm and imagery to the way poems emerge from experiences that have not yet fully revealed their meaning. “As a writer, you’re also the first reader of the text,” he observes. “I have to be intrigued by the text myself when I read it.” Often people has told Thomsen that there is a sadness in his poetry, but he concludes differently: ”If something sad has been transformed into a poem then it’s no longer sad.”
Søren Ulrik Thomsen (born 1956) is one of Denmark’s most acclaimed contemporary poets, essayists, and memoirists. He emerged as a leading voice in Danish poetry in the early 1980s and is the author of numerous celebrated collections, including City Slang (1981), Nye digte (1987), Det værste og det bedste (2002), and Rystet spejl (2012), as well as the memoir essay Store Kongensgade 23 (2021). His work has been widely translated, and he has received several major literary honors, including the Danish Academy’s Grand Prize and the Nordic Academy Prize.
Søren Ulrik Thomsen was interviewed by Christian Lund in his home in Copenhagen in June 2025.
Cameras: Simon Weye & Rasmus Quistgaard
Colorgrading: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Nanna Dahm
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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