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IN MEMORY No Swedish poet has written as deeply about death as Kristina Lugn. Would Bellman then, with some competition from Bo Setterlind, who let death put his harp in the basket. Kristina Lugn put death on an Ikea sofa. It was typical. But the continuation is timeless:
Death has
in a strange way
love your children
She comes
anytime
she has
in a strange way
to always find her children
Kristina Lugn has now been found. Too early
Kristina Lugn was born in 1948, grew up in an academic home in Skövde, the mother was a teacher, an official father. His grandfather and grandmother were in turn commissioners of the Egyptian Museum. Have you ever written a poem about them? Somewhere he says he was in love with his confirmation priest. It was not strange. Many priests have been the projection surface for the existential cravings and language hunger of the Confirmers. Kristina Lugn lost her childhood faith over the years, but not religious language. It is found near the surface of his poetry.
The death that always finds her children could have happened in a psalm of Lina Sandell, she with “Trygga Räkan”. Lina Sandell is one of the great poets of the Swedish people, one of the few found in our bloodstream. Kristina Lugn also runs there.
This method of poetic development is certainly not something that modern writing courses would recommend.
If you got the hymn song sponsored by Lina Sandell, you got rid of the irony Anna Maria Lenngren and the tradition of the Enlightenment. And her third godmother became her supervisor in the public house: Sonja Åkesson. Kristina Lugn has told us that, when she was young, she was owned by Sonja Åkesson, to know her personally and her surroundings. This method of poetic development is certainly not something that modern writing courses would recommend, but in the case of Kristina Lugn it worked out well. To a price. The poem is painfully close to life, having nothing to do with confession. It is rare for Kristina Lugn to be able to study Sonja Åkesson’s nerve seed sowing in the “background of reality”, and in part notice it, but also radically renew it.
Kristina Lugn broke in 1976 with the collection “To my husband, if I could read”, a greeting to Lenngren. But it is in the 1980s that it is the decisive decade for Kristina Lugn. His poems were not satisfied with the anxiety of the popular home and social realism as a basis; they needed styling jelly and feminism, postmodernism and dreams of funds, butterfly apps and subsidiaries. In the eighties, his book titles and works are poems in themselves: “Percy Wennerfors”, “Look how it bleeds”, “The hour of the dog”.
He seemed so amused that he had to laugh, for example at the poem about the wonderful Putte, that he sat there with his mouth on the hammer and too late realized that he had swallowed the bar. If you remember Putte, who denied his wife a sexual relationship. Neither oral, genital nor anal:
He never interacts with women.
who think they can start
A new life after menopause.
He is against it, he says.
Both intellectually and emotionally.
It is a matter of principle, he says.
I don’t think Putte’s poignant fear only applied to the chamber sphere of the bed. He is afraid of women even in public. Putte is a cultural man.
In 1987 Kristina Lugn appeared on television to tease the public at the best of my time, along with Jörn Donner and Bert Karlsson. The trio picked up the pace of the Swedish social climate, while causing the fever to rise. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember how the cigarette smoke was sealed. After each show, Kristina Lugn was asked to get a comb. Or maybe styling jelly. The show was called “Unpredictable”. Poor Bert Karlsson, now he is alone. How sad it must be.
It was also in the 1980s that Kristina Lugn’s own voice, slow, relentlessly beautiful, crept into our brains. People first growled and sent annoying letters, but toughness prevailed. No actor has been able to expand the voice of Kristina Lugn, where poetics was reflected in phonetics. She tasted, chewed, and spat the Swedish language in front of our ears. The all too familiar became visibly incomprehensible. But in language that was understandable.
Imagine yourself, what a great move. Suddenly, cretis and pleti flowed into the bookstore and consumed poetry.
One of his most beloved poems can be found in “Familiarity with older trained gentlemen is desired”:
When dawn breaks
and the unemployed are in a hurry
I usually stand outside
Nordiska Kompaniets
main entrance.
I’m just standing there.
And waiting
Yes, it is true that Kristina Lugn’s poem always defends the experience of the exposed and the right of the marginalized. But he rarely writes about others. She evokes vulnerability in ourselves. We must reach the bottom before we can climb, and laboriously fumble for the light.
Ulrika Knutson is a writer and cultural writer.
