Swedish Poetry 1
This mysterious disjunctive style amplifies the s
ensations and disorientations depicted by the poems, making for an overwhelming experience where boundaries are indeed “crushed” and flooded. 1990s: GROTESQUE, NATURE POETRY, RETROGARDISM Jäderlund’s work – together with the gender debate it helped generate – has proven to be a lasting influence on poetry written in Sweden over the past twenty years. The most immediate effect can perhaps be seen in the anthology Femton poeter ur 90-talet (Fifteen Poets from the 90s, FIBs Lyrikklubb, 1998), edited by Helena Eriksson and Maria Gumesson, which includes many of the most prominent poets who began publishing in the 90s. Most of these poets display varying degrees of Jäderlund’s influence and the ensuing “debate.” But there is quite a bit of range among these authors all the same. There is Mats Söderlund’s lush but violent nature poetry, the mysterious and exotic early poetry of Marie Silkeberg, the dark and fragmented lyricism of Helena Eriksson, and the Finland-Swedish poet Eva Stina Byggmäster’s concretist-influenced lesbian-erotic poetry. Berg has published to great acclaim the dark satire of Liknöjd fauna (Indifferent Fauna), and, perhaps most importantly, the ferocious book Hackers, which brings to ecriture feminine an anti-transcendent nature poetry and an extreme (even violent) feminism. Femton poeter ur 90-talet included some outliers as well. There are the Finland Swedes Byggmäster and Peter Mickwitz, the Chinese-Swedish poet Li Li (who has gone on to translate Tranströmer into Chinese), as well as Kristian Lundberg from the Malmö Gang. Beginning in the mid-80s and lasting through the mid-90s, the Malmö Gang stirred up a lot discussion with a poetics that was at once populist and highly learned, at times avant-garde and at other times almost Alexandrian. In the mid-90s, the members Clemens Altgård and Håkan Sandell published a manifesto on “Retrogardism,” drawing on the work of the Slovenian pop-art group Laibach and Romanticism, which received a lot of negative criticism for its perceived reactionary politics, before they went their separate ways. Sandell moved to Norway to further develop retrogardism, while Altgård began to spend more of his energies on writing cultural criticism for daily newspapers. Another Malmö gang member, Lukas Moodysson, moved on to film, reaping international success with such films as Fucking Åmål, Together and Lilja 4-Ever. Now might be a good time for the rest of the world to discover a dynamic, thriving Swedish poetry scene. Femton poeter ur 90-talet also includes selections of the early maximalist grotesque poetry of Aase Berg, who had early been influenced by her time as member of the anti-social, anti-rational group, The Stockholm Surrealists. In her 90s work, Hos rådjur (With Deer) and Mörk materia (Dark Matter), Berg made use of some of the disjunctive techniques of Jäderlund’s work, but amplified the montageelement into image-intoxicated, grotesque nightmares: The fissures of the lower mountain chains run systematically through the bone skeleton’s beams. A whole erupts in the wall next to me. A steel face bursts out of the wall next to me. Mechanically you break out of the fabric of the last wall. You stroke your claws against my grain boundary surfaces. The only meat that holds up is our salty mammalian tongue… from “4.3 The Kermec Grave” Berg’s work has changed considerably over the years, going from the maximalist sci-fi surrealism of Mörk materia to the small, loaded poems of “the mommy trilogy,” in which the Swedish language is over-charged with puns and deformation while depicting the process of giving birth to and raising children: “Will scrape shield with spoon/in shell, breast gristle, in Crayfish” (from Forsla fett). In the past few years, 2000s: A NEW WORKING CLASS POETRY Heavily influenced by contemporary critical theory, as well as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and scholarship, and conceptual art, the journal OEI had a pronounced influence on Swedish poetry in the early 2000s. Anna Hallberg is an important critic-poet associated with this journal. Her first book, Friktion (Friction, 2001), is in many ways an explicit rejection of Jäderlund’s poetic influence – instead of baroque, it’s austere, instead of mysterious, it’s concerned with surface, instead of grotesque it is constructive. The book begins: one. solder. sunk language the line down to the line The white paper’s steadiness love last extinguished Although it may be a love poem, it is a love poem that insists in a kind of constructivist aesthetic. Rather than flowers, Hallberg’s poems have instruments. OEI also participated in the revival of Johan Jönson’s SWEDISH POETRY 38