Book review: Johan Jönsons poems cut right into the delicate life

the Poet Johan Jönson will come with two new books, claims the publisher. So, you can see it. But really, know the habit Jönson-reader, he has written on the same book for almost twenty years. From the free e ”war machine” (2001-2002) through the ”Livdikt” (2012) to the later years of massive publications, it is one and the same vastness of the body of text, one and the same cry from the immanensen.

to put it Differently: one knows what one gets. And you know that it is better than basically everything else that is published in Swedish.

”Marginalia” and ”Xterminalia” is no exception. The books published at the same time, in separate but jointly sold volumes of gray cardboard packaging. Exactly how they fit together, and how important it is that they do it, is up to the reader to decide. The classification is consistently – death, life, violence, sex, work, money, alienation – as well as the subject: a male writer, driven by shame, class hatred and self-loathing, tormented by financial problems and a borderless relation to food, sex and alcohol.

”the Subject”, however, is a deceptive choice of words. It is hardly about person centred writing in the conventional sense. There is no cohesive I, either fictional or autobiographical, for the reader to find support in. Jönson is less interested in what makes the human being unique than by the condition of her autonomy. Capitalism is with him a totaliserande system, but outside of that colonises both language and life. All human is also inhuman, non-sovereign, an expression of other than the free intellect as the literature is otherwise considered to give a voice to.

Thus disrupted the self-identical throughout the time of other statements. They are sometimes abstract, sometimes, on the contrary, violent, pornographic, acute bodily: 'your / inflamed gums. / my / bleeding pussy. / our body / svallningar, sweat, / suites.”

the Quote above is taken from ”Marginalia”, with more than 200 pages, is the longer of the two texts. The verses are varied here with italics enradingar about the (lack of) money: ”I need to earn more money / I don't remember / its own death. / I need to earn more money / get away. in. near / implosiv death. / Money always takes the end”.

So lets well most people's inner monologue and if it does not, it is because someone else thinks it to. Capitalism is an inescapable reality, even for the supposedly transcendent art.

Read more: Review of Johan Jönsons ”there. there. hään”

Jönsons the time of writing, the subject of the poem the opportunity to exceed their own reifikation. How can literature shape themselves to something else, something beyond the economic order in spite of everything included? How can a book like this, celebrated in the newspapers and virtuous hemklickad of trend-conscious consumers, on the whole constitute a resistance?

Yes, it is possible even? ”It was also the most demanding, and the unfinished avantgardekonstverk can be understood, and the more effective, serve as medelklasstranscendent stimulant” notes Jönson crass, and he has the right. The more radical a work of art squares implemented, the clearer the rule, its character of being, of fair trade options on the shelf ”political poetry” next to the shelf ”fantasy”.

Jönson has no immediate strategies on stocks. On the contrary, oaks omkvädet ”I don't know” as strongly here as in his previous books. ”All of this palliative poiesis” he complains, and categorizes ”the writing / postponement / by the realization of the failure / with the writing”.

Paradoxically, this pessimism is far more refreshing than the average aktivistlyrik with unshakable faith in his own concern. Secondly, it is to Jönson, like a Reyes or Adorno, is a great humor – I laugh loud at the epicurean galghumorn in formulations such as ”to breathe / the premise / asthma”, or ”yes. I am a useless parent. you are a worthless child.” But above all, it is about the lyrics all the time working with the questions they ask themselves.

In the nearly 50-page ”Xterminalia” to be tested, for example, different montagetekniker to force the text forward. The main body is punctured constantly by different graphical elements, white squares and black censurrektanglar, while the other poems contained in the margin. The bottom of the page is filled by a prosatext about MMA, which turns out to be a hyperbol könskomedi with grotesque overtones, where the violence of the oktogonen foundation mixed with sexfantasier if the women in the audience.

the Technology brings to mind what the German filmmaker Harun Farocki calls ”soft montage”: rather than taking over from, or contradict each other, operate on the texts in common, as in the parallel monitors, and creates an overall impression which it then is up to the reader to bone.

If that sounds a bit rigid, as Johan Jönson writes a woody and theoretical poetry for the already deposited, so it is entirely my fault. On the contrary, the cut of his poems straight into feeble life. With its distinctive beauty and intelligence affects the one like no other. What it depends on? Probably this: they are true.