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Caroline Bergvall (born 1962) is a poet of French-Norwegian nationalities who has lived in England since 1989. Her work includes the adaption of Old English and Old Norse texts into audio text and sound art performances.

Life and Education
Born in Hamburg, Germany, Bergvall was raised in Switzerland, France and Norway as well as the United Kingdom and the United States of America. She studied as an undergraduate at the Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle and continued her studies at the University of Warwick and Dartington College of Arts where she received her MPhil and PhD, respectively.

From 1994 to 2000, Bergvall was Director of Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. She taught at Cardiff University and Bard College. She was appointed in 2007 as an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Performance
Bergvall has developed audio texts and collaborative performances with sound artists in Europe and North America. Her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual poetry and mixed media writing practices, in addition to Performance Writing.

Bergvall's work often draws inspiration from and explores Old English and Old Norse sources. A review of 2011's Meddle English: New and Selected Texts in The Brooklyn Rail noted that her essay "Middling English" urges readers and writers working with English to "excavate its fractured and fractious history."

She wrote FIG (Goan Atom 2), poetic and performance pieces (Salt Books, 2005). Installations with Ciaran Maher include Lidl Suga for TEXT Festival (2005) and Say: "Parsley" at Liverpool Biennial (2004). Her installation Drift appeared at New York City's Callicoon Fine Arts in 2015. Bergvall's work has also been shown at Dia Art Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, and the Hammer Museum.

Her 2014 collection of poems Drift includes the texts of a number of her performances. The titular poem Drift draws inspiration from the Old English elegy The Seafarer and she pays particular attention to original Old English words and conveying the experience of a Seafarer. In one passage she omits all vowels from her text followed by two pages of the letter 't'. It has been suggested that, 'It’s as though we’re losing sight of the poem in the fog—or as though severe weather has battered the text, which is breaking up and sinking like a shipwreck.'

On October 17, 2017, Bergvall performed her pieces Oh My Oh My in the Great Hall of King's College London for their Arts & Humanities Research Institute's annual Arts and Humanities Festival. The performance included Bergvall's own spoken word and the accompaniment of trombonist Sarah Gail Brand and electronic musician Bill Thompson. The description for event provides a reflection on her works: "In Oh My Oh My, Bergvall explores linguistic connections and displacements through a mix of spoken performance, live improvisation and a chorus of treated interviews. Drawing on language material recently recorded in travels across Europe, as well as live recordings captured during the Global Women’s March for Documenta14, Caroline Bergvall presents poetic variations for a world on the brink. Using a distinctive and unique process of translation and sonic patterning, Bergvall weaves together a language-scape that stretches from Algiers to Reykjavik, creating an abstract and complex passageway of sound made by ancient, endangered, and new local languages. This piece expands an ongoing body of work by Bergvall, which explores issues of linguistic travel and sedimentation, as well as medieval love poetry, and shines a light on linguistic and political thresholds."

Works

 * Éclat, Sound & Language, 1996, ISBN 9781899100064
 * Fig: Goan Atom 2, Salt, 2005, ISBN 9781844710928
 * Middling English, John Hansard Gallery, 2010, ISBN 9780854329113
 * Meddle English: New and Selected Texts, Nightboat Books, 2011, ISBN 9780982264584
 * Drift, Nightboat Books, 2014, ISBN 9781937658205

Fiction anthology[edit]

 * I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, 2012, ISBN 978-1934254332