Swedish Poetry 1
Jönson’s unflinching books veer between appropria
tion and confession with no clear demarcation. Though his style is very different, it could be said that Jönson shares with Berg and Jäderlund an interest in violence and the politics of the human body and its abjections. ETHNIC DIVERSITY, FEMINISM, PERFORMANCE ART Many of the poets I have mentioned in this essay – including Öijer and Jäderlund – have continued to write poetry, many of them (such as Berg, Jönson) publishing their best work very recently, and many of them have remained influential. But Swedish poetry has become increasingly varied and decentralized – a result of the advent of smaller presses and the ensuing decentralization of publishing and the result of years of immigration. Perhaps this is most obviously seen in the ethnic diversity of contemporary writers, including the prominent place of Iranian-born poet Athena Farrokhzad, whose book Vitsvit (White Blight) is an important, politically charged take on an immigrant experience, written as a montage of statements by the speaker’s family: career as a poet. Jönson’s first two books, Som samplingsdikter (As Sampling Poems, 1992) and Näst sista våldet (The Next To Last Violence, 1994), were published with the major press Norstedts in the early 90s. He then spent the rest of the decade writing violent, harsh, profoundly political and sometimes pornographic performance texts – some of which were collected in the five-volume I krigsmaskinen (In the War Machine), published by the small press Maskinen (The Machine) in 2002 – for the performance group Teatermaskinen (The Theater Machine). Over the past fifteen years, Jönson has been incredibly prolific, writing massive (sometimes 1000 pages long) poetry books about working class conditions in the era of late capitalism and globalism. These books have become critical as well as popular successes, and they have been hailed as the rebirth of “working class literature,” the kind of socialist-realist writing that shaped the poetry of the 1960s and 70s. But Jönson’s books are also highly steeped in avantgarde formal experimentations, such as appropriation. The result is an often disturbed overload of language and affect – both more formally daring and shocking than work we might associate with “working class literature” and more affecting and personal than we might expect out of techniques like appropriation; they appropriate both traditional testaments of workers, and the high rhetoric of poststructuralist theory. Many of the poems deal with Jönson’s time as a worker in a nursing home, often in excruciating detail: The excrement must come out. There is only two openings for that in a human body, just as in an animal body. The emergency exit is the mouth-// if it is hard and insoluble stopped rectally and in the intestines, the excrement may come out through the mouth.// She lay in bed, in the hospital bed, in so-called heart position. I sat at the edge of the bed and tried to get her to take all the pills. And then it suddenly came out. I got it on my chest and belly and on one side of my face, across one ear. from Efter arbetsschema (After Work Schedule) 39 My father said: One spoonful for the executioners one spoonful for the emancipators one spoonful for the hungry masses And one spoonful for me The vivid ethnic and aesthetic diversity of the current crop of poets, as well as a varied approach to publication and performance, can be seen in the confessionalism of Lidija Praizovic’s Porr för Vlada/Hjärtahjärtahjärta (Porn for Vlada/ Heartheartheart, 2012), published by the small press Dockhaveri, or in Ugandan-Swedish Johannes Anyuru’s performance-based poems and lyrical performance work. Contemporary Swedish poetry is also deeply engaged in boundary-crossing poetry that involves many media and genres. The three authors I just mentioned have all written across genres – writing plays, performances and novels as well as poems. Many contemporary Swedish poets – writerartists like Leif Holmstrand and Marie Silkeberg – are also experimenting with video, performance and other multimedia work. What ties a lot of these works together is an interest in both formal experimentation and a strong sense of politics, particularly the politics of sexuality and the body. This is probably no coincidence, since feminism has been a strong force in Swedish culture, and, even though its power has waned, the Social Democratic Welfare state’s emphasis on bodily health has left a strong awareness of the politics of the body. Not only have the easy binaries heralded by the revolutionary poetry of the 1960s been broken down many times over, even that poetic moment of “new simplicity” is now back in circulation, however this time in an impure shape. In Hackers, Aase Berg’s decadent-surrealist poetics invokes the overt politics of the 60s, though with a dystopian cast, and coupled with a de-romanticized, necropastoral vision of nature. Johan Jönson’s acclaimed work both invokes the 1960s politics and perverts it with his radical negativity and grotesquerie. Athena Farrokhzad’s book may invoke 1970s feminism and Marxism, but this time it has been channeled through an awareness of race and immigration. This anarchic state of the art is inspiring, but it makes it ever more difficult to write a trenchant overview; it becomes hard to maintain the “beautiful distance” of the critic. Poetry translations by Johannes Göransson, unless otherwise noticed. SWEDISH POETRY Anna Hellberg Friction Aase Berg Hackers