Viola Bao: Poesidebatten should surely be deleted from poetry

The recent discussion of poetry is now in its fifth week and has generated a plethora of posts that touched on everything from poets to economic conditions to a critique of the critique of poesikritiken. The debate has been putting in so many directions that it seems difficult to grasp what it really is all about. But several times hit, I am of the feeling that seems disconnected from the samtidspoesi that actually are written and given out. At least the replicas, which followed my article in the DN ( 18/1), in which I criticized the Victor Ore and Rebekah Kärdes categorical rejection of samtidspoesin as ”objectively passé” and petrified, was just as evasive and exempelbefriade as the texts I was first attacked.

Ore repeats the same thesis, and argues in her response to the lack of large metaberättelser if samtidspoesin is an expression of its ”exhaustion, diffusion, obscurity” ( Expressen 27/1), while the Kärde ( DN 30/1) adds lots of verbal gunpowder to hammer home the truism that art's value is not something inherent fixed, but is conditioned by its social, medial, aesthetic, and political” context. What this context consists of or how poetry situates itself in the today specifies neither she or Ore. Rather than repeat the Kärde just the same formulas that samtidspoesin ”had been out for twenty years ago and seen exactly the same” and that it ”alters the worldviews exactly zero of millimetres”.

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Iman Mohammed. Photo: Sara Mac Key

in the SvD ( 28/1) with the Ore and Kärde, and interpret the criticism of their texts as an expression of that poetry does not withstand criticism (in a text which, of course, also is exempt from example). As if it was this that was the question. Is this the slappaste discussion of the poetry published on a kultursida? If one is to dismiss the greater part of the samtidspoesin – which, in substance, does not need to be anything wrong – so you should at least have a little bit more ambitious statement of their aesthetic parameters, or any historiography on the basis of which the alleged poverty can be measured. As a minimum, you should probably mention what it is you're talking about. Otherwise, the ”yawn” Koli strikes a blow for that critical judgement is just a way to say that one is private bored and court jester of the poetry to come, and maintain a in even solipsistiska privacy.

Rebecka Kärde calls for an ”active aesthetic konfliktdimension”, whatever that would be. A return to modernism's utopian negativity? An excellent between Göran Greider and Johan Jönson?

Perhaps you could instead start with some of these questions: How do we define margin as a so aesthetically flat collection of poems, Tua forsström's ”Notes” are nominated for the Sveriges Radios lyrikpris instead of, say, Jila Mossaeds ”What I was missing here,” Iman Mohammed's ”Behind the tree backs”? What does that say about kulturoffentligheten when Marie Silkebergs highly dubious ”Atlantis”, where the european kosmopoliten narcissistiskt centre itself as världssamvete, unanimously praised by white critics? What happens with the poetry's political insistence on icketransparens and abstraction, as in Fredrik Nyberg's latest collection of poetry, when the abstraction rather than to point to a location outside the capital, today, instead, become its symbol?

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Marie Silkeberg. Photo: Anette Nantell

banal movement to which I subscribed – from a språkorienterad to a greater extent erfarenhetsorienterad poetry can, of course, is complicated. Can the decline of language-aesthetics in the 2010s, of course, in light of the fact that the ideological language – as språkkritiken furiously wanted to dismantle the already punkterats and uncovered after the financial crisis of 2018, together with the liberal Hans Rosling-the ideological faith in history's progress? Political poetry instead in the direction of mapping, the subject, and the narrator's unifying and centering glance? Will we in the future see more poetry working with documentary strategies, as with David Vikgren and David Väyrynen? How to change the poetry of votes from more groups in society entering in the literary room?

I don't know, this is just loose thoughts, but to draw from the literature, and its actual context, feels like a reasonable introduction to each poesidiskussion.