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I met Kristina Lugn once. It was in a basement. She had her theater there and I sat there an entire night drinking wine with her and Lena Nyman. It wasn’t just us, it felt like that. I guess for some, the most important thing is to meet Michael Jackson, or his monkey, or a party in Tribeca with 50Cent. Not for me The most important thing for me is to drink wine in a theater cellar with Kristina Lugn and Lena Nyman.
READ MORE Author Kristina Lugn is dead
“Hello, have fun!” I had just come out and my friend had called the night before and had quoted a poem about death, it ended with the king and queen something, and something about their crowns and they apologized. So the next day I got it in the library, took the opportunity to borrow “Family Wishes with Older Educated Gentlemen” from 1983 and “Dog Hour” from 1989 as well, and then I went home in the rain and read. In a way, I recognized everything she wrote, but it wasn’t until several years later that I realized that recognition came from both her own poems and other things she knew.
But then I sat there with Kristina Lugn and Lena Nyman and talked and felt so far from everything, like you’re still on a damn trip, how you can only feel if you’re coming from Alingsås. I tried to say something about how much I liked his poems. She really didn’t believe that. Or yes, he might have believed it, but it was as if he didn’t agree.
READ MORE Culture Sweden mourns Kristina Lugn
There is an “I” in literature that closes doors and there is an “I” that opens them. For me, Kristina Lugn’s poem is a door opener. The experiences described should really be played at quite a distance from my rural male heterosexuality, but still his poetry themes are so easy to interpret. Three, as well as sudden, lines like: “It was almost like a scoret / It was almost as if you / I thought of calling me then ” it sounds as much from inside as from the poems.
It’s like I’m connected in some way, I really can’t explain it. And there are as many lines as possible: “You should get a / panoramic window / child allowance”or “I have a little train station / right before the night starts. “ Or (why not admit that you still have to be some kind of genius if you can start a poem with the words): “I can growl.”
You become happy I’m happy Maybe because the language bank that Kristina Lugn’s poems are built from sometimes feels like our commons. We who have lived here since about 1950 until now. There were so many words everywhere, and many were just as bureaucratic. To me, she was a stranger who came in from the cold and delivered direct mail with the phrases and concepts of social behavior, private psychology, and contemporary history compiled in a way that was finally understood. And I had a way of talking about other poets who made me a shark! About Per Lindberg, she said that her poems were like “Sonja Åkesson on a blue moped”. Because they are.
READ MORE Kristina Lugn – poet with dark humor
There is a questionable truth about Kristina Lugn’s poetry as easy to read and communicative. I’m not entirely sure that is true. What lies on the table of the poem, the content, so to speak, never disappears with Kristina Lugn. The pain is there all the time, the absence of pain too, and it is above all that is so difficult to write. But some may. I could. So that it reaches me too.
“This I do not know that longing has nothing at all /
with the public sector.
I would like to live life as citizens experience it /
when their host families travel to resorts /
nobody has heard of it. “
Then I would also like to experience it.
About the writer:
Stefan Lindberg, born in 1971 in Alingsås, is a Swedish writer, playwright and translator ”
