You began publishing at a very young age, didn’t you?
I did, I suppose. The same month I entered university. A small leaflet of poetry. The first copies were delivered to me by the publisher in a small brown paper package at a bench in the university park. One tends to remember such details.
What was your formal schooling like? Did you ever take a creative writing course?
I was able to avoid military service, having registered for activism in the revolutionary left between the age of 16 and 17, and so went directly to university as the youngest boy in class. I studied Swedish literature and Icelandic language. But there was later a small scandal, and I dropped out, as you say. Instead I learned from the older poets in my home city, Malmö. Mostly from Jan Östergren, I just spent a lot of time sitting at his kitchen table. Among others, I saw Sven Christer Swahn, a poet and the Swedish translator of Shakespeare´s sonnets, and Göran Printz-Påhlsson, who was translated into English by the poet John Mathias. They all basically drank themselves to death, tragically, holding as they did to the old Scandinavian belief that you’re not a real artist if you don’t drink. A form of shyness of the North, I guess, a male embarrassment t at their own sensitivity. Brilliant minds. Printz-Påhlsson taught at Cambridge, but was home for summers. Very educated people, better than university. Formal creative writing courses did not yet exist in Sweden.
And you were part of a group of poets, in Malmö, Malmöligan, or “the Malmö Gang.” Could you say a bit more about that group? Who were the other members? Was there a common ethos?
I think our group of younger poets were really much inspired by the poetry scene in Northern Ireland, in the sense that, at least early on, we saw Heaney and Mahon and the others almost as role models. They seemed to triumph, very successfully, over decadent, postmodernist London by taking their own starting point in Elizabethan, Old-English and classical Latin poetry. Here, for “London,” you could of course read “Stockholm.” The cultural background is that the southernmost part of Sweden, Scania, is an old Danish province, conquered by the Swedish army in 1658, and again (after a rebellion) in 1672. We used our dialect words, that is to say, more or less Danish words. Clemens Altgård was our strategist, Kristian Lundberg later became known as the foremost Christian poet in Sweden, and Lukas Moodyson went on to become a movie director. His films have been quite successful internationally.
The readings were often rather chaotic, which was in large part the audiences’ doing, I have to say. This was the post-revolutionary individualist 80s, and there was much unresolved tension in the air. The future was open and uncertain, as it is for the young.
In 1995, you published the essay collection and manifesto Om retrogardism with another Malmöligan member, Clemens Altgård. What was retrogardism, as defined by the two of you, at the time? To what conditions in Swedish literary life were you responding?
We reacted in opposition to the Swedish blend of socialist realism and modernism. As you can imagine, we didn’t exactly receive the red-carpet treatment in return. The idea of early retrogardism was that true inspiration is impossible without rhythmic fixed forms and stanza repetitions. We opposed modernism more from a primitivist point of view than from a classicist one. Our book "On retrogardism" was viewed as a manifesto but was really an ars poetica. The book dwelt a good deal on technique, perhaps to the point of being a bit boring.
Most important was our belief that the techniques and ideas of oral literature could be put into practice in contemporary written literature. I had read the early theoreticians in the field—Lord, Nagler, Parry, too, of course, then Ong. The idea was that several poets should share the same meters and stock of images and work as a collective, to some degree anonymously.
How has retrogardism developed in the meantime?
In Oslo, retrogardism became less radical. In the last years of the Malmöligan, we had jettisoned Brodsky, Heaney, Walcott and Milosz as models, and in Oslo we took them in again, so to speak. A group of young Norwegian painters went the classicist road, honoring the old masters. So that was the new context. My young Norwegian pupils—I gave lessons in metrics –opposed me in the sense of becoming more classicist/ traditionalist than I had ever been myself. And instead of rejecting them in return, I joined them. I took the side of my pupils, against myself! And there followed the second wave of retrogardism, in close community with the painters. The painters came mostly from what has sometimes been called the “Nerdrum School,” after the painter Odd Nerdrum.
What had led you to “jettison,” as you put it, those older poets-- Brodsky, Heaney, Walcott and Milosz? What led you to read them again?
Well, we did for a few years, simply prefer Beowulf to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, if I can put it that way. We found more inspiration in something like the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book than in modern poetry at all. And we would be saying things like, Robert Browning is greater than T.S. Eliot, or, to take a Swedish example, Esaias Tegnér—an early 19th century poet—is much better than Tranströmer. A very scandalous thing to say in Sweden, since Tranströmer is, with good reason, a much loved poet at home. But this was more than a provocation. We got obsessed with the idea of escaping the grip of how modernism thinks poetry, imagines poetry. And we set medieval poetry up against modernism, symbolism up against modernism. That generation of great poets I mentioned would never had agreed to that kind of division between modernism and classicism, as they lived with the great achievements of, and the possibility of, a classicist modernism.
