Swedish Poetry 1
inside the ivory antique comb an electric shower
of sparks lingers from beings who combed out their hair at the window closed themselves up and conjured up the fuse for the vast darkness we deserve (translated by Victoria Häggblom) He has followed the trilogy with another two books in this vein (Black As Silver and And the Night Whispered Annabel Lee) while performing to sold-out venues around the country. 1980s: EROTIC, VIOLENT AND PASTORAL One reason why Öijer was able to gain such recognition in the 1990s was that the Swedish literary climate had changed significantly. In the 1980s, journals such as Kris (which published writings in the key of French poststructuralist theory) and 80-tal (which focused on new, especially young, takes on literature) helped change the tenor of poetry discussions and usher in a new generation of Swedish poets, including Stig Larsson, Magnus William-Olsson, Eva-Kristina Olsson, Ann Jäderlund and Katarina Frostenson. Starting in the late 1970s, Katarina Frostenson was – and remains – one of the key figures of this shift. In direct opposition to the ideal of a plainspoken, political poetry, her poetry is unabashedly stylized and lyrical. Frequently her work is explicitly or implicitly ekphrastic. In her poems, boundaries are constantly broken or invaded – whether it’s the physical boundaries of the body, the boundaries of the home or the boundaries of language. The actions that cross these boundaries tend to be erotic or violent (or both at the same time). In her acclaimed 1991 book, Joner (Ions), she writes: I call in the cold animals the landscape turns orange: Like a background image it cracks ups, overtakes begins on the edge then surges, quiet brown-flecked, fire-yellow and glossy sense-world You can stroll freely across the ground of the brain-plains all thoughts are driven hoard-like… This is a book about secrets and interiors, yet Frostenson relentlessly questions the model of interiority. In this quote, the landscape become baroque with color, but rather than confusing us, this baroque, stylistically saturated vision leads to an opening up of the “brain-plains.” Unlike the stereotype of a cold, distant poetry of style and obscurity, Frostenson’s poetry breaks down the binary of art against life, style against substance. In one poem she writes what could be taken as a motto: “Beautiful distances/Crush distances.” Beauty may create a kind of distance, but it can also crush the distance, envelop the reader’s “brain plains,” flood them with an affective intensity. Ann Jäderlund is another key poet of the 80s who has exerted a profound influence on contemporary Swedish poetry. Her first book, Vimpelstaden (The Streamer City), gained some notice, but it was her second and third books – Som en gång varit äng (Which Once Was A Meadow) and Snart går jag i sommaren ut (Soon Into the Summer I Will Walk Out) – that she came to define an important moment in contemporary Swedish poetry. Her poems were pastoral and mysterious. The elliptical narratives hinted at violence – and possibly incest – but remained mysterious. The style was baroque and literally flowery in a way that poetry had not been since the 1950s: The big valley is a vast mother-of-pearl mirror. There walks the large dead swan in her dead shroud. And there walks the mother-of-pearl children. Or the fragile foundling clumps. That grow out of the virgin mother’s throat. They led the swan into a forest and placed beautiful white stones of mother-of-pearl on her back… These poems captivated a lot of readers and writer, but they also ran into considerable opposition, spawning the nowlegendary “Ann Jäderlund Debates,” which raged in multiple newspapers over several years. Critics denounced Jäderlund’s books as hermetic and decadent, elitist and apolitical. In response, the Åsa Beckman criticized the sexist rhetoric used to dismiss Jäderlund’s work and defended Jäderlund’s work, invoking Helene Cixous’s idea of “ecriture feminine.” That is to say, Beckman recognized the gender politics of Jäderlund’s baroque aesthetics, rather than seeing the poem as a transparent vehicle for delivering a political message. In the years following the Jäderlund debate, Jäderlund (as well as Frostenson and Eva Kristina Olsson, other prominent poets of her generation) has continued to write challenging and baroque poetry, though it has, paradoxically, become more personal. In a book like I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt (In a cylinder in water of watertears), Jäderlund details painfully persona details: the bedspreadsmell inside the hair the brain in her eyes butt anglecharcoal the hyacinth stump of soap 37 SWEDISH POETRY Ann Jäderlund In a cylinder in water of watertears