Let Tove Ditlevsen Inspire You!

(Just a Heads Up for All Poets:  What's Going On? is going to close down. We will have our last prompt next week, and it will be an Open Link, so you can plan ahead.  Now enjoy this week's prompt!)

Let Tove Ditlevsen Inspire You!

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) is one of the most loved and (also) literarily scorned writers in Danish literary history. She was a poet, novelist, and memoirist whose brutally honest writing about girlhood, motherhood, addiction, and mental illness has intrigued generations of readers—especially women who see themselves in her quiet, contained desperation.

She was born into a working-class family in Copenhagen and published her first poem at age 13, setting off a lifelong tension between literary ambition and emotional survival.

Ditlevsen wrote from the center of her own pain. Her most acclaimed works—the Copenhagen Trilogy (Childhood, Youth, Dependency)—are memoirs written with clarity and startling emotional depth. In them, she describes a world where women are expected to endure silently: husbands, children, poverty, institutionalization, pills. Her voice is controlled, almost clinical—making the truths beneath it even more devastating.

Despite early success, Ditlevsen’s life was marked by addiction, psychiatric hospitalizations, and four marriages. She wrote openly about her dependency on prescription drugs and the damage of being both a woman and an artist in mid-century Denmark. She once wrote, “People always expect you to be more ashamed than you are.” That defiance, mixed with exhaustion, runs through all her work.

She died by suicide in 1976. For years, her work was underrecognized internationally, but recent translations—particularly of the Copenhagen Trilogy—have sparked a major revival. It wasn't until recent years that her brilliance has been acknowledged.

So why am I telling you about Tove Ditlevsen? When I was in the Copenhagen library (which also had a bookstore) I discovered a poetry book in English by her: There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die. The title intrigued me, so I skimmed through the book. I decided to buy it. (The first poetry book I bought in years.) I find her writing refreshingly honesr and real. I wanted to share a bit of her with you!

Here are a few I found online:

Rain

There Lives a Young Girl. (I really like that one.)

My prompt today involves another poem of hers:  "Memory." I would like you to read the poem and choose a line or two to incorporate into a poem you write.  Hopefully, it will spark your own memories:

Memory
by Tev Ditlevsen

My mother and father were happy. Down the street
they skipped, giddy like children lost in their own game.
And it was a Sunday. Every flagstone rang out
with the loud clacking of my father’s wooden cane.

My mother was young. I never noticed before.
She wore her white linen dress and did up her hair.
As we ran through the gate to Søndermarken Park,
her laughter carried on the balmy summer air.

A rush of joy lifted from the sharp smell of grass,
from beer and fizzy drinks and slices of roast beef.
And a budding hope quivered in the summer breeze:
My mother is happy. My father sheds his grief.

I remember no other day like that Sunday.
A childhood passed. My father was quiet and grey.
My mother was always sad from that moment on,
guarding secret longings she would never betray.

Only in the memory does my heart find peace.
My mother was young, only I noticed too late.
My father was happy. And joy resides somewhere
just beyond Søndermarken Park’s green wooden gate.

A few suggested/possible lines:  "My mother and father were happy,"  My mother was young. I never noticed before."  "A rush of joy lifted from the sharp smell of grass." "I remember no other day like that Sunday (or Monday or Wednesday, etc".  And there are many, many more.

Read the poem a few times, and something will come to you!

After you write your poem, link it using Mr. Linky below. Don't forget to comment on the poems of others.  Mr. Linky will be open until Sunday night 8 p.m. Eastern Time.