Five Poets of the Nineties: An Introduction

Cracks in the Consensual Hallucination:
Swedish Poetry at the Turn of the Millennium

What is the poetry of the 1990s? Rarely has the zeitgeist of poetry been as invisible as now, wrote a critic in a major Swedish newspaper in 1998. It was a valid question, since the poetry in Sweden at that time—at least compared with the by then prevalent ideas of poetry from earlier decades—seemed heterogeneous and in lack of a dominating poetics. But the question also discloses a logic that seems to regulate the conditions of poetry in a minor language such as Swedish. The possibility of different coexisting poetry-cultures is limited. It is more accurate to talk about a continual movement between opposition and normalization (usually identified with the succession of new generations and decades), a movement that has tended to be a very clear-cut and easily discernible process. Of course, changes take place, but for each separate period a hallucination of consensus is established. Everyone—publishers, poets, critics, readers—seems to be very much in agreement about what poetry is, can, and should be. This is due to the fact that the poetical infrastructure is highly restricted. On the whole, one could say that it consists of one or two big publishing houses and a handful of papers and magazines. That all the poets introduced here are published by the same publisher (Bonniers) is, then, not a sign of bias on our part but a symptom of this hegemony in Swedish poetry culture. Other stages (small presses, magazines, e-zines, and the like) are rare and are not really considered an effective alternative. And in contrast with the United States, for example, poets rarely hold any positions at universities—the first and so far only university-based creative writing program in Sweden was established just a few years ago. All of this, of course, has to do with tradition and leads to a situation where you have to join the only poetry game in town or perish. No alternative routes are open. And in general, everybody, poets as well as critics, seems to be satisfied with this condition. Now and then, stirrings take place, but with a few exceptions, everyone's idea of poetry seems to gravitate around one specific center. This doesn't mean that no interesting poetry is published. And poetry does still play a prominent role at the cultural sections of the daily papers—actually, almost all new poetry is reviewed! But innovative or challenging forms (and typically all kinds of Web-based poetry and poetics) are sparse, or even nonexistent.

Causes and effects are not the issue here, but it's no surprise that among Swedish critics as well as poets the conceptions of poetry since romanticism have mostly been grounded in a tradition of lyric poetry. The supposed characteristics of an expressive lyrical I (sometimes posing as a we), such as intimacy, voice, and personal tone, are highly valorized. Intimacy, identification, and recognition are the favorite tropes or figureheads of reading and writing poetry. Consequently, everything that implies distance, play, or even humor is regarded as somewhat suspicious. Form must be subordinated to content and thematics and has to be harmoniously in sync with this subject or I that is the poem's ultimate reference. Musicality and well-crafted, coherent metaphorics is good; dissonance, noise, and formal awkwardness is bad. To put it crudely. The best example of this is perhaps the fate of Swedish concrete poetry in the 1960s. It was intensely discussed for a couple of years but in the end had to be put aside as an anomaly or at best as an interesting but unproductive dead end.

Another important aspect of this poetics is the intimate link between the lyricist line and the extremely influential tradition of nature poetry in Sweden. Swedish postromantic poetry has almost always had an eye for the beautiful landscapes of the countryside. And just...