Then in Oslo these contemporary old masters like Milosz, the very wise, humanist Milosz, showed up again, now in the book bags of my pupils, and I started to reread them. I was of course much humbled—I´m not a complete fool—by the marvels of a collection like Walcott´s Midsummer—classicist modernism indeed. I decided, upon reflection, that this is after all what one had to try to compete with, as a poet, before one’s time ran out.
What brought you to Oslo initially, and how did you become involved in promoting the work of the younger figurative painters there, writing art criticism, organizing exhibitions, and so on? Has your own work changed at all because of your involvement in the visual arts?
I had a small apartment In Berlin—German poetry has been very important to me—and then one in Copenhagen. I paid very little for the apartment there and could also afford a room in Oslo. Outside the city I could go for mountain walks. I´m from the lowlands, so I was very impressed by the sort of Thomas Mann atmosphere of the place—it was like being in a beautifully situated mountain sanatorium or something.
Yes, and so there was this amazing group of young painters. In their ice cold studios, in front of the empty canvases, they viewed the problems of composition a bit more from the inside than an art historian would. Their achieved special knowledge on subjects like the exact mixing of oil colors as done by Titian or Rembrandt was often startling. There´s no question that I set about trying to manufacture poems in what I thought to be similar ways, to use in poems something like the monochrome backgrounds of late gothic/early renaissance portraits, or to change the all-too-personal lyric by including dramatized group scenes as in Italian or Dutch Mannerism. I also loved the idea of serial productions of the kind that came out of Carach’s studio in the 16th century--"Could you please send over fifteen copies of Mary-with-the-infant-Jesus and, yes, please also send eight of Lucretia-gesturing with-a-not-too-sharp-knife, thank you very much"—that sort of thing. I still eagerly await an order like that from some major poetry magazine. But there’s too little money in poetry, that’s the great weakness of our beloved art form.
You’ve lived outside of Sweden for most of your adult life. Why?
A protest? Ha-ha. To travel from Malmö, Sweden, to Copenhagen, Denmark, takes only a 40 minute boat trip. Or that was the case then; now there’s a bridge that accommodates cars and a train. But I did have an idea of broadening Scandinavia into the more energetic general field of the "North," extending from Poland to Scotland, say. I did live in Ireland, in Cork, where my girlfriend studied Celtic languages, although I escaped to London once every month, via long bus rides and a ferry. Sweden, Denmark and Norway are very small countries, but if you live in them all, then you´ll get more space, in a sense. All our countries have different poetry traditions, and when you learn their separate canons, and learn to balance them, well, to me that is freedom.
How has your work been received by Swedish critics, and by your fellow poets?
My position as an outsider in Swedish poetry has sometimes been exaggerated. In general, the collections have been very favorably received. Well, the younger LANGUAGE poets dislike me, certainly, because I’ve been critical of their lack of feeling and substance. But they haven´t occupied the major reviewing posts just yet. And it seems like people have tired of them a bit. Much like what happened to the avant-garde after the early 60s. It looks something else will come, most likely political literature again. The ideals of traditionalism are likely to be too demanding for a new generation, I´m afraid. Something easier will be the pick.
Over the course of several books—I’m thinking in particular of Midnattfresken and Oslo-Passionen, you developed a metric that’s peculiarly your own. How would you describe this meter? How did you happen on it?
The old Icelandic verse forms used half-verses. If you double that half verse, you have the knittelvers which is the base verse form of Germanic oral folk poetry. It’s not a classical form because you only count the stresses, normally four beats in each line, and the rest is free, although you have to have a feel for it, or it gets stiff. For some reason I started combining this form with blank verse, and adding long series of assonance, as in Welsh traditional poetry, or Swedish baroque poetry. The result gives an illusion of a very strict verse pattern, but in reality it’s quite free. Perhaps I learned here from the painters, too—perspective in painting is also an illusion, as we know.
As I went along, I also began writing Alexandrines using similar chains of assonance, and stressing the caesura in the middle of the line. I can see all that now, but this was not something that I planned out, but rather something that happened, that came from within. I do hope that to some extent it was my own voice coming through.
I know that you were skeptical, a few years back, of modern poets writing sonnets. However, your new book, Gyllene dagar, includes a number of sonnets, along with poems in quatrains, terza-rima, and blank verse. What’s behind this move toward received forms?
-It is true as you say, and I apologize for my foolishness. I saw the sonnet as a show piece, as something done by modernist poets now and again to signal that they, too, can do craft, but without consequences for their work as a whole, where nothing would change.
In Scandinavia we tend to use the Italian sonnet, by the way, not the English. What made me change my view, to realize that I had been stubborn, was studying in greater detail the sonnets of Paul Verlaine. What made them so much better than other sonnets? I got curious. I would say that Verlaine has a movement at play, and then not only with the "volta," the traditional turn between the octet and sestet, but more often, within the poem, a gesture beyond the ostensible subject that makes it all come alive.
Terza rima is something altogether different. It´s a wheel, it goes round. It can go on forever.