Swedish Poetry 1
Politics, Baroque and Broken Boundaries Contempor
ary poetry from the Welfare state By: Johannes Göransson Many poetry readers outside of Scandinavia have the impression that Tomas Tranströmer is not only the major Swedish contemporary poet, but the only one. For example, a recent review of Tranströmer’s collected poems in the New York Times made the claim that he is “Sweden’s major poet of the last half-century,” while making no mentions of any other Swedish poets. While Tranströmer is a great poet, he is hardly the only Swedish poet; he is hardly the only “major” Swedish poet of the last fifty years. One might even argue that over the past few decades, his influence has not been as important as several other poets. Now might be a good time for the rest of the world to discover a dynamic, thriving Swedish poetry scene. In the 1960s, the so-called “new simplicity” – based partly on populist Marxist politics and partly on avant-garde formalism (noveau roman, concretism) – rejected what it perceived as the ornamental, bourgeois, rural poetry of the past (for example Tranströmer) in favor of a plain-spoken, overtly political poetry. Since then, Swedish poetry has been shaped by conflicts between the plain-spoken and the baroque, the poetic and the political, the personal and the public, interiority and exteriority. But from the very beginning, these binaries did not hold up. The political proved to be a kind of style, the personal and baroque proved to be political. Not surprisingly for an era that has coincided with the rise and fall of the Social Welfare State, the body – whether healthy, reproductive, sickly or grotesque – has remained a powerful motif across aesthetic 1970s: THE OUTSIDER A signal exemplar of this boundary crossing is Bruno K. Öijer. The child of a single mother and raised in an urban, working-class neighborhood, Öijer burst into Swedish poetry in the early 1970s, writing a confrontational and politically charged poetry, colored by an anarchic, oppositional stance. But Öijer’s aesthetic modes were not those of conventional political poetry – it was performative, visionary and hallucinatory, influenced by historical surrealism as well as contemporary pop singers such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Öijer published his first book, Sång för anarkismen (Song for Anarchism), already in 1973 (when he was 22), followed by now-legendary books such as c/o Night, Spelarens Sten (The Gambler’s Stone) and Giljotin (Guillotine). Öijer was at odds with the dominant Marxist-populist aesthetics, writing poems full of extravagant metaphors about a decadent underground existence: He Wanted You So Intensely That He Cut Off All His Fingers & Dialed Your Number With His Tongue All The Time Now He Hears Your Wonderful Laugh from c/o Night Öijer was largely rejected by the cultural establishment because of his extravagant style and his non-compliant politics, and he remained on the outside of Swedish poetry culture for many years. Instead Öijer developed his own readership outside of the Swedish poetry establishment, turning his poetry readings into dramatic events and touring with various bands over the years. In the 1990s, he finally received recognition with his comeback effort, the so-called Trilogy – Medan Giftet Verkar, (While the Poison Takes Effect), Det Förlorade Ordet (The Lost Word), Dimman Av Allt (The Mist Over Everything), in which he toned down his brutal surrealism for a more mystical, decadent poetry (He even changed his name from Bruno Kennet Öijer to Bruno Keats Öijer). The first poem of Medan Giftet Verkar inaugurates this aesthetic turn: SWEDISH POETRY 36 Bruno K. Öijer Triology